The pain of international recipes
Today I will not be baking. Or cooking.
I'm writing about the PAIN.
I have a friend who used to live in the UK. She brought me butter fudge a few times as I loved it and we don't have anything as good here in Finland.
Now as she moved back to Finland for good, I have no source of easy butter fudge shipments. But luckily, I'm a somewhat good chef and baker.
Why not make butter fudge of my own?
I started to google for recipes and I quickly noticed how difficult this is. Butter fudge seems to be a specialty of UK (and maybe US?), but they are using very different standards than we do.
When I'm reading a recipe, I'm expecting to see milliliters, deciliters, grams etc. but instead the recipes I found were filled with cups, pints, gallons, feet, sticks and magical gnome hair.
Just see this below:
1 stick butter
3 cups granulated sugar
7 ounces evaporated milk
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1/2 cup powdered sugar
What the hell is a stick of butter?
We have butter in few different size packages and none of them looks like a stick.
Or cups. I have plenty of cups at home, but what will I use?
Will I fill my wife's bra with granulated sugar and hope her cup size is correct?
Ounce. According to Wikipedia there are at least 11 different types of ounces.
And back to the cups. Half a cup, I can't even fill the cup to be full but I have to assume something is half a cup.
How easy would it be to have "100 grams" and "50 grams" of something instead of one doodeli-poodel and half of doodeli-poodel.
FFS.
Honey give me five circular feet of carrot peels for my butter fudgeImage from Pixabay
Then when I read the recipe itself:
"Once the temperature reaches 238 degrees, remove the candy from the heat and let it cool to room temperature."
Are they using Celsius or some other temperature unit?
I might burn the damn stuff instead of getting it ready.
However, not everything is bad. I saw this text on the recipe:
The butter should smell toasty and have a beautiful nutty color.
Trying to find the perfect butter fudge recipe which I can understand is driving me nutty and toasty.
Let's get back on the topic when I have managed to find a good recipe and make some fudge.
I have faced this problem too with several recipes. :/
This might be the reason why Finns are always late for all the food trends - we can't understand the recipe!
Are we late with food trends too? Jeez... All movies, series, fashion, interior design and now also food?..
I totally feel your pain.
All of the foreign recipe measurements make cooking look like a maths test instead of making food.
''Cup'' is what really confuses me. I usually drink my non-alcoholic beverages from cup-like objects, but if I google a ''cup'', the cup is smaller than what I drink from. Perhaps it's a ''mug''.
Well then, I don't have any cups, because mugs fit way more liquid; why would I drink my beverages from something smaller than I'm used to? Then again, if I only have mugs and not cups, how do I know I've used the right amount of whatever?
Which theorems and formulas do I have to use when I want to make a simple-ass meal of one-pot pasta carbonara when the recipe uses cups, ounces and pounds? I don't want to pound my macaroni! I just want to prepare my dinner!
I'm glad you know my pain!
I actually have some kind of measurement guide to translate from imperial units to metrics. I noticed there is at least three different sizes of pint, depending if it's in the US, UK or being a regular pint or a dry pint.
I will start creating recipes with my own units, like guggies and pooh-vaders.
I actually went out and bought cup size measuring tools. I’ll say this, they aren’t anywhere near the size of what I’d be having a brew in.
Amen, cups are way too little for having any drink.
Especially if you're drinking a cup of butter.
We do have some tools for measuring cups too, but most usually the ones most sold are not for cups but for liter, deciliter or smaller amounts. I prefer weighting everything as you can get the amounts precisely.
The size of a cup is really disappointing when using it in a recipe.
Your butter doesn't come in sticks? How does it arrive? In tubs? baggies? messenger bags?
Our butter is pooped out by the butter-cow, which has been bred to have a perfectly square anus, and then trained and disciplined until it has the self control to pinch off perfect four ounce cubes into the paws of a waiting origami-wax-papering gibbon.
Clearly you Finns have a bit to learn about dairy.
Nope. Our cows have huge rectums and they give butter in this form:
It's typically 500g a piece, so you can imagine the work they are going through.
I like big butters and I can not lie
You dairy farmers can't deny
When a heifer pushes hard for a kilogram of lard
Leaves a square thing on the shelf
You get hungry...
INSPIRATION
LOL !!! Excellent post! It made me laugh in quantity ... of course, you are a chef and for you this type of recipe with those measures, they are crazy.
I, for example, have a glass (or cup) with that type of measurements and it provides them exactly as I need it (of course, I am not a chef) and the butter bars, are available in supermarkets and is relatively, a standart size .
But the truth is that the best way to learn and do the right thing is to call things by their name. You are right about that.
Thanks for making me laugh!!!!
source of the image(
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source of the image
I'm glad you enjoyed my post :)
And being less silly and more serious, I actually sometimes create my own versions of recipes. If I'm translating 1:1 the recipe from gallons and butter sticks to "regular units", what will I have? A recipe with 113 grams of butter?
This is why I'm trying to change the recipes a bit so I can get reasonable amounts, like 100g of sugar. Then I'll just pretend it's just like it's meant to be :)
Excellent attitude! keep going, while I enjoy your great sense of humor!!!
Great blog post! Dam, well my friend @finfood Just made his first post. Hopefully u can check that blog, making traditional finnish dishes. Cool stuff. Upvoted and followed :)
Hey thanks :)
Are you Finnish yourself, is your friend Finnish or is he/she just posting about Finnish food?
I would write any mention of 'cup' with 250ml (so half a cup is 125ml). And replace 'a stick of butter' with '100g of butter'. Then replace '7 ounces' with '200g' and save the recipe in metric, never looking at imperial measurements again. I say this as someone that grew up in the UK. It is only the old Brexit brigade and Americans that still use that nonsense.
That could work, but I'm not sure if I could do that. It's more likely I would create an excel sheet with the exact amounts and then try to find a recipe size which gives somewhat reasonable amount for all the ingredients. I'm trying to avoid too big rounding up or down, as I'm worried it might harm the end result.
However, how would I know, if I have never tasted anything with the real recipe? :)
In my experience recipes are approximate anyway, and the exact amounts will vary according to difference in ingredients, brand of butter, individual ovens, etc. Amounts given are guidelines, and you have to experiment to refine them into something that works best for your own conditions.
You're completely right. Even something as simple as flour affects baking a lot - older flour is typically drier than fresher flour is. This can lead into very different results in the end if you just try to follow everything using exact amounts.
So true it hurts! Had the same problem too many times.
But you nailed it and made me laugh as crazy :D
Cheers to that breaded man!
Thanks, I'm happy you can bear this with me.
This is the main reason I never ever make anything which is from outside of Finland.
Ahhahah I can feel your pain! Linking this to @escapist, she will feel the pain also!
I knew you could understand this.
However, if I would just replace a stick of butter with a whole piece of butter (500g) I could get some really delicious fudge.
Everything tastes better with more butter, what could go wrong!?
I loved this ! Feel ya, totally. And like this isn't enough then comes cake mix flour, self-rising flour and all that. Is it just damn too hard use yeast and flour separately??
I know! I should start my own crazy baking ingredient brand and come up with "carrot flour" etc. and start making cookbooks for recipes using those.
Then people would freak out with all the ingredients they can't find anywhere else than in specific locations.
Hahah! You should! Carrotcake out of carrot flour!