I recently wrote a tiny site to do exactly this! It converts ingredients from volumes to weight. Check it out at https://bready.io/. Would love to hear any feedback ya'll might have!

I imagine you all have also greatly increased the amount of baking you're doing while staying safe at home.

Id love to do the conversion on both directions. Grams -> Volume (in caps, tbsp, or milliliters). Happens as well people may not have weigh scale.

Have you considered making a public REST API available?

I've been working on one recently. https://rapidapi.com/smilebot/api/food-unit-of-measurement-c... would love your feedback :)

I don't know how americans manage to feed themselves, while measuring things with cups! It's such a bizarre and archaic unit. Like the english stone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit)

Until recently, it was a lot easier to lay your hands on a decent set of measuring cups than a good electronic balance. The spring ones weren't very precise, and weights are easy to lose and make a mess. Measuring cups are cheap and simple, and doubling and halving recipes (the most common operations) is elementary-school math.

Even European recipes still measure small amounts for flavors, leaveners, etc. in volumes. A scale that's precise to sub-gram levels is more expensive. So it's not as if you're not familiar with the concept.

Now that electronic ones are cheap it's clearly the better choice, especially for flour, but that's only in the last decade or two. People are switching over to scales, but the volume measurements are perfectly adequate and they're what our existing cookbooks call for.

I'm not American (Canadian living in Germany) and I have to say that I find using cups/spoons is much easier than pulling out a scale and weighing everything. Just grab a measuring cup / spoon (every house has a set of standard sized measuring cups and spoons) fill it up to the right amount and dump it in.

Cups work great for certain things, such as a cup of water, sugar, flour, or peanuts. It gets difficult in other situations though, like trying to measure a cup of spinach, strawberries, or ice, because the measurement greatly varies depending on how the items are packed or arranged in the space.

Measuring volume is not great for flour for the same reason, it contains very different amounts of air depending on whether it’s packed or sifted.

Which is why most recipes say something like "1 cup of flour, sifted" - you have to measure it, then sift it.

That’s so much more work than just weighing it.

Uh...

Using a scale is even easier, especially for things like bread, you can just pour ingredients directly into your bowl until you hit the right amount, zero it and move onto the next thing. No guesswork of trying to fill a cup, no separate measuring device needed, just pour and tare.

It also solves to many issues with ingredients that will just never have equal density, flour variances, packing brown sugar by hand, etc are things of the past.

Another great spot is stuff like butter where you wind up cutting off different sizes all the time, and always have a few assorted scraps kicking around, using a scale solves that, just pile scraps up til you get the right amount.

Just use a german measuring cup which has like 30 different scales for everything you might want to measure in volume and weight, e.g. https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01BAU2N62/ ?

That’s what we commonly use which is easier to use than just weighing everything, but still just as accurate.

But you have to admit, a gram of flour and a gram of sugar are very strange units of volume. Better to just use millilitres or cups or something.

Well they allow you to measure with a measuring cup, or with a scale, whatever you prefer, and easily allow scaling a recipe up or down :)

Not every house has a set of standard cups and spoons. We leave a scale on our counter and when were mixing ingredients, we put the bowl on the scale, add and tare.

I think it depends on the recipe. For baking, I find the scale easier: add flour, hit tare, add sugar, hit tare, etc.

For a recipe where ingredients go in at different times and require different prep, and measurements are approximate anyway, weighing is more trouble.

How do you fill a cup with apple slices?

It's quite easy to fill a cup with apple slices. You won't get an accurate, reproducible measurement this way, but the procedure itself isn't difficult. If accuracy isn't that important, then it works okay.

Carefully, if you don't want to end up with applesauce.

Australians, Indonesians, Germans all measure recipes with two kinds of spoons (!). Australians also use cups (that are 10-12 mL bigger than American ones); other countries may too.

I wonder if the ideal country where no-one uses units of volume other than litres and millilitres actually exists.

The really bizarre units of volume are certainly the ones I've seen in Europe - where you get measures marked in "grams of flour" and "grams of sugar". I suppose no-one has ever asked for a hundred grams of sugar of flour, but I'm tempted to every time I see one of them.

"Grams of flour" isn't volume, it's mass. You stick your mixing bowl on the scale, hit "tare", and add flour until you hit the right mass. Then hit tare, add the next ingredient until it hits the right mass, etc. Much more accurate, which is needed for good consistent baking. Also much faster.

I wrote a browser extension that does this (although it will of course occasionally get something wrong): https://github.com/falk-hueffner/metric-cooking

Just make sure to send @jspash your bank details or bitcoin wallet address so he can give you the money he was talking about.

Why is cups->mL not sufficient? Cups->grams just seems more prone to errors in general.

Because most Europeans use weighing scales rather than volumetric measurements. When I'm baking I put the bowl on the scales and pour in the ingredients. When recipes say 1tbsp or 2tsp it gets me annoyed because if they had converted to grams I could just pour those ingredients straight in too but instead I need to get out my volumetric measures (or in most cases just guess and hope it doesn't matter too much)

>When recipes say 1tbsp or 2tsp it gets me annoyed because if they had converted to grams I could just pour those ingredients straight in too but instead I need to get out my volumetric measures

Are kitchen scales accurate enough for such tiny measurements? 1 teaspoon is 5ml, so if your scale only has 1g of precision you're looking at up to a 10℅ variance (assuming you're measuring water), and that's assuming its accurate at that range. It gets worse when you need to deal with fractional teaspoons.

> Are kitchen scales accurate enough for such tiny measurements

Yes, and there are lots of recipes that use mass rather than volumetric measurements. For solids, in fact, many sources prefer this because consistency of packing density and other user factors that effect consistency with volumetric measure are far worse than with mass measured with a kitchen scale.

Yes below 5g it's not that accurate but I've never seen a recipe demand precision like 1.3tsp so if anything you can get more accuracy with weight.

Huh, here in Sweden we use volumetric measurement for most things (milk, flour, sugar, etc.), usually in milli- centi- or deciliter.

The exception is usually butter, which is measured in grams (and conveniently indicated on the packaging).

Well, the conveniently indicated grams on the packet are not units of weight - they're units of volume. So you've got two kinds of units of volume in your recipes: milli/centi/decilitres, and grams of butter. But it's fairer than the grams of flour I've been ranting about elsewhere here because at least the manufacturer can have some responsibility for fine tuning it to their product!

Do you have any source for your claim that "grams of butter", "grams of flour" and "grams of sugar" do not all refer to the SI unit "gram"?

I live in Europe and have always weighed exactly 100g on the scale, whether I was asked for 100 grams of butter, sugar or flour.

They are the SI unit of mass. He's just saying that because it's indicated by lines on the package that the actual measurement is done in volume, and the conversion is implicit by the scaling. Where he goes wrong is in thinking that it's implying that "grams of butter" is a unit of volume.

ML is fine for liquids, but you wouldn't (or shouldn't) measure flour in ml.

Well, tell that to Europeans, who don't use millilitres to measure their flour or sugar by volume - they use bizarre units of volume called "grams of flour" or "grams of sugar". Check their cup measures! It's crazy.

Apparently it works perfectly fine for household cooking to use units of volume for flour and sugar. Close enough is good enough!

Isn’t a cup defined as 250mL?

Unless you’re in the USA, in which case a cup is 236.5882365mL exactly.

If you need a particular amount of flour, you can't express it in volume, since 250ml of flour may be too much or too little depending on how tightly the flour is packed. For reliable baking, measuring flour by volume is too inaccurate, you need to weigh it so you know how much flour actually went into that cup.