Re:Cups vs. grams: why can't American and British cooks agre...
by dgacmu on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @08:24AM
(#39916533)
No, because they have a different internal crystal structure with more space. The kosher salt is, to use a vague term, more fluffy. There's a photograph in this Cooks illustrated article, if you go to the end of it and click read more: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/taste_tests/2109-kosher-...
The article also points out that the salt structure differs not just between table salt and kosher salt, but between kosher salt manufacturers depending on the process they used to make it. Weight wins.
Re:Cups vs. grams: why can't American and British cooks agre...
by mynegation on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @08:17AM
(#39916469)
I see what you mean but that only works in the assumption of crystals being the same shape and point size probability distribution. Which is a reasonable assumption for crystals but real materials are derived by grinding, so you can easily have a wider distribution of shapes (rounder) and sizes (small particles filling the gaps between larger ones).
The article makes a similar point about unrefined brown sugar and caster sugar, but something doesn't sit right with me for that. Shouldn't the packing densities of sugar/salt crystals, and therefore the mass densities, be the same at different scales? So unless the volume you're measuring is within an order of magnitude of the size of the objects being measured, where edge effects become significant, shouldn't they contain about the same amount?
(Even the grains of coarse salt shouldn't be significantly more than 1/10 of the width of a teaspoon, no?)