We know that it’s summer, and that’s supposed to mean no school! But today we’re sneaking in a little lesson to help you master reading recipes. No tests—promise!
When you read recipes, you usually start with the ingredient list. And sometimes the ingredient list will tell you how to prepare the ingredient to use in the recipe. It might say:
Ingredients
- 1 carrot, chopped
OR
- 1/2 cup diced onion
Before you think about how you’re going to prepare those ingredients, you need to investigate what exactly those instructions are telling you, since the order of the words matters!
Let’s talk about nuts. Spot the difference between:
1 cup pecans, chopped
AND
1 cup chopped pecans
We’ve moved the placement of the word chopped. So in “1 cup pecans, chopped,” the instructions want us to measure 1 cup of pecans and then chop them.
But in “1 cup chopped pecans,” we have to chop pecans, and then measure them. Because smaller, chopped pieces take up less space than big pecans, we’ll need more than 1 cup of whole pecans to make 1 cup of chopped pecans.
Make sense? This doesn’t always make a big difference in a recipe, but just think about some times that it might.
"1/4 cup garlic, minced" might mean a recipe has 3 or 4 cloves of garlic, but "1/4 cup minced garlic" could be 10 or more cloves of garlic! That’s a big difference!