In praise of the metric system
9:43 AM
I love the metric system. It makes cooking so much easier. Yesterday I wanted to
brine some shrimp. Normally I'm a big fan of Alton Brown's Good Eats, so I
quickly found his brine recipe for shrimp. Here it is:
1/4 cup kosher salt
1/4 cup sugar
1 cup water
2 cups ice
This recipe makes enough brine for over a pound of shrimp and I'm not doing that
much, so I want to cut it down, but how do I do that? Also, how exactly does one
measure 2 cups of ice? Is it cubed, crushed, etc? Also, what kind of kosher salt
are we talking about. Diamond Crystal is about half as dense as Morton's. So 1/4
cup of Morton's would be 1/2 cup of Diamond Crystal. Do you see my confusion?
Instead I pulled out Charcuterie and found the basic brine recipe:
4 liters of water
225 grams salt
125 grams of sugar
What makes this recipe so great is that 4 liters of water just so happens to be 4000
grams of water. So out comes the scale. I can quickly deduce that even one liter of
water would be more than enough brine. So lets just divide that recipe by 5:
800g water
45g salt
25g sugar
Wasn't that easy? I didn't even need a calculator.