Measuring the Unmeasurable
It’s inevitable. There you are with a tub of vegan margarine from the fridge in one hand and a recipe requesting a portion of it in terms of volume in the other hand. Do you attempt to pack your ingredient into the measuring cup? Do you melt the ingredient (if meltable) and then use the volumetric method?
Friends, there is a better way. It’s called a metric kitchen scale. You can pick up a really nice digital model from the nearest big box corporate store that sells kitchenware for about forty dollars. You can get a crappy one for significantly less than that. I assure you that the metric part is key, however, so don’t just get a scale with Imperial measure in ounces.
The real trick lies in watching the government-mandated serving size listing on the package. In most cases, even when it gives the Imperial serving size in terms of volume (teaspoons, cups, etc.), the metric listing is nearly always in terms of grams unless you’re dealing with a liquid measure. Just calculate how many grams you need and measure out that amount using your handy scale.
As an example, my brown sugar lists a serving size as 1 teaspoon or 4 grams. A quick answer from Google tells me that there are 48 (American) teaspoons in an (American) cup. Seeing that I need 3/4 of a cup of brown sugar for a recipe, I break out the calculator and determine that I need about 144 g of brown sugar.
3/4 of 1 cup = 36 teaspoons
36 teaspoons * 4 g/teaspoon = 144 g
The really fun part is that the mass of the food in question doesn’t vary with temperature. 144 g of melted margarine is the same amount of margarine as 144 g of refrigerated margarine. You get consistent results with less variation.
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