this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I do find cooking easier in grams. Just put the bowl on the scale and add ingredients until it hits the number. No measuring cups to wash. But it would life changing if woodworking switched to metric. Doing any sort of exact math is annoying as hell. What is 12’7” divided by 4? How many 1/8” is 0.55 inches?? It is my own personal hell.
It's also a lot easier to multiply and divide recipes if you switch it over to metric. This is particularly useful if you don't have enough of one ingredient and need to reduce the others by that ratio.
Then there's the ability to measure the ingredient directly out of the container, using any scoop you can find, rather than needing multiple sets of measuring spoons.
Ah yes, I'll have 0.8 metric eggs please.
Say you have a recipe that takes three eggs but you only have two. Do you wanna do the math on what 2/3 of one cup is actually?
Ummm... It's 2/3 cup, and that is a standard measurement. But maybe that wasn't the best example. Let's say 2/3 of 1/4 cup. Well that's 2/12 or 1/6 cup which is far from common. However a cup is 48 tsp, so 1/6 cup is 8 tsp.
I mean it's dumb as hell but it does work.
The Metric system is easier though.
It's like when the crazy guy says it's easy and then pulls out a pinboard with pictures and string connecting them and proceeds to explain how it makes sense in his head and you have to admit that you sort of follow but also can't believe what you're hearing is reality.
The thing that drives me bonkers is that ounces is both a volume and mass measurement, and they aren't the same for water.
You can just say you don’t know fractions.
It’s okay.
They used to give out a little conversion rotary slide rule at trade shows. Pretty nice tech, two circles of cardboard pop riveted together in the center, on the top one the units are written on a series of rings, smallest on the outside, biggest on the inside, there’s a cutout along the radius so you can see the numbers written on the bottom one. Spin the bottom one so the unit you know is showing and the one you want will be right there.
I bet they still make em.
As a previous hardware store employee in Australia I can confirm we were given these as well, as a lot of our tooling is still in imperial measurements - particularly bits, tools, fasteners and the like. I think my old one is still lying around in a box in the garage somewhere…
Sometimes I buy liquid eggs in a carton if I need a lot of eggs for one recipe and don't feel like cracking a dozen eggs. One large egg is about 50g, so 0.8 metric eggs is about 40g.
Got to get the metric chickens for those.
Kek. 1.21 kilochickens
Interestingly chicken size is based on their weight... So a size 18 chicken is a 1.8kg chook
That's a big mother Clucker for sure 🤣
Reminds me of the good old days when my dad raised free range fowl: the chickens were the size of turkeys and the turkeys were too big to even fit in the oven 😂
A metric egg is a little over 50 grams. You typically get a bit over 30 grams of white, 20 grams of yolk and 5-ish grams of shell.
This is a rounding error.
Uh, you know metric has volume measurements as well, and Imperial has weight measurements? Measuring cup vs scales is not really a difference in metric and imperial.
A litre of water weighs a kilogram. When asked for 300ml of water, I can add 300g instead.
Only at sea level. Cooking with metric in the Himalayan mountains would not allow for this conversion.
+1 point to imperial /s
That's a good point, that does come in handy.
Okay now do oil.
It's not often you get a recipe telling you to add 300ml of oil. But it sounds like a recipe I want to try.
Directions and nutrition information and other stuff like that tend to use mass for metric and volume for imperial. Yeah, you can convert stuff, but it's annoying.
I get around it by just working in inches entirely. If some guy needs the foot-and-inch measurement I'll convert but generally calling for something to be 97 5/8" is sufficient, without needing to add feet into the equation.
I do agree that metric would be interesting. I have a metric tape measure I use when I am practicing botany so I can work on familiarizing myself with common metric distances like 10/100cm