Cooking Conversions for Dummies

Weights and Measures conversions

The intern checking for dead links was patrolling the Leaf Group niches not long ago and ran across a suspicious-looking title. Not only was the title suspicious, but the freelancer who chose it seemed somehow wrong. You see, the topic was (apparently) kitchen conversions, but the contributor who snagged it was a high school football coach. Weird? Not half as weird as the job Keith Dooley did on his Hunker.com post, "How to Convert Cups to Pounds." Hunker.com? Are they kidding? (they must have been... Leaf moved it to Sciencing! and then back to Hunker...)

We asked everyone at AN headquarters what the question might mean, and everyone was convinced that the question had to do with dry measure; most likely the number of cups in a five-pound bag of flour (or maybe sugar). The answer is easy to find: a pound of flour is about 3¹⁄₃ cups, and a pound of granulated sugar is about 2 cups. It really is that straightforward.

So where did Dooley get off track? Well, he was off-track by the second sentence in his introduction: "Converting measurements is often necessary when you are involved in cooking. Measuring ingredients can require that liquids [bolding ours] be converted from one unit of measure to another." While liquid unit conversion isn't rare, it's far, far, far more likely that the conversion be between units of volume. For instance, a cook might need to convert from tablespoons to cups or from teaspoons to milliliters. When it comes to converting between cups and pounds, that's almost always dry measure. Even then, it's fairly rare. But take a look at what Keith wants his readers to do:

1. "...multiply... by eight (the number of ounces in one cup)..."
2. "Divide... by 16... the number of ounces in one pound..."

In the first place, Keith, a (liquid measure) cup is eight fluid ounces, which is a unit of volume; not a unit of weight. Second, that little set of instructions would only work if the liquid in question were water, which weighs one ounce per fluid ounce (close enough, anyway).

Dooley's "answer," such as it is, is that,

"...for every one pound you must have two cups."

Which is fairly close to the correct answer for granulated sugar (two cups actually weighs about 14½ ounces). We are, however, almost certain that that's nothing at all like what the OQ wanted to know. The OQ probably had a pound of flour in the cupboard and wanted to know if it was enough to make a recipe calling for four cups of flour.
The OQ did not get the answer he or she needed from our Dumbass of the Day. Dooley wasn't even close!

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