American recipes are annoying

Just put 1/3 football fields of flour and 1/12 Empire State Buildings of salt and exactly 2 1/4 tsp of yeast (no more, no less)
- Don't forget the 1/137th of a blue whale of water.

Wait till you learn that pre metric Canadian measurements use the same terms but are different.

What do you guys call bell peppers?

Oh my god another country calls things different words! How outrageous of them!
- The idea of spices is a foreign concept to them
- That doesn't stop it from being annoying. I'm not blaming American recipes.
  
  That's exactly what the title of your post is doing lol

The only thing measured in grams in the US is cannabis.
- And bullets are measured in millimeters
  
  It depends. Ones designed in other countries, yes. But if the bullet was designed in the USA, it is measured in inches like .45 ACP or .223 Remington
- I think most medicines are measured in grams over there too (500mg for acetaminophen / paracetamol). And Cocaine.
  
  Weed is measured in both!
- Medicine is in metric except for the entire bottle of liquid medicine. How many 30ml doses are in an 8oz bottle of nyquil?
  We have 2 liter bottles of coke, but also 16oz if you just want to drink now.
  Don't ask about cooking measurements we don't get it either and everyone who questions it turns into flour within the week.
  
  Britain is weird too.
  
  Liquor sizes: 375ml 750ml 1.75L Wine: 750ml 1.5L
  Anyone who asks for a pint or a half gallon at a liquor store is just wrong (unless they want beer)
- It's actually sold in ounces. And grammes. My local head shop does that.
- In Russia, cannabis was measured in "matchboxes" (around the amount that gets in to a small ziploc) and "glasses", where glass is a 220ml glass Russians drink vodka from in the movies.
  So it goes full circle when you start measuring cannabis in glasses, sounds really American!
  
  Yeah but how many hands is your horse?

Cilantro is mui fomoso.🎺🪇🎶

I just want to know if you are cooking using European recipes are you constantly weighing every ingredient out into a separate dish or just get used to estimating "This much butter is about X grams"? I'd go nuts if I had to sit there carefully weighing out everything instead of just going "1 tablespoon, done".
- You literally put a bowl on scale and add to it the semi correct number of grams. Or alternatively put the package on scale and remove until scale shows correct number of negative grams.
  Same with liquids since 1g = 1ml roughly. It couldn't be easier. Also some packages eg butter have gram measuring lines written on them. Most of the time you don't even use it unless it's baking or fermenting or anything else where its hard to do it by feel.
- This is how we tell how much butter we get
  
  What is funny is Americans are doing the same thing to measure their butter, cutting off chunks according to a ruler on the package, it is just marked in volume on the side of the package instead of weight:
- Nobody* is complaining about table spoons or tea spoons but cups are a stupid unit of measurement because cups come in all kinds of sizes
  For butter specifically: a block of butter is usually 250g in Germany so if the recipe says 50g butter I'd eyeball 20% of it
  *Maybe some are
- Usually, you put the bowl on the scale and throw everything in and tara inbetween each ingredient.
  
  Yep. Most of my recipes are at most two bowls and typically just one.
- Why would you have to carefully weigh anything? Butter doesn't really need to be measured, just eyeball it and go from there.
  In the U.S., butter is sold in sticks of half cup/4 fl oz/8 tbsp by volume, but it's basically fine to think of them as little 100g portions too. Tolerances for cooking are pretty high, and people aren't that precise at cutting off whatever portion they need.
  If you're baking, there needs to be a bit more precision, but that precision matters whether you're measuring by weight or volume, or imperial versus metric. Plus, a lot of baking can be done by feel when you have experience anyway.
  Just go and do. Cooking is fun. Some people like to measure, and some don't. It all works, though, as all the different styles still converge on the principle that making tasty food for yourself and loved ones is a pretty universal experience.
- Tablespons are used to measure stuff here. Butter has a little diagram/ruler at the side that shows how much the piece you're cutting off weighs.
- I have different sized spoons at home and I never know which is the correct one for the recipe. On top of that I don't know if the spoon should be leveled off or if it should be with a heap on top.
  But if the recipe says 15g, I can put the bowl on a scale and put the stuff into it until the scale says 15g.

What is a cup? What is a cup for liquid? What is a cup for flour?
Ffs.
- Cups are ~235ml regardless of wet or dry. They are one of the sane-er measurements
  You may be confusing your frustration with the ounce, which may refer to:
  avoirdupois ounce, used for mass in most cases
  Troy ounce, used for mass when referring to precious metals
  the imperial fluid ounce, used for volume sometimes
  the us customary fluid ounce, used for volume sometimes
  the us food labelling ounce, used for volume like the customary fluid ounce, but rounded to a nice number of milliliters
  
  In metric, dry ingredients are measured by weight, so how much a cup is changes for each ingredient.
  
