The rest of the world does not measure its chocolate in squares, yet it seems completely natural to many of us. Baking chocolate has come in paper-wrapped squares for so many years that a lot of recipes refer to the number of squares as if it's a measurement sanctioned by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

It is not. And the biggest problem with using a square as a standard unit of measure, is that many people have forgotten that a square weighs 1 ounce.

ounce weighs 29 grams, so if you divide 200 by 29, you get 6.8965517. It would be absolutely safe to round that up and add 7 squares for your recipe.

To help others in the same bind, we've created a handy Baking Chocolate Approximation Chart. We have rounded the numbers to reflect common metric measurements, so you may be using a little more chocolate than specified. We also took advantage of the fact that most squares of baking chocolate are scored, so you can cut them in half if necessary.

Baking Chocolate Metric Conversion Grams Squares/Ounces 25 1 50 2 75 2.5 100 3.5 125 4.5 150 5 175 6 200 7 225 8 250 8.5 275 9.5 300 10.5 325 11 350 12 375 13 400 14 425 14.5 450 15.5 475 16.5 500 17

If you had a digital kitchen scale, as we are constantly recommending, you could just switch to the metric setting, add chocolate squares one by one, and stop when you got to the number closest to your goal. Then you wouldn't have to run to the computer mid-recipe in hopes that Ochef would answer your question on the spot (which we, sadly, did not do).