Converting from US recipe

corblimey

I'm trying to follow a recipe in a US cookbook and I'm having some trouble converting. There's hundreds of resources online for doing this, but they seem slightly conflicting. Anyone here successfully converted a US recipe?

The recipe calls for teaspoon, tablespoon and cup, various volumes. Is a teaspoon still a teaspoon and tablespoon still a tablespoon? The cup appears to be different depending on whether it's wet (c250ml) or dry (c225g, but depends - flour is less, raisins are more). This makes sense, flour is lighter than raisins, as such.

Is it possible to buy american measuring spoons and cups over here (specifically in Cork) or is it easy enough to convert?

bonkey

http://www.recipegoldmine.com/kitchart/kitchart2.html

Magic Monkey

Gram Conversion Calculator - there's a table with some common baking ingredients

Cooking Conversions Calculator - search for ingredients and convert

It's handy to have a set of graduated measuring cups, most kitchen supply shops or homeware shops should stock them, but they're not essential. Neither are the spoons - the UK/Ireland, North America, and New Zealand tablespoon is 15ml (Australia is 20ml), so just use a regular tablespoon and teaspoon for those measurements. Anything that's in cups, find a receptacle that'll hold 250ml to the brim and use that, or convert to grams and weigh it.

corblimey

Magic Monkey wrote: »

Anything that's in cups, find a receptacle that'll hold 250ml to the brim and use that

I have a measuring jug that goes up to half a litre. So if I half fill that, it will work fine? And that will work for dry ingredients aswell?

Tree

brennans on oliver plunkett st have anything you'll never need in the kitchen. you'll also find some regular plastic jugs have listings on the side for flour and sugar

corblimey

Tree wrote: »

brennans on oliver plunkett st have anything you'll never need in the kitchen.

Interesting typo I've always found them expensive and unhelpful in there.

Tree

i find them grand, there's cookware on carey's lane too. not a typo, there's lots of stuff you can get that you dont really need, egg separators etc

Alun

corblimey wrote: »

I have a measuring jug that goes up to half a litre. So if I half fill that, it will work fine? And that will work for dry ingredients aswell?

Yes. 250ml of anything, liquid or solid, is the same volume as 250ml of anything else. They'll have different weights, but that's not the point, as we're talking about volumes here, and the recipe is based on that premise.

I actually find it a handier and more intuitive way of measuring for a lot of recipes, to be honest, and more like what I do when I'm "making up' recipes as I go along, i.e. you judge things in terms of ad-hoc volumetric quantities like "a handful" or "a bunch", not "about 200g" or such-like.

the beer revolu

corblimey wrote: »

Interesting typo I've always found them expensive and unhelpful in there.

They're not cheap but I've always found them extremely helpful!

In fact, I'll report back - I'm returning salt and pepper grinders with a lifetime guarantee there today.
It will be interesting to see how I get on!