Gram to Ounce Conversion Questions - Page 2

No.  Weights and volumes are sometimes but not always convertible.  It's a question of density.  Water is the density standard.  250g of water = 250ml.  English/American measurements can be ambiguous, because a unit ounce can refer to either weight or volume.  With water, "a pint's a pound, the world around."  However, a pint (16oz volume) of white wheat flour weighs about 9oz, because, you see, uncompacted flour is less dense than than water. 

Consequently, when you convert a unit of mass to one of volume, as you do when converting 1.4g to 1/2tsp, a density similar to water is an underlying assumption. 

I assumed that it was well understood that weight/volume conversions -- no matter whether the units are metric, "American," or mixed -- would not always be 1 to 1.  However, it appears my assumption was not well founded and not everyone understood.  My apologies.

Back to coffee:  If you do not understand how moisture loss in the roasting process alters mass more than volume, I'll be happy to explain that too. Just ask.  Further,  volme/weight conversions for coffee beans are complicated by a great deal more than mere roasting.  Perhaps that's a topic for discussion in some other thread.  Again, you have but to ask.

The subject here is conversion from metric units to "American" and vice versa.  It is not coffee roasting.  But:  If 250g is the equivalent of 1/2 a pound -- which is part of what I said -- then 250g of roasted coffee and 250g of green beans are both about half a pound, to the same degree of accuracy. 

BDL

Can i quote and applaud particularly the following

Quote:

Originally Posted by boar_d_laze 

 

Even if it were in some way germane to the conversation, the figure put in issue from the Modernist Cuisine recipe is the standard, editors metric conversion from 1/2 tsp.  In other words, the recipe was developed and written in an amount which was easily measured with an ordinary kitchen tool -- if a tool rather than "two pinches" was used at all.

Whenever i see these minute measures I get so angry.  Teaspoons exist everywhere, they can be used and are used (as are "pinches") even in metric countries!!! Who would think to pull out a scale for a half a teaspoon of salt!!?? 

 

The fundamental misunderstanding involved in posting "1.4g" as an amount called for is the powered by the same misunderstanding which overvalues accuracy in an inherently inaccurate pursuit.  I guarantee, no one person or group of people involved in the books tried five different versions of the dish testing whether 1.2g 1.3g, 1.4g, 1.5g, or 1.6g worked better.  If you think someone, you completely misunderstand not only how recipes are written but how actual cooking is done.  Sorry to be blunt, but that's the truth of it.

 

exactly my point elsewhere - people who are all about accuracy of measurement have never tried inaccurate measurement, so they really don;t know

 

• If you're measuring 2.4g salt for a recipe, as opposed to using a "tsp," you're not cooking but involved in some other activity best practiced alone and with the door closed.

 

  is the other activity one that often has "mental" before it?

 

Lastly, try to bear in mind that great cooking has been around somewhat longer than super accurate scales have been available for home or commercial cooking.  You might find a scale helpful, but it's not necessary.

people forget that great cooking was not invented with the obnoxious tv chefs, but was, dare i venture to say, invented before even the tv was invented!  

 

Maybe some forget that cooking is done with organic ingredients, that have different masses depending on the conditions of growth, the time it's been sitting around, the way it was processed if it was, and countless other factors.  100 grams of onion may add an overwhelming flavor to a dish and may not add much at all, depending on the onion, when, where, how it was grown, etc.   The same flour might have more or less humidity and more or less gluten etc.   But maybe these people have been cooking with chemicals instead of real food?  That would be the only place you could even think to aspire to "accuracy." Just remind me not to eat what they cook.

 

 

BDL

Quote:

Originally Posted by cheflayne 

 

 

Just curious, so a cup of green coffee beans and a cup of roasted coffee beans weigh the same; both weigh 250g?

Roasted coffee beans weigh 10-30% less than they diddue to water loss.

Quote:

Originally Posted by boar_d_laze 

Back to coffee:  If you do not understand how moisture loss in the roasting process alters mass more than volume, I'll be happy to explain. Just ask.

 

Not necessary, but thanks for the kind offer.

