guest wrote:If I am converting dry and liquid measurements for a recipe from US standard to metric, should I convert all to grams, or convert to milliliters, or convert the dry elements to grams and the liquid to millimeters? I was converting a recipe for chemistry class and was wondering what I should do? It seems odd to want to measure out milliliters of flour, but I know that you go from milliliters to grams using grams/milliliter density.
You could just convert all the US volumes to milliliters, but European recipes usually measure the fluids and weight the dry ingredients, at least the larger amounts (cups). Small amounts of spices may be measured by volume.
If you use the approximation 1 cup ~= 240 ml, you scale the recipe by about 1.4% (negligible), but 240 has lots of factors and you can easily compute quarters and thirds of cups, teaspoons(48/cup) and tablespoons(16/cup). (Exact conversion is 1 cup = 236.59 mL to more accuracy than you can measure, and all the subunits are "messy")
If you want to convert dry volume to weight, you may need a scale. It is hard to find reliable densities for flour, sugar, etc, as it depends on how it is processed.