Category Archives: Metric Cooking

Metric Cooking Without Imperial Leftovers

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By The Metric Maven

Update: 2013-01-17

On 2013-01-10 the 25,000 signature threshold for a whitehouse.gov petition urging the US change over to the metric system was met. This was the threshold required for an issue to merit attention from the Obama administration.   Five days later, the rules have now changed: White House Raises Petition Signature Threshold to 100K.

Before I start the current blog, I would like to make an appeal to my US readers. I tend to  be of the opinion that online petitions are feckless. I would like to make a singular exception this month and encourage my readers to sign the petition at whitehouse.gov called Make The Metric System the Standard in the United States, Instead of the Imperial System. I have tried to sign up twice, once with my home email and once as The Metric Maven. I never received my confirmation emails with a password either time. Yes, I checked my spam filter. I then tried to login and clicked forget password? It indicated I would go to a page where I could change my password. It did not, but it did take me back to the petition, which I then signed. Sven also needed to use the same procedure to sign the petition. Others apparently have been able to breach this vestigial firewall and as of this writing (2013-01-09), there are 20,376 signatures. This is very close to the 25,000 needed to require the White House to pay attention to this issue. The petition will end on January 31, so voting before this deadline is crucial.  Based on my experience with the whitehouse.gov website, I believe more people have tried to vote, and have been unable to, than are shown on the tally. Should we make the 25,000 signature limit, we can then find out if this was a feckless endeavor or not. It will give us something concrete to which we can point when contacting legislators and requesting that legislation be enacted. Thank you.  Now the blog.

When the 2008 Olympics were held in China, there was one group of people the hosts were not certain how to feed. It was the Americans. Recipes sent from all other countries of the world made sense, but not those from the US. In order to make the recipes for Americans, measures with cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and all the other measurement units unfamiliar to the rest of the world had to be obtained. The necessary glassware and measures were sent from the US, the cooks adapted for the Olympics; the Americans were fed. After the Olympics were finished, they saw no value to these odd cooking utensils with imperial measures, and threw them all away. This story is somewhat apocryphal, but illustrates the metric culinary island to which we’ve banished ourselves in the US.

I’ve read a few cooking blogs that lament our use of imperial measures for cooking in the US. Imperial units isolate new US recipes from the rest of the world, and prevent the world from sharing with us.. These cooks wonder when, or if, we will ever figure out a way to change American cooking to metric—as the other 192 metric countries of the world have done—years ago.

A couple of solar orbits back,  I decided to look into the details of cooking using the metric system. Pat Naughtin often stressed that when changing to metric one should take the opportunity to reform practices within industries and make them better. What I realized during my work, was how different metric cooking is from the way I learned it using imperial. In an earlier blog, I lampooned the way some American computer programs mindlessly convert recipes to metric. Unfortunately this is generally the way people have converted from imperial to metric recipes in the past. When I’ve read through old accounts from the 1970s, metric cooking is treated like imperial cooking, just with different units. This leads to unpleasant imperial leftovers, that need correcting.

Cooking Scale with small bowl zeroed for measuring

A fundamental difference between cooking the way metric countries generally do, and ourselves, is the use of a scale to measure mass (weight). A volumetric quantity of flour in a measuring cup will change depending on how settled it is, but it’s mass (weight) doesn’t. Brown sugar can be measured loose, or  packed, so a cup of brown sugar can be of different weight, but occupy the same volume in a measuring cup. This can cause inconsistent results in cooking, but when mass is used, the quantity is assured to be consistent. Most all of us have seen the side of a breakfast cereal box that has a warning like: “Contents may have settled in shipment. Contents are sold by weight not by volume.”  I’m sure many people had called in complaining their cereal boxes were not filled to the top when they opened them. So how much flour is in a cup of flour?—depends, but we can always be certain how much 225 grams of flour is. The mass remains constant. The density does not.

I purchased a scale which would automatically awaken in grams and has a nice large digital display. Scales have a tare function on them. What this means is that if you set a small bowl on the scale, you can press the tare button and it will re-zero the scale so you measure only the contents you then place into the bowl. At first cooking this way seemed awkward, but soon I realized that the use of a measuring cup was minimized to mostly liquids, and a scale was way faster. What one does not realize is how often one has to place contents in a measuring cup, bring it up level with your eyes, or worse bend down and look at it when it’s on a counter top. Many modern measuring cups have graduations which may be viewed from above, this is a great improvement. Measuring cups are often graduated with imperial units facing a right handed person, so to read milliliters, one must turn the cup around, or possibly hold it in your left hand. This is a subtle anti-metric bias. Graduations which may be read from above a measuring cup eliminate this anti-metric bias—for right handed people anyway.