And really, my personal opinion, all budding chefs should have a year of college general chemistry under their belt, just to learn weights, measures, density and proportions.  I know this for a fact.
 

Siduri,

There are many things I like about you, other things I like more about you, and those things which I adore.  Mental indeed.

BDL

My pleasure.

BDL

if you don't have metric measuring spoons or cups then all you need to know is a TBSP is about 15 ml and a TSP is about 5ml  and a cup is about 250 ml and half a gram is next to nothing  and you'll be fine. like someone else said just do it in metric, it's easier to double or cut recipes in half as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rbrad 

if you don't have metric measuring spoons or cups then all you need to know is a TBSP is about 15 ml and a TSP is about 5ml  and a cup is about 250 ml and half a gram is next to nothing  and you'll be fine. like someone else said just do it in metric, it's easier to double or cut recipes in half as well.

Uhhhh... No, that's not what I meant.

When you go to the store, most f the ingredients you buy are sold by weight:  Meat, produce, cheese, flour, sugar, butter, chocolate, nuts, even Cornflakes, are sold by weight.  So if they're sold by weight, why do we then convert them to another system, albeit a very inaccurate system,  to measure out ??

See, I liter of water is exactly i kilogram.  I cup of water--250 ml is exactly 250 grams.  If you use a scale, then you know how fast and accurate the scale can be.  Professional recipies list everything by weight, if it calls for 360 gr of vegetable oil, that's what you scale out, if it calls for 1,360 gr of 2% milk, that's what you scale out.

foodpump writes:

When you go to the store, most f the ingredients you buy are sold by weight:  Meat, produce, cheese, flour, sugar, butter, chocolate, nuts, even Cornflakes, are sold by weight.  So if they're sold by weight, why do we then convert them to another system, albeit a very inaccurate system,  to measure out ??

Because the tradition of writing down recipes began before people had scales in their homes.  For the intuitive, cups are more easily managed, and are handy household objects,  and before digital scales, a scale was a large object (and its accuracy, like the accuracy of any measurement - just ask a physicist - is never perfect)  the scale was only as accurate as the thickness of the line that was drawn at 100 gms or 200 grams - every line drawn has a thickness, and that thickness is the inaccuracy.  So the tradition began with cups, and then standardized cups, which are as accurate as you need to get for all household purposes.   And digital scales are also inaccurate believe it or not.  My digital person scale will tell you a different weight each time, with a range of a half a kilo. 

For me, halving a cup and a quarter is easy, i look at the cup-and-a-quarter line and i find half of it physically on the side of the cup and that's where i fill it to.  I can't visually halve 125 grams. I have to divide.  half of 2.75? without paper and pencil i can't do it. But if the flour is piled in a cylindrical cup, i can find the midpoint and dump off half.    What's the easiest way to measure the midpoint of an object?  measure it and halve the measure?  Or take a piece of string, mark the length of the object and then fold it in half? 

Mathematicians and engineers argue about "for all intents and purposes" measures - mathematics is about numbers, while engineering (like cooking) is about things - numbers can be precise, because they're abstract, but things are not precise.  Did you ever hear the joke about an engineer and a mathematician discussing Zeno's paradox, the  hypothetical problem of halving the distance between themselves and the girl they see at the bar, and then halving it again and halving it again and again etc. Will they ever get to her?  The mathematician says, and is right, that you will never get there.  The engineer (also right) says that for all intents and purposes, you will. 

Say what you will, i have a scale for italian recipes, but i hate using it.  If you like it, then by all means use it.  But don't scare people off baking because they can't measure 1.23 grams!

When it concerns liquids, the quantity given is VOLUME, either FLUID OUNCES (FL OZ) or in CUBIC CENTIMETERS or LITERS.  And no, I'm not shouting.

foodpump, by saying do it in metric i think we are pretty much giving similar  advice, i didn't say to convert the recipe i just gave suggestions for someone that may not have metric equipment at home. if this were a professional forum i would say use a scale. i may be wrong but as far as i know most  home cook books use volume and not weight. metric is by far a more superior system especially for canadians that could encounter a recipe in either imperial or american. 

