Vinegar pie
Hey Americans: don't you hate it when you find a recipe you like but it calls for strange things like "500g flour" or "200g chopped onions"? These recipes usually come from Europe or someplace weird like that. Seriously, you're supposed to weigh your food in grams? What, haven't they heard of measuring with cups, or just counting the number of onions you chop?
Well, I'll admit it. They won me over. I keep a scale in my kitchen now, and I love recipes that measure ingredients by weight.
Here's why I love my scale:
1. You don't have to count. If you have a bucket of tomatillos, do you really want to count them all out? Or would you rather dump them into a bowl in the scale and read the little number?
2. Your definition of "medium" is probably different from the recipe writers. You know what I mean - "four medium sized plum tomatoes", "one small onion", "two large eggplants". Example: North American cantaloupes taste similar to the European species - so they'd be a fine substitution in most recipes - but they're almost twice as big.
3. Weight is more reliable than volume for ingredients like flour. Ever see cookbooks telling you to fluff up your flour and measure it in a very precise measuring cup? Too much trouble for me, too. Weigh the flour, and it doesn't matter how fluffed it is.
Want to join me? kitchen scales are cheap, and they'll come in handy for knitting, soapmaking, mailing packages, and all kinds of other activities.
Start here for some weight-based recipes, or do like me and weigh ingredients on your own. For example, I weigh a few "normal" carrots, and then I know how many of my stubby homegrown carrots to use. I also solved a bucket-of-tomatillos dilemma the same way: I weighed five large, average-looking tomatillos (50 grams) and then weighed my whole bucket (500 grams). Through the power of math, I knew I should multiply the recipe by ten!