Why Milk Street Uses Metric Weights Only in Baking Recipes

Question

Hi Milk Street team - are you doing some kind of experiment with recipe writing? Your use of metric vs non for both dry and wet ingredients seems to be all over the place, even within a single recipe. Why not consistently just show both with one in parentheses?  I find myself more and more taking your English measurement and pouring it into a bowl or cup on my scale and annotating the book/magazine, esp. for baking. It would also be helpful for dough recipes to put the Kitchen-Aid speed in parens when saying things like ‘ low or medium low’. KA 2/3/4 would be helpful (of course if KA isn’t on-board with the reference or another sponsor has an issue, I guess you can’t. ). Thanks!

Lynn Clark · Accepted Answer

Hi Amy - I spoke with our Recipe Editor, Dawn Yanagihara, and she asked me to pass this along:
Thank you for your note. We’re always trying to improve our recipe style to make our recipes easier to follow, and we admit that in the early days of Milk Street we may not have been very consistent about metric weights and volume measurements. Just to be clear, we give metric weights along with volume measurements in only baking recipes because weights are more precise and help ensure success in recipes that are sensitive to variance in ingredient amounts; sweet recipes that do not involve baking use only volume measurements. Our kitchen uses metric weights when developing baking recipes but also tests with volume measurements to ensure good outcomes either way.
 As for your suggestion about specifying speeds on KitchenAid mixers—we try as much as possible to not be brand-specific when it comes to kitchen equipment. We hope that regardless of the brand of appliance, cookware, bakeware or utensil, our recipes turn out so well that you want to make them again and again.
 Happy Baking and Cooking!
Dawn

Why Milk Street Uses Metric Weights Only in Baking Recipes

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