This is one of two pages about quantities in cooking. It describes the relationships
between the “medium onion” and what it really means in practice, and also relationships
between various forms of the same items. The other page describes problems of weights and measures.
A clove of garlic
Typical recipes use vague formulations like “a clove of garlic”. Which of these is the
standard clove?
Clearly it's not the big one or the small one, though the small one isn't as small as they
can get (I've seen some weighing as little as 0.6 g, only 2% of the weight of the big one).
But is the one in the middle correct? The average size of a clove of garlic depends on the
locality. There's an answer that is simple, accurate and useless: “it depends on what the
writer of the recipe was thinking”. Divine that and you'll get the results you want.
Alternatively, go by weight.
This is the reason that I specify things in weights. Sometimes this looks overly pedantic,
but the real point is that I'm just recording what I do, especially when I'm experimenting.
If I don't know what I did last time, there's no way to improve on it the next time.
The medium onion
What do you do when you see a recipe asking for “3 medium onions”? Onions vary
in weight as much as garlic: they can weigh between about 20 g and 1 kg. What's the happy
medium?
I don't know, and if I didn't have to read cookbooks so often, I wouldn't care. But here
are some empirically derived weights for things I use, in some cases based on measurements,
in others on guesswork. When I wrote this page, I put the ”medium onion” at 100 g. Now I'm
saying 160 g, simply because that's what my onions weigh on average. I have no idea if
that's typical. If you have any input, positive or negative, I'd like to hear it. Note the
weights of spices: whole spices can't be heaped as much as powder, so a
“tablespoon” of whole spices tends to be about 3 “teaspoons”,
whereas for ground spices the factor is about 4 to 1; yet another reason not to use
volumetric measures. Note also the big differences in weights for different spices.
In some cases, weighing doesn't make sense. A stick of cinnamon weighs between 1.5 g and
2.5 g; if you get a recipe asking for 2 g cinnamon, and your sticks weight 1.5 g, are you
going to take one and a third? Probably not. In this case, where the sizes are pretty
uniform and the exact quantity not very important, traditional measures are good enough.
| Object |
Average weight |
“Teaspoon” weight |
“Tablespoon” weight |
| Medium onion |
160g |
| Garlic clove |
6 g |
| Ginger, per centimetre |
7 g |
| Cinnamon, stick |
2 g |
| cashews, whole |
|
|
15 g |
| almonds, whole |
|
|
15 g |
| Coriander seed |
|
2.5g |
8.5g |
| Pepper, whole |
|
6g |
25g |
| Cumminseed, whole |
|
5g |
20g |
| Turmeric powder |
|
6g |
24g |
| Fennel seeds |
|
3g |
9g |
Rehydration
A number of foodstuffs are available either dried or fresh, such as mushrooms and chiles.
I'm starting a list here of the relative weights. Think of the values as factors or
weights.
| Food |
|
Dry weight |
|
Rehydrated |
|
Cooked |
| Oyster mushroom |
|
1 |
|
3 |
| White beans |
|
1 |
|
2.2 |
|
2.8 |
| Chick peas |
|
1 |
|
2.2 |
|
2.5 |
| Noodles |
|
1 |
|
2.5? |
Boning meat
Many cuts of meat are available either with skin and bone or without. Apart from the effort
of removing the bone and skin, there's the question of the relative weights; that also makes
a difference with the cost. Here's a work in progress on the subject, which also shows how
difficult this is to guess:
|
|
|
|
Weight before |
|
Weight after |
| Date |
|
Cut |
|
boning |
|
boning |
|
Yield |
| 11 November 2006 |
|
Lamb leg |
|
1.8 kg |
|
1 kg |
|
56% |
| 24 August 2013 |
|
Lamb leg |
|
1.197 kg |
|
888 g |
|
74% |
|
Removing fat
Legs of lamb are available without bones, but that doesn't mean that they're all meat.
Here's a comparison that I've started:
|
|
|
|
|
|
Weight before |
|
Weight after |
| Date |
|
Source |
|
Cut |
|
boning |
|
boning |
|
Yield |
| 8 April 2017 |
|
Davis |
|
Lamb leg roast, with net |
|
1.28 kg |
|
0.94 kg |
|
78% |
US volumetric measures
In the USA they love to use vague volumetric measures for solids, like “2 tablespoons
flour”. That makes no sense at all, even if the measures had an intrinsic meaning. Here
I'm adding conversions that may come in handy.
| Unit |
|
Substance |
|
Weight |
| 1 cup |
|
margarine |
|
227 g |
