Answering Amazon Questions re the Norpro 3080 Mini Measuring Spoon Set Dear Friends, Those of you are into creative spooning will love snuggling up with these. Outside of the frivolous labeling, these spoons are wonderfully manufactured, refreshingly priced. (One caveat: If there really is a standard definition of Tad, Dash, Pinch, Smidgeon, Drop, customers deserve accurately-sized spoons, not salesman's empty hype.) My carefully considered volumetric tests, double-checked: Drop: 1/80th tsp Smidgeon: 1/40th tsp Pinch: 1/20th tsp Dash: 1/14th tsp, essentially (1/13.6th tsp, if you want to be exact) Tad: 1/6th tsp, essentially (1/5.7th tsp, if you want to be exact) [My exact measurement trials of the "Dash " and "Tad" measuring spoons involved precisely measuring 1 tsp of dry clove powder to weigh 3.03 grams on an AWS-100, 100 + .01 gram measuring scale. I then weighed ten consecutive samples, each, of carefully-leveled Dash and Tad spoonfuls. They averaged .223 g (1/13.6 tsp), and .53 g (1/5.7 tsp), respectively. So it's essentially 1/14th and 1/6th tsp. I used dry table salt for the 1/80, 1/40 1/20th spoons, which seemed exact to those predictable quantities.] Being frustrated with well-meant scattering attempts to get to the bottom of these National security Issues of Norpro 3080 Mini Spoon certification, I did carefully-leveled dry powder tests for my own vitality, longevity, dash 'O curiosity. This is the only repeatable way to do it, so I humbly offer my experience. Liquid tests are unreliable, due to substantial meniscus, mental Coriolis, effects (Since 9/11 how many still know which hemisphere they are in, what's up, what for?) petty challenges and frustrations, particularly if the working medium is maple syrup, lager or Champagne. I offer REPEATABLE (repeat them if you wish!) meticulously-leveled and tallied, fine-dry powder measurements performed via my traditional engineering-physics regimens (Berkeley) while sipping evening chamomile tea (subliminally chanting Om ... as Laughing Raven is won't to do to displace the extraneous Raven) Maybe the web "definition" of a Tad, Dash, Pinch, Smidgeon, Drop is different than what I have found, and as reported elsewhere, but this is what small dry granules say in my spoons. Can 1,000 incompressible dry granules be wrong? (I think I see where the guys who designed the spoons struggled a little with the calculus-of compound-revolution, or never heard of it. It ain't easy!). I have enjoyed scribing these truths, along with memorable haiku, on each spoon in my collection, as a memory more permanent than my own. I enjoy just having these precisely stamped spoons, at 1/2 to 1/3rd the cost of other, perhaps less incisive, sets: I enjoy them courageously filled with 10X reishi extract, preparing for a bout against cancers, or 150 mg (a Dash) of Phosphatidyl Serene (PS) - even a daily Tad (325mg) for six months. I enjoy these little bouncers empty-hooved on the hook. They excel - beyond extravagant competition - at the triple jump, in three most-valuable, superb little measurements, which I have not noticed elsewhere (Am I blue?): the 1/80th, 1/40th, 1/20th tsp events (kinda makes my flit back to Junior High track). While the 1/13th Dash may have been more perfectly 1/10th (for the matinee audience) and 1/6th Tad optimally 1/5th for your father, I have already found good use for these, too, in metering out my daily PS, just as I have said. Anyway, both 1/10th and 1/5th are easily arrived at: Very simply and precisely, two 1/20th Pinches is a (guess what) NSA-Seal-of-Approval 1/10th. Four 1/20th Pinches expertly drifted into the 1/6th Tad will round-out to a slightly rounded Tad if the breeze is not blowing through your teepee - and if you like those little "rounds" you can probably spend a lazy afternoon somehow cleverly piling cords of them up (so to speak) pretty accurately, for safe keeping in the pantry with your cupcakes. These spoons should help you live longer, their artful process wiser. How many opportunities for creative expression do any of us Human Bacteria still have? You will discover how the Issue is not cubic millimeters, Tads, even Smidgeons (in parallel worlds we would only unravel, it could be Pigeons, Eurasian Collared Doves ... ): Have you been measuring up to Gaia? Have you wasted your life?