When it comes to following recipes no set of units is inherently superior, and it's easiest to stick with the units given, whether metric, American, Imperial, dry or wet.  It seems obvious -- at least to me -- there's no advantage to converting to something else unless you lack appropriate measuring tools.  And if you must convert, it's important to bear in mind that successful cooking seldom involves a high degree of accuracy. 

BDL

Quote:

Originally Posted by boar_d_laze 

  And if you must convert, it's important to bear in mind that successful cooking seldom involves a high degree of accuracy. 

 

This is true to a degree, however, if this were one of the Professionals Forums as opposed to a General Food Forum, I'd comment that the hallmark to a successful food business is consistency of product, and to that effect it's imperative to be accurate time and time again, even if that means being consistently inaccurate - as long as it's the same each time.

But yes, there is typically a range of error that can be handled.

Keep in mind:

• ± 1 gram = ± 1/28 ounce (weight)  = 0.03527 ounce (weight)
• ± 3 grams ~ ± 0.1 ounce (weight)
• ± 1 gram of water ~ 1/5 of a teaspoon (volume)
• ± 1 teaspoon (water) ~ ± 4.72, say 5 grams

Significant digits are important!

Quote:

Originally Posted by siduri 

 

 

Because the tradition of writing down recipes began before people had scales in their homes. 

 

 

Ehhh... No.

Pound cake is a pretty straight forward and very old recipie:  One pound of butter, one pound of sugar, one pound of....

Scales have been around long before teh Romans, the Egyptians have drawings depicting theuse of bakers scales

Quote:

Originally Posted by PeteMcCracken 

Keep in mind:

• ± 1 gram = ± 1/28 ounce (weight)  = 0.03527 ounce (weight)
• ± 3 grams ~ ± 0.1 ounce (weight)
• ± 1 gram of water ~ 1/5 of a teaspoon (volume)
• ± 1 teaspoon (water) ~ ± 4.72, say 5 grams

 

Significant digits are important!

Just as an FYI, "significant digits" means that if a number is accurate to one digit, you can't gain accuracy by converting to more digits.  For instance, if you're minding significant digits, the American equivalent for 2g would be 0.07oz, and not 0.0754oz, because 2g has only one significant digit. 

BDL

My engineering prof would have said 0.8 oz, but then again, he rounded to the nearest significant digit , btw, he DETESTED calculators! A slide rule RULED!

Quote:

Originally Posted by boar_d_laze 

Just as an FYI, "significant digits" means that if a number is accurate to one digit, you can't gain accuracy by converting to more digits.  For instance, if you're minding significant digits, the American equivalent for 2g would be 0.07oz, and not 0.0754oz, because 2g has only one significant digit. 

 

BDL

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChefDave11 

This is true to a degree, however, if this were one of the Professionals Forums as opposed to a General Food Forum, I'd comment that the hallmark to a successful food business is consistency of product, and to that effect it's imperative to be accurate time and time again, even if that means being consistently inaccurate - as long as it's the same each time.

But yes, there is typically a range of error that can be handled.

thank you chefdave for pointing out that we all as chefs are accurate in our inaccuracies...hallelujah! i love being playful and carefree and inaccurately accurate....it's freeing...not like pastry chefs. who needs stinkin' measuring cups and spoons? maybe we could get tshirts printed....chef on the front saying "we don't need no stinkin measuring cups"...on the back...we're accurate inaccurites!

just kidding...

i will say this though...if you make the same recipe for 20 years and it calls for 1 cup of sugar, 1 tbl of salt, 1 tsp black pepper, and 1/4 tsp of cayenne, i will bet that one doesn't have to measure any of those out...that eyeballing would be pretty spot if not dead spot on...at least i could.....sorry if i got off tangent....

joey

I was quoted as saying: Because the tradition of writing down recipes began before people had scales in their homes. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by foodpump 

Ehhh... No.

 

Pound cake is a pretty straight forward and very old recipie:  One pound of butter, one pound of sugar, one pound of....

 

Scales have been around long before teh Romans, the Egyptians have drawings depicting theuse of bakers scales

Yes, of course the Romans had scales.  But did they have fins?

oops,. sorry, i couldn't help it. 

