August 1, 2022 - 5:44pm
Help with units for a British recipe?
I'm looking for help interpreting the units in this recipe. My question centers on the interpretation of the dreaded oz which could be the volume ounce or the weight ounce.
Here is the recipe transcribed into a table with my guesses for the units.
Any help interpreting these will be appreciated and are there any guidelines for interpreting these?
| Dough | Unit Guess | |
| Milk | 7 oz | volume |
| Eggs | 2 medium | |
| Bread flour | 1 lb 5 oz | weight |
| Yeast | 1 oz | ? |
| Sugar | 2 oz | ? |
| Salt | 2 tsp | volume |
| Butter (unsalted) | 7 oz | ? |
| Filling | ||
| Butter (unsalted) | 5.5 oz | ? |
| brown sugar | 9 oz | ? |
| cinnamon | 2 tsp | volume |
| Egg glaze | ||
| egg | 1 medium | |
| Milk | 1 oz | volume |
| Sugar glaze | ||
| Sugar | 3.5 oz | ? |
| Water | 3.5 oz | ? |
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Volume oz is a fluid oz or fl oz.
I see lbs and oz. Not fl oz. A fluid oz (volume) will always be expressed as fl oz.
weight
A recipe will be consistent! It won't change from fl oz to oz in the same recipe unless specified. Stick to weight and convert.
A tsp is a tsp. Sometimes they'll throw in teaspoons for things like salt. Just easier I guess.
Gary, these are good questions! Please watch the video. You will see that all fluids are weighed, as they should be (in professional baking), there is no marks for fl.oz and parts of fl.oz on the giant plastic cup that Bertinet uses to weigh milk and water for this recipe.
I do not know how much his medium size eggs and a tsp of salt weigh though. Maybe it is not so important.
Here
https://www.egginfo.co.uk/egg-facts-and-figures/industry-information/egg-sizes
it says that UK medium eggs can weigh as little as 53g and as much as 63g. A 20% difference! Again, I do not know if it is with or without shells.
Also, the UK, a teaspoon is generally equal to about 5.9 milliliters. This is different from a tsp in the US or the rest of the world (5ml) - another 20% difference.
The other thing is to convert it to bakers formula flour being 100%
1lb 5 ozs = 21ozs - 100%
1% will be 0.21ozs
flour 21oz 100%
milk 7oz 33.3%
eggs i wasnt able to weigh one to get a reading but you get the drift whatever the weight equate to the formula
yeast 1oz 4.76%
sugar 2oz 9.52%
salt ( i measured physically t spoon measured at 0.25oz 2 would be 0.5oz
0.5oz 2.38%
butter 7oz 33.3%
Once you have the formula expressed as bakers percentages you can easily then size your amount of dough required and everything into grams.
i transferred a lot of my old Tech notes that gave recipes which were given in Avoirdupois which was our system 50 years ago over to decimal .: a system of weights based on a pound of 16 ounces and an ounce of 437.5 grains (28.350 grams) and in general use in the United States except for precious metals, gems, and drugs.
When ever i come up against an interesting recipe with a measure such as T spoon or desert spoon i usually grab my jewelers scales and the stated implement and do a physical measure
Regards Derek.
The only one of your questionable items I would consider a volume is the water in the sugar glaze. I would definitely use a fluid oz. for that.
Of course, for pure water, it makes no difference at all.
Thanks!