How much is a pinch?

HOW MUCH IS A PINCH?

One of the two most terrifying things to people who are new to cooking is getting the measurement of ingredients right (the other is fear of undercooking or overcooking).

Food is very forgiving and unless you substitute a cup of salt for a teaspoon the difference in the final product will be negligible.  Just adjust it a little next time you make the same dish.

Most measurements are pretty easy to figure out, although I have known people who have gone through life never quite knowing which is a teaspoon and which is a tablespoon, compounded by the abbreviations of tsp for the former and tbs for the latter.  Where it really gets complicated is exactly how much is a pinch or a dash?


Well, you would think that pinches or dashes really don’t represent anything; that the instruction just means to eyeball it.  Wrong.  They are actually valid measurements.

So, assuming you know or can figure out how much a teaspoon and a tablespoon is, here is their equivalent for pinches and dashes:

• 1 U.S. teaspoon (tsp) = 8 dashes.  Therefore a dash is a really small amount

• 1 U.S. teaspoon (tsp) = 16 pinches.  It figures then that a pinch is about half as much as a dash

There are 3 teaspoons in each tablespoon, which means there are 24 dashes and 48 pinches in a tablespoon.

If it’s liquid you’re measuring you might need to convert pinches and dashes to drops (it’s especially hard to pinch liquid).  In that case there are 96 drops in a teaspoon or 288 drops in a tablespoon.

HOW DID WE IN THE U.S. COME BY MEASURING COOKING USING TEASPOONS AND TABLESPOONS ANYWAY?

According to Two Leaves Tea Company, the size of a teaspoon is the perfect size to measure one serving of dry tea, so at one time it was probably a pretty popular spoon and remains so today.

The tablespoon is more interesting.  It seems at one time in history people used to carry their own fork and spoon with them in their pockets.  The spoon that the brought to the table was called their table spoon.  Too bad they didn’t call it a Pocketspoon because there would be a whole lot less confusion these days about teaspoons and tablespoons.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY:

“A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”

- Mary Poppins

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