At this point it may be best to introduce a recipe to use for illustration. The Chocolate Chip Cookie originated in the US, and is an obvious choice. I went to allrecipes.com and found their Best Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe. The site has an option to convert to metric. When I did this the recipe below was offered:

The conversion is much better than others I’ve seen, but has a few problems. First, the butter, white sugar, brown sugar, flour, chocolate chips, and chopped walnuts are all  weighed in grams, that’s good. The unintentional, algorithmic humor is that the recipe originally called for 1 cup of packed brown sugar. When weighing brown sugar, as is called out in the metric version, packing it beforehand is a superfluous waste of time. It reveals the mindless metric conversion the software performed. Two eggs are obviously two eggs. Ten milliliters of vanilla extract may be measured using two 5 mL (tea)-spoons.

In the case of ingredients like spices, they are often in such small quantities, that measuring them becomes inaccurate. Remember a gram is about the weight of a plain m&m. If you are trying to measure 1 to 5 grams, your scale will not easily distinguish a gram from two grams. (there are culinary scales that are accurate to 0.1 gram, but they are around $500.00 which breaks my budget) This converted recipe indicates you should use 5 grams of baking soda. This is a bad practice, and will cause frustration. It has been converted from 1 teaspoon of baking soda. One should directly use the equivalent volume which is 5 mL. The recipe calls for 3 grams of salt. I tried measuring three grams of salt, don’t do it, you will only encounter frustration. The imperial version of the recipe calls for 1/2 teaspoon of salt, use the 2.5 mL (1/2 tea)-spoon. The two teaspoons of hot water were taken directly to milliliters and are fine. For spices and such, use volume measure.

I have a viewpoint on how imperial recipes should be converted for Americans in during metrication. Americans are not used to using a digital scale (believe me–it’s easier than what we do), so volumes should be placed next to the weights in parenthesis. This allows a person to implement the recipe if they don’t have a scale. With luck, the parenthetical volumes would be dropped for weight, as Americans realize the ease of using a scale in grams. Here is how I would convert the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe for Americans to use (FYI This recipe has been much improved since I wrote this essay. See my metric cookbook):

Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

225 g butter, softened (240 mL)             5 mL of baking soda
200 g white sugar (250 mL)                  10 mL of hot water
220 g brown sugar (350 mL)                 2.5 mL of salt
2 eggs                                                    335 g Semisweet Chocolate Chips (475 mL)
10 mL vanilla extract                              115 g Chopped Walnuts (240 mL)
375 g all purpose flour (600 mL)

1) Preheat oven to 175 C (1750 milligrade)

2) Cream together the butter, white sugar, and brown sugar until smooth.
Beat in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. Dissolve baking soda in hot water. Add to batter along with salt. Stir in flour, chocolate chips, and nuts.
Drop by large spoonfuls onto ungreased pans.

3) Bake for about 10 minutes in the preheated oven, or until edges are nicely browned.

With a scale, the ingredients may be measured very quickly. I took the mixing bowl from my mixer and placed it on the scale, used the tare button to zero out the bowl, and then added 225 grams of butter. If you are brave, you can continue adding the other ingredients using the tare function, but I don’t recommend it. Next obtain a small bowl, place it on the scale, hit tare to zero it, and measure the white sugar. Put it in with the butter in the mixing bowl. Use the same bowl to then measure the brown sugar, and place it in the mixing bowl with the butter and white sugar. You can then set your mixer to about medium speed and creme the mixture for about 8-10 minutes.

While the mixer is creaming, you can use the a bowl to measure out 375 grams of flour. You may wish to also measure out the chocolate chips and walnuts. I often use a small paper bowl or plate and set the measured ingredients aside to be added later. Once you have the hang of using a scale, it is much faster and more accurate than using a measuring cup for dry ingredients. If you are within a gram or two, that’s fine, a gram is a very small unit of mass, it will still  be closer than the old way of cooking.

Contemporary measuring spoons are marked in 2.5 mL, 5 mL and 15 mL, so the vanilla, baking soda, hot water and salt are all straightforward to measure.

As I’ve said, metric conversion is the perfect time to examine your current practices and consider changes. If you have never used cooking parchment paper, I recommend you give it a shot. Rather than greasing a pan, which after cooking can create a petroleum sludge which requires scrubbing to remove, cut a piece of cooking parchment paper to the same size as the baking sheet, and place the cookie dough on it as you would normally. Bake as usual, and when you take the cookies out of the oven you can easily remove them with a pancake turner—after they cool 4-5 minutes.. I have a second baking sheet lined with parchment, and blobs of cookie dough, ready to go into the oven when the first pan is done. I cut a third piece of parchment paper and put it on my counter. I place the warm cookies on the parchment protected counter. This frees up the cookie sheet for more dough as the second set of cookies is baking. You do not need to cut a new piece of parchment for each bake, just use it again with the same cookie sheet from which you just removed the cookies. You will be surprised how much easier baking cookies this way is. Best of all it’s a bachelor’s dream, no cookie sheets to be cleaned. Just throw away the parchment when finished.

