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Einstein-Landauer culinary units
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this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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Yeah, because no other metric can be divided by an other size of the same metric.
That is why I always have 100ml over whenever I divide a liter by 250ml increments.
Well then you've lost the whole advantage of base 10. You're buying 2L or 4L containers and dividing them up into 250ml increments, having to do divisions of 8 or 16 like some common imperial peasant, only you're doing it with numbers that have no real relationship with your daily life. I mean, ultimately it's all arbitrary anyway. But when someone says use 2 cups, that's 2 scoops, which seems better to me than having to know that 500ml is 2 scoops.
I have 1l milk and 1kg flour. My recipe wants ⅜ liter milk and 150g flour. 375ml is a bit odd but trivial ultimately, and very easy to measure when I just pour 375g into my blender on a scale.
Now how would imperial cups deal with 150g from 1kg?
I also have 45g oil, what odd measurements would that give when you try to divide it up without a single decimal number?
Try 24g suggar.
I'd love to see all that converted to imperial.
Our recipes rarely use weights except for maybe meats. We've got a scale in my kitchen but it hasn't been touched in a while.
The ratios of ingredients matter more than the exact values so for the recipe you're talking about, it'd be like 2 cups of milk, 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup of oil, 1/8 cup of sugar (or 2 tablespoons, which is a pretty common size so most people probably have a scoop for that).
it wouldn't though, it would be like 7.5 parts milk to 3 parts flour to almost a part oil to half a part sugar.
And that still being quite imprecise, using 22g or 26g sugar makes a change in taste I wouldn't want to happen uncontrolled at random. I'm also closer to 41g oil these days, wouldn't want to use 50 to make it fit some very coarse division.
Scoops of stuff also seems very imprecise. Are they at least levelled?
I also use "a pinch of salt", which doesn't have to be very precise, but if someone were to ask I could tell them "roughly 0.2g", from having just measured it. I still remembr how much I hated descriptions like "a pinch" as a cooking novice, and now I can simply measure my pinch on a scale and others can confirm their pinch on their scale until it about matches 0.2g too. How would that work in imperial?