Grams versus Ounces

The other day I answered a readers question about tomato soup baked with pastry on top. In the recipe, Chef Jenni uses grams rather than ounces and I wondered why. She is a professional baker who attended a the Orlando Culinary Academy’s Le Cordon Bleu cooking program so why was she using the metric system for measuring out ingredients? So I asked her if she always used this system and if so why. Here is how she replied,

“No, I don’t always work in the metric system, although it is really the most exacting measuring system around as far as baking is concerned. I do try to convert standard recipes as much as possible. This is easy with our Detecto Scale. You can change the unit from grams to ounces to pounds and ounces to pounds and 1/10ths of pounds. Very convenient.

One ounce equals roughly 28 grams. I think it’s much more accurate to call for 14 grams of an ingredient than 1/2 ounce, mainly because your margin for error is greater–your scale might only measure ounces to the nearest 1/4 ounce, leaving about a + or - 3.5 grams error in measuring.

It’s mainly a personal preference, but it does help with standardization and consistency in the final product. Honestly, I prefer weights (either metric or standard) over cups any day.

In culinary school, we always weighed, mostly using a balance scale and then getting digital scales later in the program. Most of the recipes were written in pounds and ounces. The metric conversions were woefully inaccurate, and when I was there, they were talking about updating all the metric measurements.

We also learned that there are three liquids you can measure or weigh (a pint is a pound the world around) accurately: water, whole milk and whole eggs. Most other liquids will vary by a few grams or fractions of ounces either side of that pint=pound standard depending on the density.”

Cooking Conversions

By the way, I have a page on my web site called Cooking Conversions that has two easy to use converters. You can change ounces to cups, teaspoon to tablespoon and more with the first one and just about any conversion with the second. Give it a try.

Cooking Apron for Those Senior Moment

And don’t forget to check out my recently revised Senior Moments Cooking Apron for those times when you can’t remember how many teaspoons in an ounce or cups in a quart. It also has RG’s suggested internal temperatures for cooking beef, pork, lamb, veal & chicken. No more running to your cookbook to look up what the temperature should be for rare, medium rare, medium and medium well done.

You can purchase one for yourself or friends at CafePress.com. They make great gifts too!

Recently I received an email from Annelie B. asking, “I was out for dinner - we had tomato soup baked with pastry on top - how do I do that? ”

So I asked my friend Chef Jennifer Field what she would do and her reply is below. I thought it was interesting that she gave the ingredients to me in grams and not ounces. I asked Chef Jenni about this and will offer you her response in an upcoming blog. I have included the conversions to exact measurements but I would round them off if I were making this but we will learn more about that in Chef Jenni’s response.

“Spooning down through a pastry crust to get to the tomato soup underneath–sounds like a winner! And easy to do at home, as well. You can either make a savory pie crust yourself….

Ingredients

420 g (14.82 oz.) all purpose flour
10 g (0.35 oz.) salt
200 g (7.05oz.) butter
4 oz. cold water.

How to Make a Pastry Crust For Tomato Soup

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Mix flour and salt in a large bowl. Cut in butter with your fingers until the flour is very mealy and you can’t see individual pieces of butter. Do this quickly–you want to keep things cold so you don’t end up making paste.

Put 2-3 ice cubes in your water, then drizzle in about 1 oz. of water at a time. In between drizzles, toss the flour with the water to evenly distribute it. When you get about 3 1/2 oz. of water incorporated, test it by squeezing a bit of the dough together (it won’t look like dough until you squeeze it). If it’s not staying together, add the rest of the water. If it is staying together, resist the urge to add more water and compress the dough into a disc. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Roll between two sheets of parchment to about 1/8 - 1/4 inch thick. Cut to fit over your soup crock, and press the edges down around the crock with hot soup in it. Brush with 1 egg beaten with 2 teaspoons of water.

Bake at 325 degrees for about 15 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown and delicious. For an added treat, sprinkle a layer of cheese on top of the soup before you put on the crust, or grate on some cheese during the last 5 minutes of baking.

…or,if that seems way too much like work, and I wouldn’t much blame you if it does, use frozen ready-made puff pastry, available in the freezer aisle. Thaw it in the fridge overnight, cut to fit and bake according to the package directions.”

Yay, soup!

Why Do You Roast Meat But Bake A Cake?

Your recipe for roast loin of pork says to roast in a 350 degree oven. Your recipe for yellow butter cake says to bake in a 350 degree oven. For either recipe, you open the oven and put your food in. So, is there a difference between baking and roasting?

The short answer is “No.” But it really isn’t as simple as all that. Baking and roasting are both dry heat cooking methods. This just means that the food being cooked isn’t covered in a sauce or other liquid during the cooking process.

In modern times, we assume that baking and roasting both occur in ovens. Prior to having access to home ovens, people baked and roasted over a fire. Food was often roasted on a spit over flames either on the hearth or in an outdoor fire. A Dutch oven, made of heavy cast iron, was placed in the fire, covered, and coals were place on top of the lid. This provided radiant, if uneven, heat from all sides.

The Joy of Cooking defines roasting as a specialized type of baking. Roasting is almost always done in an open pan; that is, the food to be roasted is uncovered. Often, when roasting meat, you place it on a rack so it doesn’t sit in its own juices as it roasts. The rack serves as a suspension system whereby the meat is “suspended” in the oven over a pan (shades of spit roasting in days of yore).

There also seems to be a convention associated with the terms “bake” and “roast.” Although the two identify almost identical cooking techniques, in the modern kitchen anyway, “baking” is most generally associated with breads, cakes, pies and casseroles while “roasting” is what you do to meat or vegetables.

Roasting often starts at a higher temperature to create a “crust” on the outside of what is being roasted. Then, the temperature is reduced for the remainder of the cooking time. This is also the case when baking pate a choux (for cream puffs or éclairs) and some breads. In these similar cases, the identical cooking process (high temperature reducing to a lower temperature) is employed for different reasons.

In the roasting example, you’re trying to encourage exterior browning and caramelization of the target food before decreasing the heat and finishing gently. In the baking example, you need an initial burst of intense heat to encourage an expansion of air to make the pate a choux puff up or to encourage optimum oven-spring in the bread (the yeasts’ last hoorah). Then, the temperature is reduced to set and dry the structure of both the pate a choux and the bread.

So, while roasting and baking are almost identical methods of dry heat cooking, the terms roasting and baking apply to two different kinds of foods. You generally roast food that has structure already, solid foods such as meats and vegetables. You generally bake foods that don’t have much structure until they are baked: cakes, breads, pies, casseroles, crème brulee, etc.

Okay, so what about a baked potato, you ask? You’ve read the article; is it a baked potato…or a roasted one?