Cooking from an Italian recipe, the one that barely needs converting
Italy weighs everything. An Italian recipe gives flour, sugar and butter in grams and cured meats or cheese in etti, so it arrives in the units a kitchen scale already reads and there is no cup to decode. This page is the opposite of the others in this cluster: the hard parts of an Italian recipe are the few things that are not weights, and none of them is a conversion.
Why there is nothing to convert
An American recipe says one cup of flour and leaves you to discover it can mean 120 grams fluffed or 160 scooped. An Italian recipe names the grams outright, and the ambiguity is gone: the scale reads what the recipe wrote. The essayist behind Memorie di Angelina puts the reason plainly, that Italians measure solid food by weight and not by volume, and asks what "one cup of chopped spinach" could possibly mean when packing changes it twofold. So the single best thing you can do with an Italian recipe is buy a scale, after which most of the recipe needs no conversion at all. Where you do want a cup figure, our ingredient masters carry it, flour near 120 grams and sugar near 198, each with its source.
The etto, the unit an American reader has never met
The one Italian unit an American reader has not met is the etto, 100 grams, an ettogrammo shortened the way everyone shortens the word they use daily. A market asks prices al etto, per hundred grams, and a recipe writes due etti di zucchero for 200 grams of sugar. It is not a conversion so much as a word to learn: an etto is 100 grams, mezzo etto is 50, tre etti e mezzo is 350. Once the word is yours, an Italian quantity in etti is easier to weigh than an American one in cups, because it names a mass and a mass is what the scale shows.
The words that refuse a number
What an Italian recipe does leave vague, it leaves vague on purpose, and these are the lines that stop a literal translation because there is no figure behind them to find.
| The recipe says | What it asks for |
|---|---|
| q.b. (quanto basta) | As much as you need, usually to taste. Written to refuse a number, so no converter can give you one. |
| un pizzico | A pinch, the two-finger amount, mostly of salt. |
| una noce di burro | A walnut of butter, the lump you cut without thinking, roughly a tablespoon. |
| un filo d'olio | A thread of oil, the thin drizzle that finishes a dish. |
Quanto basta is the one to make peace with. A recipe that ends sale q.b. is not withholding a number, it is telling you the amount is a matter of taste and yours to set, the same judgment a good cook applies to the salt in a pot whatever the language. Treating q.b. as a missing measurement and hunting for the "real" gram figure misreads the instruction.
Farina 00 is a class, not a weight
The number that confuses foreign readers most is on the flour bag: 00, 0, 1, or integrale. It looks like a quantity and is a grade, the fineness of the milling, with 00 the most refined and integrale wholemeal. It changes how the flour behaves, not what a given weight of it is, so 300 grams of farina 00 and 300 grams of a coarser flour are the same 300 grams on the scale. What the number does and does not tell you, and why an Italian bag names the mill as often as the grade, is on flour types. The short version for the kitchen: match 00 to cake or pasta flour and do not treat the number as anything you weigh.
The spoons, the machine cup and the leavening sachet
A few smaller conventions. A cucchiaio is a tablespoon and a cucchiaino a teaspoon, the metric 15 and 5 millilitres, so they transfer to an American drawer within a hair, and every spoon size sits on tablespoon sizes by country. A recipe written for a Bimby, the Italian name for the Thermomix, measures by the misurino, its 100 millilitre lid, which our cup sizes page lists among the machine and drinking vessels used as units. And Italian baking has its own leavening sachet, the bustina di lievito per dolci, a baking-powder packet dosed for 500 grams of flour, about the 16 grams of the German Backpulver packet it mirrors. As in French, the word splits: lievito per dolci is chemical baking powder, lievito di birra is yeast, and the yeast converter handles the second.
The rare glass, and an oven that just says the number
Two last things prove the rule rather than break it. A few casual and southern recipes still measure by the bicchiere, a drinking glass of about 200 millilitres, or a tazzina, an espresso cup, and these are the loose exceptions in a culture that otherwise weighs. An old zia's ciambellone in bicchieri is the Italian cousin of the French yogurt pot, and it drifts the same way, which is why even Italy writes them down in grams once the recipe leaves the family. The oven is the other relief: unlike the German Stufe, the French thermostat and the British gas mark, an Italian recipe carries no national dial to decode. It prints the temperature in Celsius, 180 gradi and nothing to look up, so the heat is as plain as the weights, with the fan rule and the foreign scales on oven temperatures.
A recipe, decoded
Read a ciambellone, the plain Italian ring cake, as it is written. Notice how little of it is a conversion at all: five of six lines are already grams or a countable thing.
- 250 g di farina 00
- 250 grams of type 00 flour. Weigh it. The 00 is the grade, not a quantity, and cake flour is the closest bag.
- 200 g di zucchero
- 200 grams of sugar, weighed. Barely over an American cup at 198 g, if you must, but the scale is faster and surer.
- 3 uova
- Three eggs, Italian medium, which is the EU medium band and maps to American Large. See egg sizes.
- 1 bustina di lievito
- A sachet of baking powder for cakes, about 16 g, dosed for this much flour. Not yeast, despite the word lievito.
- 1 etto di burro
- 100 grams of butter, one etto. Weigh it; there is no stick in an Italian kitchen.
- sale q.b.
- Salt to taste. No number, and none is missing.
One line asks you to recognise a word, farina 00, one asks you to know the egg grade, and one, the salt, hands the decision back to you. The rest is a scale and a bowl. That is the whole character of an Italian recipe: it trusts the weight, so you can too.
Questions about Italian measurements
- Do Italian recipes use cups?
- Almost never. Italy measures solid ingredients by weight, in grams and etti, so an Italian recipe already arrives in the units a kitchen scale reads. The cup is an American and British habit; the Italian recipe skips it, which is why it is the easiest foreign recipe to follow if you own a scale.
- What is an etto?
- 100 grams. Due etti is 200, mezzo etto is 50. It is the everyday Italian unit at the deli counter and in recipes, where "due etti di farina" means 200 grams of flour, no cup involved.
- What does q.b. mean in a recipe?
- Quanto basta, as much as you need, usually to taste. It is a judgment rather than a quantity, so no converter can turn it into a number, because the recipe was written to leave that number to you.
Sources
Memorie di Angelina for the weigh-not-measure principle and quanto basta, Misya for the Italian cup-to-gram figures and the farina 00 grades, and our unit registry for the etto and the misurino, each sourced on its own node. Full citations on the sources page.