Weights and Measures

[faustus]

I'm having fun with recipes. Some of my recipes are in British, and some in America, and some in metric and some in imperial, and some in combinations of those permutations. A lot of what I'm cooking from right now is in US cups - which makes sense for flour and sugar, but less so for butter.

And of course US cup is 8 fl oz and UK is 5 fl oz.

Now I see that US and UK fl oz are not the same; 29.57353 ml and 28.41307ml repectively.

Can anyone point me to a website that will tell me how much 8 fl oz of flour, sugar and especially butter would weigh, either in oz or g? Or know this kind of thing off the top of their heads?

I think this might be the sort of thing I'm after - but the weights and measures rather than the ingredient side:

Comments

Is this any use?

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Basic, but...

http://home.clara.net/brianp/cooking.html

Re: Is this any use?

[fjm.livejournal.com]

ps. US measuring spoons used to be sold by Lakeland.

Re: Is this any use?

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Measuring spoons aren't necessarily the problem - although I do need to check whether mine are US or UK now as I made a recipe with them which was US measurements and turned out ok although I assumed they were Britsh (and didn't compensate).

But it's hard to measure a cup of butter (or dried fruit for that matter). From what I can see a cup of butter is 8oz - so roughly our 250g chunk - about 10% - so half a cup can be judged by eye, but other solids aren't so easy.

Re: Is this any use?

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

But then equally a friend is cooking with cups but no scales, so is converting the other way. So far cookies are good, but the lemon sponge was flat - although there could have been any number of reasons. I can't get cakes to rise for me nowadays.

Re: Is this any use?

[fjm.livejournal.com]

With cakes and scones the problem is not the measure but the flour. I can't get scones to taste right in the US because they prepare their flour differently to ours: the recipes are structured to a different level of gluten I think.

(and don't wash rice if you are in the US, it's pre-washed and you end up with pudding).

Re: Is this any use?

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Pretty sure I'm using the same sort of flour after all these years. I just used to be able to do cakes and pastry, but can't now. Still, I've not tried as much in this gas oven, and the flat cake was in a fan assisted electric. I'm not at all convinced about its temperatures. (Especially given the amount of time we cooked chicken legs in there which still ran bloody juices)

I think I've nailed scones, by adapting the gluten free recipe and reducing the liquid (or calling them drop scones if I forget).

Re: Is this any use?

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

"In the UK, the tablespoon is now defined as 18ml., and the teaspoon as 5ml. However, if you look at commercially available measures, the tablespoon is shown as equivalent to 15ml., with the teaspoon as 5ml. However, in reality there are 4 teaspoons to the tablespoon!"

4 x 5 = 18...