Seven tablespoons of butter

[snousle]

Dear European chefs,

Converting a recipe to American measures involves more than multiplying by the appropriate conversion factors. It also requires scaling the whole recipe to match typical American package sizes.

We can tell when you are being lazy. Half a cup of cream, plus one tablespoon? Three and a quarter cups of flour? Seventeen ounces of chocolate? And the worst - the absolute giveaway - is your repeated insistence on seven tablespoons of butter.

Please stop.

Thanks,

- The American Cook

Comments

[bigjohnsf.livejournal.com]

7 Tbsp = 100g, no?

But, isn't butter typically sold in IIRC 250g or 500g blocks? (A metric 'pound' or a metric 'half-pound'.)

In that case 9 Tbsp would make more sense.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Having read a LOT of pastry recipes lately, my guess is that these come from 1/10th scale versions of restaurant recipes, which very often use a kilo of butter.

[linuxcub.livejournal.com]

Isn't there an app for that ???

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Funny you should ask, I use PCalc constantly in the kitchen. It's the only software calculator I've found that has been able to replace my 20 year old HP 38s. Includes a very handy unit conversion feature.

[linuxcub.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFF_system

You people are so funny when it comes to units :-)

The temperature scale, according to Wikipedia, seems to be originally defined so that 0°F is the temperature of brine, and 96°F is the temperature of Fahrenheits wife !!!!

ROTFLMAO

[albear-garni.livejournal.com]

See my upcoming post....

[theotherqpc.livejournal.com]

fuck volumetrics, get a digital scale and do it right.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I have three of them! One for 0-50g, one for 10-1500g, and one that goes up to 20 kg. Doing the conversions to grams for my never-complete database project is how I know that all these odd measures are suspiciously close to nice round numbers in grams!

I hear your pain…

[ursine1.livejournal.com]

The real problem is the insistence of using "cups" for dry ingredients instead of grams. Add to that the US cup is 8 fluid ounces while the rest of the "British empire" uses 10 fluid ounces makes it difficult for us ex-pats.

You might be interested to know that dessert recipes here in Spain (as offered by US companies like Kraft) use half as much sugar as their American counterparts. I'm talking about those on-the-box recipes.

The US is so confusing. Don't you have 2 l bottles for Coke? And of course all medicine is metric. And there never were "English" units for electricity (volts, amps, watts) or magnetism.

And for nutrition, the "energy" unit is Calorie (really kilo-calorie).

Chuck, my town is famous for being the point where the Paris Meridian dips into the Mediterranean which was used for determining the length of the meter.