Do you have to be so precise when measuring ingredients? After all, what difference does 5g of flour actually make?
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A recent Feast recipe uses three types of flour: two requiring 55g and one 50g. Surely 5g won’t make a difference? US cups are less accurate than British pounds and ounces, and American cooks get by on those. Why not use teaspoons for smaller quantities and round figures otherwise?
Judy, Leamington Spa
“I get Judy’s frustration,” says Feast perfectionist Felicity Cloake. “It often doesn’t make that much difference at all.” In fact, Nigella Lawson writes about this very predicament in her latest book, Cook, Eat, Repeat: “I struggle, as many food writers do, with just how precise to be, and my books reflect how I feel at any given time about what is helpful and what is confining.” Lawson might specify “a large onion”, give an approximate weight or simply call for “an onion”. “The truth is, the weight of an onion, or the size of it, is not always critical.” However, as Cloake points out, “Yotam Ottolenghi says that if one of his recipes stipulates an eighth of a teaspoon of ginger, that’s because it has been tested with that – and with more and less, too – and that’s what works.”
