I noticed how Herman comments on converting the measurements. I know that you own some of the same books that I do, and I was wondering about cheese recipe books written in metric units. Are there not many, and therefore you buy the U.S. Imperial ones, or are the ones in U.S. Imperial easier to find? I’m just curious. Having never lived anywhere else, I always just assumed that other countries had the same kind of stuff we have, just written in different measurements.

This also got me to wondering how the U.S. came up different so I looked up an article on the internet.

http://www.france-property-and-information.com/imperial-system-and-history.htm

I remember when I was in school, that they were telling everybody that we were going to swap over to the metric system completely in the next 10 years. That would have been 30 years ago.

I draw buildings and draw the HVAC duct systems. About 15 years ago it was common to get a government project that was drawn in metric. I have done several CDC buildings, Center of Disease Control, and when we first started working on them they were in metric and the spec stated that we had to provide metric drawings for the engineer to approve. Our shop is not tooled for metric. We were drawing on a computer, so we had to draw it in U.S. Imperial for the shop, and then we would copy the file, call it up and have the computer convert the sizes over to metric. The computer did not convert the duct elevations correctly. It converted the sizes correctly, but it gave some strange arbitrary numbers for the elevations. The elevations are where you have to write on the duct line how far off of the floor it is hung, which is critical. So I would have to manually convert every elevation and type them in. It would take 4 hours to change a drawing to metric so that I could send it to the engineer.

The first two projects we did had to be done this way. The next project, they provided us with metric drawings but they didn’t want metric back. They said that it took them too long to convert it back to U.S. Imperial so that they could read it. By the time we got to Building 18 they had given up sending out metric drawings and just gone back to U.S. Imperial.

The military buildings used to be metric also, but now they are not.

As far as I’m aware, here on the main land of Europe we all use the metric system. The UK is still using a mix: On schools the metric system is teached but in every day live a lot of non-metric stuff is used, however, since the so-called decimalisation the english pound is devided into 100 new pence. The famous book of Tim Smith that is translated into Dutch, uses liters for milk, milliliters and grammes (1/1000 of a kilo) but also spoons (tea and table). In recipes (also for cooking) it is common to use spoons. A teaspoon is considered to be 3 milliliter and a tablespoon 15 milliliter.

Its still a mix up, us/imperial gall are not the same yet allot of people dont know that and some of the industry relies on deceiving people to save .54Liters.
European Kg and Canadian Kg are not the same unless thats been resolved (1kg=2lb=Europe, 1kg=2.2lb=Canada).
Teaspoon, Tablespoon are frequently inaccurate since rarely they say Level or Rounded.
So overall it still boils down to experience and experimenting.

On Wikipedia is a subject about teaspoon, from which I have the following quote:

In the United States one teaspoon is 1⁄3 tablespoon, 1⁄6 U.S. fl. oz, 1⁄48 of a cup, and 1⁄768 of a U.S. liquid gallon (see United States customary units for relative volumes of these other measures). This is approximately 5 mL[4] and 1⁄3 of a cubic inch. For nutritional labeling purposes on food packages in the U.S., the teaspoon is, by federal regulations, rounded to precisely 5 mL, per 21CFR101.9(b)(5)(viii).[5]

In an other article is stated: 1 US teaspoon = 4.92892159 milliliters

Well, I think I can live with that difference

Anyhow, given the fact that the surface of a fluid is never flat, it’s always impossible to measure totally exact.
And I don’t think we’ll taste the differences…

That’s pretty picky. Cooking is not a chemistry exam.

An then theirs that whole area humidity and elevation that influences recipes LOL

..and that is the charming thing about artisan cheese making: In contrast with a cheese factory where the same kind of cheese will always taste the same the whole year through, our cheeses can be different of taste every time, depending on time of year, where the milk comes from, the humidity and how precise we were measuring the ingredients etc. Every time a challenge, every time a surprise…

Did u see the vid i posted on Unpasteurized milk? It might be worth it to find unpasteurized cheese and add some of it to our standard store bought milk to tease out some more flavor LOL