Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Liquids can be accurately measured by weight. The converse is not true -- powders cannot be accurately measured by volume. 2 tsp of kosher salt contains the same amount of salt as 1 tsp of fine salt. And every brand is slightly different. The only way to accurately know if you're using the same amount of salt as the recipe developer is if the measurement is by weight.

View on HN

Then there's the people who write recipes telling you to chop 1 cup of a vegetable, or "X medium-sized Ys". I never understood the aversion some people have to weighing things.

They are eyeballing everything, then have to make a recipe out of it. The recipe didn't include all of the "fixing" of the spice/salt balance they do during cooking.

Weight also opens up question. Is that pre or post preparing? Like removing parts or skins and so on?

That’s interesting. I’ve never once thought of weighing (or measuring by volume) something before chopping it up. Maybe I’m just not thinking of the right ingredient?

For me, weight solves one of the biggest issues which is “large potato” or “large onion”, WTF is “large”?

> 2 tsp of kosher salt contains the same amount of salt as 1 tsp of fine salt.

The article makes a similar point about unrefined brown sugar and caster sugar, but something doesn't sit right with me for that. Shouldn't the packing densities of sugar/salt crystals, and therefore the mass densities, be the same at different scales? So unless the volume you're measuring is within an order of magnitude of the size of the objects being measured, where edge effects become significant, shouldn't they contain about the same amount?

(Even the grains of coarse salt shouldn't be significantly more than 1/10 of the width of a teaspoon, no?)

I see what you mean but that only works in the assumption of crystals being the same shape and point size probability distribution. Which is a reasonable assumption for crystals but real materials are derived by grinding, so you can easily have a wider distribution of shapes (rounder) and sizes (small particles filling the gaps between larger ones).

Good point but this only holds if the sugar/salt particles always have identical geometry and are just varying in scale; I think that assumption is fundamentally flawed.

No, because they have a different internal crystal structure with more space. The kosher salt is, to use a vague term, more fluffy. There's a photograph in this Cooks illustrated article, if you go to the end of it and click read more: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/taste_tests/2109-kosher-...

The article also points out that the salt structure differs not just between table salt and kosher salt, but between kosher salt manufacturers depending on the process they used to make it. Weight wins.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com