Condensed milk

[Darienne]

Just settling down to make DL's Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream, remembering that I had bought a can of condensed milk to make something or other which never got made.

DL's recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups sweetened condensed milk.

Naturally the Canadian can, Eagle Brand, is 300 ml. Why make it easy? So 300 ml is 1 1/4 cups: 1/4 cup too small.

My question: what is the measurement of an American can? No reason, just curious, as usual.

(I added 1/4 cup of half and half and a dollop of corn syrup.)

[ethermion]

An American can of Eagle is 14 ounces, or 396 grams. Says so right on the can so it must be true. If fluid ounces, that would be 7/4ths cups, but it is not fluid ounces. It is avoirdupois, though they do not say quite so. The can says about 20 tablespoons (two tablespoons per serving, 10 servings per can), and let's see 1 tablespoon is 1/16 of a cup, so... Darn. Ran out of fingers. I would guess that it is about 1 and 1/4 cups or 1.25 cups.

[Darienne]

So the American can and the Canadian can both hold 1 1/4 cups of condensed milk. Thank you for your help. Now I can rest easy.

[Darienne]

Almost one year later and again questions about condensed milk arise.

Again, making DL's Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream and starting with two cans of milk because one can is not enough.

OK. So DL calls for 1 1/2 cups or 600 grams. So I weighed the milk as I poured it and found that a very generous 1 1/2 cups (up over the rim a bit) weighed only 516 grams.

Do you suppose that different brands of condensed milk weigh different amounts, as in Brand A is actually heavier than Brand B?

Hardly important for ice cream, but still puzzling...

[mkayahara]

I would guess that's just a conversion issue. When converting between volume and weight measurements, cookbook writers usually round things off, which can lead to some pretty big rounding errors at times. That's also partly why they advise against mixing the volume and weight measurements in a given batch of the recipe.

[Darienne]

Is that one HUGE rounding error!

Thanks for the input.

[janeer]

BTW, how IS the DL Vietnamese coffee ice cream?

[Darienne]

BTW, how IS the DL Vietnamese coffee ice cream?

Wonderful as always. It's pretty fail-proof. I added a dollop of Kahlua for an extra zip.