I've been weighing in lieu of measuring for some time. I've run into two "difficulties," for one of which I have a sort-of solution, but for the other I think there may not be a _good_ solution. The first 'difficulty' is that flour is highly variable in terms of moisture, nevermind other variables. I've settled on a brand I like for a number of recipes I use regularly and established that, for instance, 1 cup of sifted all purpose flour weighs 120 grams, and in good recipes a 120 gram cup works well. (By good I mean those that are reliable as far as ingredient listing is concerned.) So my solution is: test the brand and type of flour by triple sifting and carefully measuring and then weighing three separate samples. Average the three for a weight for 1 cup. The second difficulty which really is (to me) a problem is in the matter of amounts of herbs and spices. Salt is so regularly used that recipes can often be trusted (if they cite an amount, which often they do not, more's the pity!). I'd love to be able to turn measurements for singleton spices (e.g. capsicum) or herbs (e.g., basil) into weights -- for which I actually have a scale usually used by jewelers for such pricey-per-hundredths-of-a-gram items such as gold -- but while there are very rough weights given for some of the more commonly used herbs and spices (as in the examples given) even so the qualities from one source to another is so great as to be insurmountable. Then there is the issue of more being a great deal more -- for instance, I just made a large batch of soup (roughly six times the original recipe) and everything I guesstimated turned out fine EXCEPT I used three of my small-ish but very strong Bay leaves) I'm left to fall back on the old wives' way of measuring: know your flavor and use it accordingly. Any thoughts on this matter would be appreciated. I do puzzle over it from time to time... // Oh, and the last comment I see above, about 8.3 oz for a cup of water perhaps being too picky (or not) for the home baker, two points: Three tenths of an ounce of water even in home baking can be a recipe killer. For instance, add water 3/10ths of an oz at a time to pastry and see where that increment gets you by way of trouble with a capital T. The other point is a generalization. There are very reputable sources giving completely bogus conversions from metric to imperial and vice versa. It is (for me) worthwhile to keep my own list of conversions against which to check before trying something new and iffy. // the guideline that comes to my mind in all this goes back to learning arithmetic. Look at a set of numbers to be, say, divided. Come up with a ballpark estimate of what the answer should look like -- so you know if you get thousands instead of tens of something you know there's an errant decimal somewhere in there . . . This is all a bit far from the business of inaccurate measuring cups, which is a sad but true problem on its own. Weights are better when possible, across the board.

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