[Internomad]

Hi all, I am new to smoothies and would like to ask a question. When a recipe refers to a cup, fo measuring your greens and fruit etc., what sort of cup do they mean?

 

[Spudulika]

Hi there, it's a US measuring system, where everything is measured by volume.
You can get US measuring cups in the UK in many bigger shops. I think I got mine from a supermarket.
I find them useful for free flowing dry goods, like flour beans, lentils, rice as well of course as liquids. I don't find them at all useful for measuring vegetables though and usually prefer to gauge by eye the volume needed.

 

[BlackBoxed]

For me it's however much I can fit in my blender before I need more liquid to thin it out.

but off the top of my head it's roughly 240ml, 8oz, or 16tbs. If that helps put it in prospective?

 

[silva]

With things like smoothies a big handful of greens is about a cup

I just guesstimate things like that

 

[Dave in MPLS]

The easy answer: assuming the recipe was written for a contemporary US audience (and most are), a cup of a non-fluid ingredient means a measuring cup like you'd find in many every day stores, often in sets like this:

For liquids you'll want this:

By 'want this' I mean you'll want that specific design, either OXO Good Grips or a knock off brand. Sure, a different design will work, like the common pyrex measuring cups without the internal markings, but the OXO design is just so much easier to work with ...

So you have two kinds of cups that are kind of basic to cooking. In a pinch they're interchangeable, but in practice it is next to impossible to get a decent measure of a liquid in a cup designed for dry ingredients and vice versa.

If you're baking it gets a little more complicated - measuring technique matters - but these two measuring cups are the basic equipment you'll want to have on hand.

 

[Rebeka]

A set of measuring cups can be bought for 1 pound in some shops.

 

[Dilettante]

I have found that volume units, such as cup, are fine for measuring liquid ingredients, but generally not a good way to measure certain dry ingredients, because of the differences in how they can be packed. For example, one cup of flour or sugar can vary significantly depending on how tightly it's packed in. Beans don't have the packing issue, but it's hard to get them level. So again, volume isn't ideal. That's why I prefer to use mass. I have a food scale, and if a recipe calls for, e.g., a certain number of cups of flour, I use the volume-to-mass conversion factor on the side of the flour package to measure it out in grams, which is a mass unit. That avoids the issue of packing.