  You might be right, I think I got annoyed with fluid ounces in cups in a recipe with flour also measured in cups, and some other random third measurement.
  
  Also an ounce of common sense!
- Oh, and is it an american cup or an english cup? Yes, they're both different.
  
  If you are complaining about American recipes, then it should be self evident what version of cup it is.
- What is a foot? Whose foot?!
  Why is it a pound 💷? It weighs nowhere near a pound?!
  
  One pound sterling (the full name of £) was once worth one pound of sterling silver.
- No word of a lie, one of my university roommates came up to be the first week we were living together with a drinking glass in his hand and asked me if it was what a recipe meant when it said "add a cup of water."
- What's fun is halving a recipe with a quarter, 3/4, or third...

please don't use google. There are plenty of good search engines that aren't evil.
- Not my picture.

I get the rocket and coriander ones, also the units of measurement but what do you call a bell pepper? (Also how do you differentiate dried cilantro seed powder from the fresh herb? I like to know if I should be using a spice or the fresh plant)
- In the uk we call a bell pepper a pepper. Red/green/orange/yellow prefixed as required.
- what do you call a bell pepper
  Paprika.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_pepper#Nomenclature
  It's very well documented.
- what do you call a bell pepper
  Capsicum. Or red/green/yellow pepper.
  
  Red/yellow/green pepper is generally valid anywhere bell pepper is. But bell lets you choose your favorite!
- Rocket????
  
  Arugula is known as Rocket in most of the rest of the world.
- In Bluey they call them capsicums. Which is a fun word to say, we do that now.
- Cilantro is the herb, coriander (seed) is the spice/dried powder. Often you can tell by what you are making and how it's being used/added, but typically they are differentiated as above in American recipes.
  Genuinely confused as well about the pepper, a bell pepper is a pretty universal name for it as far as I knew. Folks also refer to them as green/yellow/red peppers here, or sweet peppers occasionally (usually when used in Italian food), but bell pepper is the generic name.
  
  Cilantro is the herb, coriander (seed) is the spice/dried powder.
  That's very much an NA thing. US mostly, but also sometimes in Canada. Coriander is name of the plant.
  
  In a whole load of languages, you call bell pepper paprika. If you just say "pepper" to me, that's usually black pepper in particular. If you say chilli pepper, that means a spicy variant of the capsicum genus. A non-spicy capsicum genus member? That's a paprika.
  There's no name to put in front of "pepper" in my language that would make it refer to paprika.
  That said, in English, it's apparently almost always something something pepper. Or capsicum. Or apparently according to Wikipedia, in the American mid-west, mango???????
  
  a bell pepper is a pretty universal name for it as far as I knew
  I thought every language just called it paprika. TIL English doesn't
- I call it a bell pepper. Paprika is a spice.
  UK and Ireland paprika is pointless and flavourless.
- Just call it a pepper, like "red pepper" or "black pepper" for the seasoning.
  
  There are other kinds of peppers that are those colors, that's why we use "bell pepper" to refer to the ones that look like bells
  If you went to my garden and used my red peppers (serrano) as a replacement for red bell pepper then you're going to end up with a much spicier dish

Truth.

TIL other countries are too dumb for measuring cups...lmfao
- Opinion discarded due to coming from a country that elected a felon dictator and an immigrant african nazi to stage a coup. After they failed at a coup during their last term.
  
  ☹️
  
  Yeah, and people that dumb figured out measuring cups.
- Finding something annoying is not the same as not understanding it. Don't worry, at some point you will figure out the difference, it's actually not that hard, you can do it.
- What do you mean?
- Grew up with cups, now use weights for nearly everything and it's so much better, easier, and uses fewer dishes to wash.

You can ask the AI chat bot to do the conversion for you.
- If we made a list of things you can do, that would be on the list.
- nothing like using gallons of water to generate a paragraph that incorrectly describes the conversion
  
  It's weird to me how it manages to fuck up that kind of simple cut and dry answer thing.
- Because that surely will be right every time. /s
  Many people aren't dumb enough to go ask a shitty AI about everything.
  
  Unit conversions are something that AI chatbots can be programmed to do normally, by simply providing them with a unit converter alongside their language model

... And now you have me thinking about whether siccing AI on automatic recipe translation is a good or bad idea ...
- Since LLMs suck at maths, it would probably result in me putting 2kg of sugar into a recipe calling for 3 cups.
  
  Aeons ago Cracked did a skit called "Cooking with Babelfish." First of all remember when it was called Babelfish? Remember Alta Vista?
  The one thing you could count on with one of those...feels wrong to call it 'old'...translation algorithm programs was it would get the quantities right. It might tell you to put in 5 kilograms of earth apples, because the French don't have a word for "potato" and Babelfish didn't know that, but the recipe did indeed call for 5 kilograms of them.
  
  LLMs are getting better at math btw.
  There are also techniques considered to have the LLM call functions like a calculator to address arithmetic.