An ounce of butter

Butter is important in American baking, but not in the way you may think.

 I've been doing all these low carb versions of various things, and have hit upon the Butter Brioche Batter Bread from the Fannie Farmer cookbook as a simple, delicious, and more balanced bread. It's essentially one-third flower, one-third butter, one-third eggs.

When getting ready to bake another one of this quite delicious recipe, I pondered the weight of these ingredients, and the weight of the butter is 227g, which is rather an odd number. 

For those of you who have not been unfortunate enough to have to deal with American measurements, 1 cup is 8 fluid ounces (fl. oz.), 1 fl. oz. is 2 tablespoons (tbsp), and 1 tbsp is 3 teaspoons (tsp). Yes, it's that confusing, and that's even leaving out the two other kinds of ounces.

With an American wife and the American centric internet, we've had to do conversions so much that we got little fridge magnets with the factors. Only today did I realize that a cup of butter is exactly half a pound, and thus 1 fl. oz. of butter weighs 1 oz (1/16th pound). So the cups-ounces-tablespoons-teaspoons measurement system in fact based on butter. Because butter is better.


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