Working With Cooking Quantities

01 Jan 2010

I recently imported a nice cookie recipe into Mealfire. Here’s how the ingredients look on AllRecipes:

3/4 cup butter, softened

3/4 cup granulated sugar

3/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 1/4 cups plus 2 Tbsp. all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 (12-oz.) packages semisweet chocolate morsels

Parchment paper

and here’s how it looked after being imported:

¾ cp butter, softened

¾ cp granulated sugar

¾ cp firmly packed dark brown sugar

2 large eggs

1½ tsp vanilla extract

2⅓ cp and 2 tsp all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

¾ tsp salt

1½ (12-oz.) packages semisweet chocolate morsels

Parchment paper

There’s not a lot of difference there. The units have been abbreviated and the fractions have been turned into HTML, but that’s all just style. The interesting difference is with the flour. There, “2 1/4 cups plus 2 Tbsp.” has been turned into “2⅓ cp and 2 tsp”. I would argue that the Mealfire representation is a bit better. They are both 325.30 milliliters, but the second one gets a lot closer with the first part, meaning that if you wanted to skip out on that second measure (or just forgot), you’d only be off by about 3%, rather than 10%.

But there’s another benefit to programatically recognizing split measurements. Say I wanted to now halve that recipe. If I don’t split measurements into two parts, I get something like this for the first three ingredients:

⅜ cp butter, softened

⅜ cp granulated sugar

⅜ cp firmly packed dark brown sugar

That’s not terribly easy to measure. Actually, it’s really tough. You have to think to yourself, “Well, that’s an eighth less than a half, so I’ll measure a half, then take off a smidge…”. If you split it, however, you get this:

⅓ cp and 2 tsp butter, softened

⅓ cp and 2 tsp granulated sugar

⅓ cp and 2 tsp firmly packed dark brown sugar

Here’s another nice example. Consider the following ingredient:

⅓ cp flour

What happens if you want to halve that? 1/6 of a cup is not going to be all that useful, of course. Here’s what Mealfire gives you:

2 Tbsp and 2 tsp flour

There’s a couple things going on here. First, anything less than 1/4 cup should be represented in tablespoons or teaspoons, so the unit has changed, but it hasn’t changed into 2 2/3 tablespoons, which is perfectly correct. It turns out that you can’t ever have a third of a tablespoon. A third of a tablespoon is a teaspoon, but not everyone knows that. So, instead of confusing people who can’t find the “1/3 tablespoon” on their measuring spoon set, you spell out for them exactly how to get there.

None of these examples are major roadblocks, but not having to do math while your cooking let’s you concentrate more on not burning dinner. I tend to need all the help there that I can get.

Working With Cooking Quantities

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