Yes, there were scales in stores, in markets, etc.  But if people had scales at home, why did fanny farmer make a big deal about standardizing the cup measure?  obviously because people did NOT have scales at home.  At least in america, people were using cups.  But one person's china service was different than another's. 

And my grandmother (from italy)  never measured anything at all, neither in grams nor in cups. 

A baker, that's a different thing, i'm talking about at home. 

I only weigh new recipes that have some feature that is unique (like molten choc cake or the like).

On most recipes I just eyeball it after I am used to making it, because things like humidity and the type of flour, etc affect the result.

So by knowing what consistency I want, I actually get better results going by "feel".   This is true for pancakes, waffles, biscuits, shortbread, cookies, bread including quick bread, etc.  However - I do measure for cake, including cupcakes, though, especially if I'm going after a particular texture. 

I'll get an edible, perhaps even tasty cake by eyeballing it, but if I want a certain crumb, or texture, I have to measure.

Home baking is actually fairly new, it only became popular when stoves were available inside the home.  Prior to that, ovens were outdoor affairs, a fire had to built inside the oven cavity and let burn for at least 3 hours, then the ashes were swept out and the first batch of baking loaded in.  A right royal pain in the arse, which is why most households only baked once a week, or bought from the baker.   . 

Many European baking recipies are in weight, and many households had scales, usually handed down several generations.  Many immigrants did not have the luxury of bringing scales with them when they moved to the "New World", only bare essentials were brought.  When wood burning stoves improved to the point that an actual oven was included and did not need several hours of pre-heating, is when home baking become popular.  And since many home bakers did not have kitchen scales, a substitute had to be invented.  And measuring dry ingredients by volume is a substitute.

You may be right, Foodpump, for certain places, but my inlaws (born in the first decade of the 1900s in italy) would describe their home kitchens and how their mothers and grandmothers would put a mound of flour on the table, make a hole in the center, add ingredients, by eye, a handful of sugar, a couple of eggs, etc  etc, and start mixing from the center, incorporating as much flour as "it takes" and bake it in the home "forno di campagna" - a sort of makeshift oven that you put on top of the fire of the wood stove, and it's got some sort of air space between the base and the place where the cake pan goes - my cousins in tuscany still use this in the house my grandmother was born in, which they inherited and have kept as it was, with an open hearth in the kitchen to which they added two gas rings on the side. 

My mother said that in her tiny hill town in northern tuscany, the local bakery would rent baking space in its oven, after they finshed baking bread, and her mother would bring her cakes down to the breadmaker at a certain time, each family having reserved a time before the holidays, and would bake her schiaccia and potato flour cake and rice pie in the residual heat of the oven.. 

All these first-hand descriptions were of a pile of flour and ingredients thrown in with makeshift measures (an old chipped cup, a handful, a ladleful, simply "as much as it takes")  I remember my mother trying to figure out just how much her mother used. 

My mother-in-law's sister would make the family bread - there was a special piece of furniture that stored the flour and then the baked loaves, and the top lifted up to get at this, and when it was down it was where they did the kneading.  Always by eye, from her description.  I know because she told me many times that people who really know how to cook don;t use recipes!  (That was a bit of a dig, perhaps, but then she ate my cakes and had to retract). 

I also wonder how much was actually weighed in bakeries, and if they didn;t just use a number of  "bags" of flour, that may or may not have been packed by weight and not by volume.  Those were the times in the english-speaking countries, where they talked about bushels and pecks, which were volume measures.  I can imagine that to make a huge amount of loaves of bread to supply a small village or town, the quantities would possibly require scales that would have been too large and therefore too expensive. 

When i first came to italy, every market stand had a hand held scale, held by chains, like "justice" is depicted in courthouses - a metal plate on one side, and a stick with a weight and some notches that the person would slide back and forth.  Certainly in the 20s and 30s bakeries could have had big scales, but i really doubt a small country town bakery would have such elaborate equpment.  My father-in-law's bread bakery used workers who kneaded the bread by hand, dozens and dozens of loaves.  that was in the years of world war II.

