Oz, the Great and Terrible

[prillalar]

I haven't been a frequent cook in my life, because it's a big hassle and takes a lot of time. ("A lot of time" meaning "more than five minutes".) Now that I have more time and I'm trying to eat less junk, I'm actually cooking stuff that combines more than three ingredients.

I'm having some metric/imperial issues though. If I get a recipe off a US website and it says, "2 oz cheddar cheese, shredded" how the hell do I measure that? I assumed weight, but now I hear that may not be so. My little scale has both ounces and grams, so it's no problem to weigh ingredients, but is that really weight or is it volume? (And what kind of a system uses the same word for both?) If it's volume, how do you tell when you've got 2 oz? The cheese is rectangular; my measuring cups are round. Or do you shred it first and then measure it? I'm assuming there's some order of operations in play here, where because "shredded" comes at the end, you shred it after measuring, not before.

This is probably why I spend so much time getting Sims to make grilled cheese sandwiches. Then they have to measure the bloody cheese, not me.

Mmm, cheese.

ETA: I feel better about being confused seeing the lack of consensus in the comments. But I'm still confused. *g*

Comments

[prillalar]

And of course, if it says "a cup of cheese," then either you're good to go with a measuring cup, or you can be a Terribly Good Cook and measure out 8oz on the scale.

Therin lies the confusion. 8oz of cheddar cheese by volume is about 3.5oz by weight, so I end up staring at the recipe wondering just how much cheese is really called for when it says 2oz. But I guess with cheese, you really can't go wrong with "more". *g*

[zarahemla.livejournal.com]

Definitely not, with cheese. More is always better. But I don't know how you could measure cheese by volume anyway, unless you melted it. If it's shredded in the measuring cup, then there's air and space and whatnot in there. I guess you could pack it in there really well ... oh, to heck with it. I think cheese can be eyeballed. You only want to be careful and measurey when there's baking and flour involved.

Measurements and cheese

[taverymate.livejournal.com]

The industry standard amongst American food packagers today seems to be that 8 oz. of cheese is equivalent to two cups. Major food companies like Kraft even have a picture of two measuring cups on the front of a bag of shredded cheese right above the listed weight of 8 oz. And that equivalency is found regardless of the cheese variety: it's the same on packages of cheddar, mozzarella, monterary jack, cojack, etc.

And unless you're baking with cheese (baking as in baking cakes and pastries where proportions are more a matter of chemistry and so more critical), I'd agree with you that: you really can't go wrong with "more"