American kitchens: Why cups, and not weight? Where's the kitchen scale?

maki — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:21:58 +0200

(This post has nothing to do with Frugal Month. It does have something to do with my recent obsessing about kitchens though.)

I like the cooking videos on the New York Times web site quite a lot. I especially like the ones from Apartment 4B, starring Jill Santopietro in her tiny kitchen. She’s adorable, and the recipes look workable.

But as I was watching this latest video, where she makes a pizza in that tiny kitchen, I was shaking my head in disbelief many times.

Well first, go and watch it if you haven’t yet. I’ll wait.

(Waits.)

Seen it? Ok, this is what’s bothering me.

She recommends ‘fluffing the flour up’, before scooping-and-leveling it out with your standard measuring cup.
She then makes the pizza dough with a gigantic Kitchen Aid mixer.

So basically, this girl who has a kitchen barely big enough to turn around in, has a giant mixer, yet has no kitchen scale. I guess there’s some sort of rationale behind the fluffing up the flour step, but - isn’t it more important to have an accurate amount of flour in the dough? What if you fluff more one day than you do another, and your dough doesn’t turn out the same?

Which leads to a question that’s been bugging me for a long time. Why don’t American cooks like to weigh their ingredients?

Now, while I did spend a number of years living in the States, I essentially learned the fundamentals of cooking in Japan, with some England and Switzerland thrown in there. (This is mainly because when I lived in New York, I either was too broke to cook much beyond the basics, or (later on) I had a crazy 100 hour a week type of job which left me little time or energy for cooking. If I’d had a food blog back then, it would have been about the wonders of NYC takeout.) Anyway, the point is, I learned to cook with this basic understanding: For complete accuracy, you need to weigh out ingredients, especially for baking.

But every single American cookbook or recipe site has measurements in cups and spoons. This makes sense for liquid ingredients. And most recipes are forgiving enough so that a few grams or ounces more or less don’t make a big difference. But if you have a complicated recipe for cake or something that you want to be able to replicate reliably, in my mind cups don’t really make a lot of sense. Commercial recipes, which must be reliably reproduceable, don’t do cup measurements.

I do write out most of the the recipes on my sites with cup measurements (as well as ounces and grams) for U.S. readers. I have memorized archaic U.S. only measurements like a stick of butter = 8 Tbs. of butter = 4 ounces of butter. Still, I don’t really see that it’s totally logical.

A fairly fancy kitchen scale doesn’t cost more than $50 or so, $100 at most. That humongous KitchenAid in the video probably cost what - $400? $500? More? I did not have a very big kitchen in the house we just sold, so I couldn’t find the space for a mixer, but I only needed a tiny narrow shelf to house a good kitchen scale.

So, my U.S. based readers - what’s your opinion? Why do Americans love cup measurements, and not weight measurements? Do you have a kitchen scale? Do you use it? (Do you have a KitchenAid or other big gadget, and bake often, but no scale?)

(Disclaimer: I have nothing at all against KitchenAid. My sister has one, it’s beautiful. I admire it when I visit her.)

(Oh, and one more thing that bugged me about that video, though it’s not unique in this: Carmelize onions?? Make them smell like Carmel, California? Isn’t it caramelize??)

Kitchens out of the past

maki — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:54:35 +0100

I know, I haven’t updated here in some time. Why, you may ask, am I updating Just Bento but not Just Hungry? Well, I had actually stockpiled up some bento posts before the Big Move and Nomadic Period commenced, and also arranged for some guest posts. My plan was for Just Bento to go on semi-autopilot (which it has), and for Just Hungry to be updated with food-related things about my travels. But it hasn’t quite worked out the way I wanted to on that front, due to getting really sick the first week on the road, then just being very busy.

But anyway, here I am. As I wrote before, I have now moved out of the house in the suburbs of Zürich where I had lived off and on for some years, and I’m now roaming around looking for the new place to call home. At this point we are about 60-70% leaning towards ‘somewhere in France’ (to be determined where). So last week, we started looking at some houses for real.

Now, we are mainly looking at houses that need some work done to them, since we figure that we’ll get more for our money that way. Besides, we never totally like someone else’s taste in decor anyway, so we might as well start off with an empty shell or something.

Of the houses we’ve seen so far, the kitchens in two of them were particulary memorable. (Actually, most of the other houses didn’t even have kitchens.) First up is this one, in a 1920s house in a town in the Vaucluse (a region in the northern part of Provence).

I’m sure the range is not from the 1920s - I’m guessing it’s circa 1970s. It’s tiny, and fitted into the beautiful, huge fireplace. My first thought was, wow what a waste to stick a cooker in that fireplace! But I guess it makes sense, for ventilation purposes? (No, I don’t get the birdcage either. It was sure pretty though.)

Here’s a closeup look. The chocolate brown cabinet thing is the tiny refrigerator - the other appliances (not shown, in a wall closet) matched. That fireplace…so gorgeous.

The other side of the fireplace. I am not sure if those cabinets were used as worktops. Maybe the occupant used a kitchen table for working. In any case, it’s a kitchen that is so different from our modern concept of what a kitchen should have. But despite the lack of ‘worktop space’, I am sure that the meals produced there were delicious regardless.

Now here is another kitchen that left a deep impression on me. It’s circa 1970s, un-renovated I think, and in perfect condition. It’s a symphony of browns!

Another view. The stainless steel handles, the mustardly-yellow tiles…the teak! Nothing says ’70s like teak. And mustard-yellow.

I’m pretty sure the appliances are not circa 1970s, but the plastic coffee pot does fit very well in here.

Their vacuum cleaner seems to be from the same era as the kitchen. I wonder if it works?

And the pantry down the hallway. It too was spotless. I do love the concept of a separate pantry.

It’s really fascinating to see for real how fashions in kitchens really do change so much over the years. Nowadays I guess we want lots and lots of working space, tons of cabinets, granite worktops, neutral colors, chrome and sleekness. I’m not sure we’d buy either of these houses, since it almost seems a shame to rip out the period kitchens (and other reasons). But it was so interesting, even educational, to have seen them in any case. We’re going to see more houses in the upcoming weeks, and more kitchens. I can’t wait.