.

Yeah, my Mom and Dad grew up in Switzerland during the depression and remembered, as kids, bringing unbaked pies and casseroles to the local baker to be baked, but that tradition had existed for quite some time. 

When I look through history books every European baker HAD to sell his loaves by a certain weight, by law.  Gawd knows how many wars and uprising throughout history were started by selling underweight bread......

It's just, that after cooking and baking for 30 odd years I see measuring ingredients by weight as a triple bonus.  Certainly as a Chef, it has saved my butt on many occasions with training new staff, but especially with inventory, food costing, and recipie calculations.

When I see new people struggling, I feel the best thing is to show them how to use a scale, as it will guarantee consistency, repeatability every time. 

The whole thing reminds me of the time I saw my neighbor trying to plant a cherry tree sapling with a snow shovel.  I went to my shed and offered him a spade, he refused.  I  explained that the spade was designed for just such a purpose.  The snow shovel works, but it is awkward and time consuming.  A substitute.

calling a spade a spade!

I think for some (like me). insisting on exact measurement would have put me off cooking entirely.  For others it can be a way to overcome anxiety. 

When i had my first child i bought a thermometer for the bathwater, i was so nervous about the temperature of the water and afraid that i wouldn't be able to judge it right and would freeze or burn my poor baby..  By the time i had my second child i realized how totally foolish that was.  Just put your elbow in the water, it should not feel cold or hot.  How hot should the water for yeast be? for dry yeast, like my shower in the winter, for fresh yeast, like a baby's bathwater.  If I could trust my baby to it, i can certainly trust a little yeast plant. 

I understand the need for regular predictable products in a commercial bakery.  Though i know that in the old days bakers acquired a feel for the bread, which they learned with long apprenticeships, and i would bet that they would also have had predictable quality without the weighing.  Also, consider that before commercial yeast they used a sourdough starter or a brewing yeast that was kept and passed on, and was probably not of any kind of regular quality (not having refrigeration) so they'd have to adjust to the starter as they found it - and the temperature in the bakery would vary summer to winter, needing less starter in summer with the hot weather. 

Yes, bread was (here it still is) sold by weight.  You still don;t have to get a whole loaf of bread, you can ask for half a kilo, 250 grams, a kilo, whatever you want.  But my point with the scales is that to weigh a loaf to meet the laws controlling weights and prices, you used a hand-held scale but you can't weigh the quantities of flour needed to bake bread for a small town with a hand held scale.  And a scale that could hold two large bags of flour to weigh them?  Pretty expensive for a small town bakery.

Instead of making assumptions, go find the 100 year old men and or women in your town and ask them what was done when they were just wee lads.  That'll at least be a start to discovering whether your ideas and theories are just that based on your current store of knowledge, or if there's actually some fact to it.

And I theorize that this information might be found in historical books as well.  Maybe within introductions and prefaces to old old cookbooks as well.

For bread baking scales, here's what you need imho, Edlund Scales:  http://pastryitems.com/bakers_scale.htm

My parents and inlaws, if still alive, would have been well over 100, and their stories are of real life memories in small towns.  My grandmother would have been even older. 

If you have some sources, it would be interesting to read them. 

Meanwhile I'll consult an acquaintance of mine, a historian specialized in ancient roman cooking. 

The real point, it seems to me, is that those who rely on precise measures cannot conceive of a possibility that experience can substitute for the precision they rely on.  Like those that can't believe shakespeare wrote his own plays because he never went to university, or who think babies can't be born without the techniques of modern medicine. At some point in history people made bread, and at another point in history, much later, they invented scales. 

I have a couple of medieval cookbooks that, though they don;t have bread recipes, have recipes used at court to make food for huge feasts, and no mention of weight or even volume that is not completely intuitive (a handful, a bowl).  (see, for example,  Redon, Sabban, Serventi, La gastronomie au moyen age)

Ehh..... Scales were around about the same time people figured out how to grind grain. Like I said, teh Egyptians had hyroglyphics(sp?) depicting bakrs using scales and unloading loaves from ovens.