LogFAQs > #904474097

shadowsword87 posted...

Wait, what does this mean?
I think you misunderstood what a tablespoon is.

It's a quarter of a quarter of a cup, which is in turn a quarter of a quart. Ergo, 1 tbsp= 1/4^3=1/64 q. In a 100% metric world, if a comparable volume was considered useful, a 1/64 L measuring spoon would exist that measured 15.625 mL. It'd probably be given a common name to make it easier to reference, but there's no reason to think it wouldn't exist.

shadowsword87 posted...

The point is that if you had a recipe that was 8x, or 4x, or 2x more than you wanted, it wouldn't conveniently scale down and you would have to round, and rounding leads to food not tasting right.

Provided you're lucky enough to want to scale something down by an exact power of two that consists entirely of measurements larger than tablespoons, sure. Generally, the ideal scaling factor isn't actually going to be so predictable and you're going to end up rounding the factor down to the closest one that suits your needs.

Of course, in actual practice, you're more likely to be limited by the number of eggs in the recipe than by your measuring system. Eggs don't readily subdivide, unless you're using packaged stuff or weighing them and wasting the excess. Though really, weighing ingredients is always the best way to bake (especially dry ingredients), in which case your measurement system doesn't matter much (but metric works better for every scaling factor that isn't a power of 2).
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