Cookie dough ready for baking on parchment paper
Baked cookies using metric recipe
Alton Brown taking the measure of a Donut. Are they metric calipers?

The results were very Good Eats. Alton Brown is one of the best known Chefs on television. His program Good Eats was very popular with the public and myself. Alton does his best to explain the scientific basis for why he cooks his recipes the way he does. Cooking is presented in an entertaining manner, in a way one cannot imagine Julia Child embracing. I bring up Julia as she did all her recipes using the metric system. She had obtained her culinary education in France, and realized how much easier using metric measurement was, and continued its use when she returned to the US. The recipes were then converted to imperial for her US audiences and in her cookbooks. I’ve watched a lot of Good Eats episodes and in one Alton seems to have indicated he prefers the use of metric measures. Alton, I implore you, consider creating a show called Metric Eats.  You would be doing your country and the world a favor. As for my readers, while you are waiting for Alton, you can download my humble offering of a cookbook here. It is fairly abbreviated, but should give you a decent starting point for exploring cooking with metric. I have made two compromises with it. I have Fahrenheit temperatures in parenthesis next to Celsius, this is of course not consistent with Naughtin’s Laws and is bad practice, but in the US difficult to avoid. Another compromise is that I have placed volume measurements in parenthesis next to the mass values for each recipe. This is to facilitate metric cooking even if one does not own a scale.

Another online option is The Metric Kitchen, my only complaint with this site is its  tolerance of centimeters, but it does discourage them and prefers millimeters. And considering the trespasses in my metric cook book, I have only a marginal leg to stand upon complaining, or criticizing at all.

I have noted that one negative aspect of imperial cooking, which has not been eschewed from metric cooking, and should be. It is a stealth imperial leftover, which has seemingly gone unnoticed, or possibly ignored, but that is the topic of the next blog.

If you liked this essay and wish to support the work of The Metric Maven, please visit his Patreon Page and contribute. Also purchase his books about the metric system:

The first book is titled: Our Crumbling Invisible Infrastructure. It is a succinct set of essays  that explain why the absence of the metric system in the US is detrimental to our personal heath and our economy. These essays are separately available for free on my website,  but the book has them all in one place in print. The book may be purchased from Amazon here.


The second book is titled The Dimensions of the Cosmos. It takes the metric prefixes from yotta to Yocto and uses each metric prefix to describe a metric world. The book has a considerable number of color images to compliment the prose. It has been receiving good reviews. I think would be a great reference for US science teachers. It has a considerable number of scientific factoids and anecdotes that I believe would be of considerable educational use. It is available from Amazon here.


The third book is not of direct importance to metric education. It is called Death By A Thousand Cuts, A Secret History of the Metric System in The United States. This monograph explains how we have been unable to legally deal with weights and measures in the United States from George Washington, to our current day. This book is also available on Amazon here.

American Software vs. Metric or Mormons Making Coffee

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By The Metric Maven

It is my understanding that during the Bejing Olympics the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) sent measuring cups and spoons to China. This was done because the Chinese could cook recipes from anywhere else in the world but not those from the US.  The non-metric units of the US were a complete bafflement to the hosts, and when the Olympics were over, they just threw the cups and teaspoons away seeing them as useless.

I began cooking with metric about three years ago. It took me a while to understand that I needed a scale with a digital readout in grams. I realized that metric recipes generally use mass instead of volume for dry ingredients. The best chefs do this also. The surprising part was that because of the fact that 50 milliliters of water weights 50 grams, I could actually estimate using the mass of many liquids also. After I became used to using the digital scale and it’s tare function, I found cooking in metric vastly easier, quicker, and more enjoyable than it had been in imperial.

My father has been interested in cooking his entire life. He uses a software package to index his recipes. During a recent visit to his home, my father marinaded steaks and served them for supper. I had not tasted steaks made this way since I was a boy, and later asked for the marinade recipe by email. He sent me the recipe in imperial units as I would expect and then said he had included a metric version from the program so I would not have to convert it. Below is a reproduction of the metric recipe:

After I saw this I wrote my father an email, and asked if he had created this metric recipe  as a joke. No, he assured me, it’s how it came out of the recipe program. I was just gobsmacked by the use of fractional values of centiliters, deciliters and milliliters. According to the metric recipe this would make one cup of marinade.

