Cooking from a German recipe, and the words with no numbers
A German recipe will ask for 1 Päckchen of something and usually leave the grams unsaid, weigh flour in a Pfund that is 500 grams rather than a pound, and assume a spoon is level unless it says otherwise. None of that is a units conversion. It is a set of conventions a German cook knows by heart and a recipe rarely spells out.
The Päckchen problem: the numbers recipes leave out
This is the wall most translated German recipes hit. A line reads 1 Pck. Backpulver or 1 Würfel Hefe, with no weight, because in Germany the packet is the unit and the sizes barely differ. An English reader has no packet to reach for, so the recipe is unconvertible until someone supplies the grams the manufacturer assumes.
| The recipe says | Which is | Weight | Dosed for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Pck. Backpulver | baking powder | 16 g | 500 g flour |
| 1 Pck. Trockenhefe | dry yeast | 7 g | 500 g flour |
| 1 Pck. Vanillezucker | vanilla sugar | 8 g | one cake |
| 1 Würfel Hefe | fresh yeast cube | 42 g | up to 1 kg flour |
The yeast deserves a caution the table cannot carry. A 42 g cube converts to 14 g of the European instant dry yeast in those packets, at three to one, which is Dr. Oetker's own equivalence. That ratio is for instant yeast; American active dry is a wetter product and converts at closer to two to one, so a reader with the American tin needs more. The dosing and the arithmetic behind the cube are on the yeast converter, and the baking powder here is the same 16 g that page decodes.
Pfund and Tasse: two false friends
A German Pfund is 500 grams exactly, a metric half-kilo, not the 453.6 gram pound an American or British reader assumes. The gap is about 9 percent, small enough to slip past and large enough to matter across a loaf. Halbes Pfund is 250 grams. Read Pfund as pound throughout a recipe and everything comes out proportionally light.
The Tasse, meaning cup, is worse because it has no standard at all. A pre-scale German recipe using Tasse might mean anything from a 75 ml mocha cup to a 250 ml breakfast cup; the common assumption is about 150 ml, which puts a Tasse of flour near 100 grams against the 120 grams of an American cup. So a German Tasse is not a smaller American cup, it is an unspecified household vessel, and the honest move is to treat any Tasse figure as approximate and weigh where the recipe depends on it. The full range of the world's cups, including the ones that are drinking vessels rather than measures, is on cup sizes around the world.
The spoon is always level, and butter comes as a block
A bare EL or TL in a German recipe means a level spoon, gestrichen. When a recipe wants a heap it writes gehäuft, and the difference is not small: a heaped spoon runs roughly two to two and a half times a level one, so misreading it halves or doubles the ingredient. The German EL is 15 millilitres and the TL is 5, the metric sizes, so the volumes need no conversion; only the fill does, and the per-ingredient level and heaped weights are on heaped versus level spoons.
Butter arrives as a 250 gram block rather than a stick, about 10 centimetres long with cut marks every 50 grams. The German no-scale trick is arithmetic: divide the grams you need by 25 and cut that many centimetres off the end. A US stick is about 4.5 centimetres of block, which our butter master works through, along with why rounding a stick to half a block overstates it.
The oven prints two settings, and the gas scale is not the British one
A German recipe usually gives two oven figures, Ober- und Unterhitze for conventional top-and- bottom heat and Umluft for the fan, and the fan setting sits about 20 degrees lower. Gas ovens use a Stufe scale that looks like the British gas mark and is not: Stufe 4 is 200 degrees where British gas mark 4 is 180. That collision, and the surprise that the German scale is a loose convention while the French one is an exact rule, is on oven temperatures.
The micro-measures
German recipes quantify the smallest amounts with words an English reader cannot size by instinct, and the German pinch is much smaller than the American one.
- Prise
- A pinch, about 0.04 g of salt: far smaller than the American pinch
- Messerspitze (Msp.)
- A knife tip, 0.1 to 0.5 g: what stays on the first centimetre of a table knife
- Schuss
- A dash of liquid, roughly 25 ml
- Spritzer
- A splash, under a millilitre
Flour, eggs and dairy carry their own systems
Three more things a German recipe assumes. The flour is graded by ash content, Type 405 for cake up to 1050 for dark bread, a system orthogonal to American protein grading and worked through on flour types. A recipe saying Größe M eggs means the EU medium band, which maps to American Large rather than Medium, on egg sizes. And German dairy is defined by fat percentage, with Quark and Schmand that have no clean American equivalent, so those are substitutions to research rather than conversions to calculate.
A recipe, decoded
Read the ingredient list of a plain German Rührkuchen as it would appear, with an English kitchen in mind.
- 250 g Mehl (Type 405)
- Cake flour, 250 g being a Pfund would be wrong here: this is grams, weigh it. Type 405 is cake flour, not all-purpose.
- 1 Pck. Backpulver
- 16 g of baking powder, about three and a half US teaspoons. The recipe usually will not tell you the 16.
- 1 Pck. Vanillezucker
- 8 g of vanilla sugar. Substitute a teaspoon of vanilla extract and a spoon of sugar if you cannot buy it.
- 125 g Butter
- Half a 250 g block, about 5 centimetres cut from the end, or weigh it.
- 3 Eier (Größe M)
- Three EU medium eggs, which are US Large. US Medium would leave the batter short.
- 1 Prise Salz
- A German pinch, a few hundredths of a gram, far less than an American pinch.
Only one line of that is a units conversion, the butter. The rest are conventions: a packet with no printed weight, a flour type, an egg grade and a pinch that means something smaller than it does in English. That balance is the whole point of this page.
Questions about German measurements
- What does "1 Päckchen" mean in grams?
- It depends which packet, and most German recipes leave the figure out. Baking powder is 16 g, dry yeast 7 g, vanilla sugar 8 g. Some home-baking blogs do print it in brackets, and the figures they print for baking powder run between 15 and 16 g. Where the recipe stays silent, a translated ingredient list stops dead at the abbreviation.
- Is a German Pfund the same as a pound?
- No. A Pfund is exactly 500 g, not the 453.6 g of an avoirdupois pound. Read one as the other and every quantity is about 9 percent short, which a bread dough notices before you do.
- How do I measure a German butter block without a scale?
- Divide the grams you need by 25 and cut that many centimetres off the end. A 250 g block is about 10 cm long, so a centimetre is 25 g. A US stick is about 4.5 cm of it, which is why German sites that round a stick to half a block overstate it.
Sources
Dr. Oetker for the Päckchen weights, the yeast cube and the Größe M egg default; Koch-Wiki and German baking references for the 250 gram butter block and the centimetre method; and German milling references for the flour types. The Pfund, spoon and oven figures come from our unit registry, each sourced on its own node. Full citations on the sources page.