This strange metric usage made me think of a story told to me by a deceased family friend, known as Skeez, about his experiences in World War II. He talked about riding in troop trains across the US when he was in the military. He gushed and gushed about the great food the women would have prepared for them at each rail stop. Word had “gotten around” that the food at all the Utah stops was good—but don’t drink the coffee. Mormons are forbidden from drinking coffee, but when they were catering for the government, and were required to brew it, the coffee was not remotely as good as the food..

In fact, the coffee served by Mormons was so awful, that considerable speculation went into the method used to make it so completely unpalatable. Some argued that they reheated the same giant container of coffee over and over during the week, and just added more as it decreased in volume. Others thought they just re-used the coffee grounds and added new when it didn’t look black enough. For me “Mormons Making Coffee” was a metaphor for people trying to implement something about which they had only a very slight acquaintance or understanding, and no working knowledge. Like an American presiding over a cricket match.

Whoever programmed the recipe software my father owned, had proved to me that he was like a “Mormon Making Coffee,” but more specifically he was an American Using Metric. There could be no certainty how an American might imagine metric should be used in cooking, and as we see, anything could happen. The two hallmarks of the metric system which make it elegant for cooking, is that it can be implemented to whole value (integer) numbers and only a simple set of prefixes need to be used. It was clear that the confused, and nearly incomprehensible, American measurement vernacular had been imposed on the metric recipe. The use of 1 1/8, 2 1/2 and 1 1/4 with metric values was ultimate proof. As the saying goes, there is no crying in baseball, and no fractions in metric. Metric recipes generally use whole numbers and milliliters–only. And certainly not fractions. Generally spices are measured in volume as indicated, but not with fractional numbers. The brown sugar would be measured in grams. Let’s take this simple recipe and write it as I would have expected to see it.

Don’s Soy Sauce Marinade

125 mL LaChoy Soy Sauce
125 mL Orange Juice
30 mL Lemon Juice
12 grams (15 mL) Brown Sugar
30 mL Salad Oil
3 mL Pepper Sauce
1 Clove garlic, crushed
1.25 mL Black Pepper

Combine ingredients. Use to marinate beef, pork, or chicken before grilling or broiling. I usually put it in a Ziploc bag with the marinade for 2 to 4 hours before grilling…..for a little different flavor add 30 mL of Worcestershire sauce.

Yield 300 mL

This is the best I could do with this conversion. You will note that other than the black pepper, I was able to use whole numbers for the rest of the ingredients.

This episode in my life illustrates something I did not appreciate until a few years ago. Although the metric system is much simpler than the, bloated, and uncorrelated set of units used in the US today, metric should still be even simpler. There are metric prefixes that should be eliminated, which I call the prefix cluster around unity. More formally it’s Naughtin’s 4th law. Some prefixes with units, like the centimeter the centiliter, deciliter should be vanquished. The use of prefixes that are spaced by a factor of 1000 seems to work very well, and is about as simple as it gets for metric system implementation. In cooking, the milliliter is probably all you need for volume, the gram for mass, and the millimeter for distances, and that’s it—done!—nothing else to learn!

American Interpretation of using The Metric System in Cooking

With a metric recipe and proper instructions—perhaps even Mormons could successfully make palatable coffee. But not if that metric recipe was created by imperial to metric conversion software, which had been written by American programmers. Without instruction in the metric system from childhood, and its mandatory and efficient adoption in the US, our software designers will probably continue to use metric in an obtuse manner, and continue to create the illusion that the metric system is complicated, when it’s a paragon of simplicity.

Updated 2012-11-10  Fixed quantities in recipe.

If you liked this essay and wish to support the work of The Metric Maven, please visit his Patreon Page and contribute. Also purchase his books about the metric system:

The first book is titled: Our Crumbling Invisible Infrastructure. It is a succinct set of essays  that explain why the absence of the metric system in the US is detrimental to our personal heath and our economy. These essays are separately available for free on my website,  but the book has them all in one place in print. The book may be purchased from Amazon here.


The second book is titled The Dimensions of the Cosmos. It takes the metric prefixes from yotta to Yocto and uses each metric prefix to describe a metric world. The book has a considerable number of color images to compliment the prose. It has been receiving good reviews. I think would be a great reference for US science teachers. It has a considerable number of scientific factoids and anecdotes that I believe would be of considerable educational use. It is available from Amazon here.


The third book is not of direct importance to metric education. It is called Death By A Thousand Cuts, A Secret History of the Metric System in The United States. This monograph explains how we have been unable to legally deal with weights and measures in the United States from George Washington, to our current day. This book is also available on Amazon here.