The Secret To Recipe Success- Kitchen Scale

Have you ever made a recipe, followed all the instructions, and it ended up going belly up? In other words, it didn’t look anything like the beautiful recipe picture. Turns out, it may have had nothing to do with your ingredients or technique; it may have been your measuring cups. If you’re looking to cook and bake with confidence, knowing your recipes will turn out every time, read on to find out the small changes you can make!

Cooking, and more specifically, baking, depends on precision. Both precision in technique and in measurement. Varying ingredient quantities can have disastrous effects on what you’re making. In my first post, I wrote about my experiences as a bread baker. The baker who trained me was a stickler for precision; the bakery had a massive scale, likely costing over $1,000, to measure everything down to the nearest gram. The point I am trying to make is that professionals use scales; it is fairly rare to see measuring cups being used, especially for baking. If you want the same results as a professional, it’s time to tuck away the measuring cups and start using a kitchen scale.

Before we dive into why we should be using scales, let’s take a step back in history to understand why we are using measuring cups in the first place. In the early and mid 1800s, recipes looked very different from today’s detailed dissertations. And even still, into the early 1900s, measurements were near non-existent. When I was in France, I bought a book published in the early 1900s named le verilable cuisine de famille. Flipping through this book, the measurements simply aren’t listed with the recipe. The same goes for the famous book Le Répertoire de la cuisine, another French book published in 1914. These books weren’t user-friendly for someone wanting to learn how to cook. So, in 1896, an American named Fannie Merrit published a book named The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, and in it, measurements via measuring cups were used. Fast forward to modern day, the United States is the only country in the world that uses measuring cups for nearly everything. Other countries use these cups, but usually only for liquids.

If you’re interested in learning more about the history of various cooking instruments or why we cook the way we do today, there is a fantastic book linked here.

Let’s talk precision. Before we get into the countless benefits of kitchen scales, let’s discuss the almighty measuring cup used in the US today. Let’s say we measure flour, a quintessential ingredient in baking. One cup of flour can range anywhere from four to six ounces. That is a HUGE difference in weight. Flour can be compacted, airy, or somewhere in between; that’s where we get this large discrepancy. Liquid on the other hand, does not have this issue, as its volume is largely unchangeable.

Don’t just take my word for it, experiment on your own. You’ll need a kitchen scale, flour, and a measuring cup. Scoop a cup of flour, level it off, and place it on your scale. Take note of the weight. Repeat as many times as you’d like. You’ll soon notice that the measurements are rarely equal. Even if off by a few grams, this will affect your recipe. Multiply that by however many ingredients you measure via a cup, and your recipe may be very different from what the writer intended.

How about a recipe that calls for zucchini, such as zucchini bread? Take one cup of chopped zucchini. Well, how much do you want me to chop it? Large dice, small dice, minced? Each of these will have a different amount of space to take up in your measuring cup. If I dice it small, there will be less air or free space in the cup; with a large dice, there will be more air.

This same principle of granular size holds true for dry ingredients. The US food industry is vastly overregulated in some facets and vastly underregulated in others. One instance is the flour industry. In France, there are stringent regulations regarding the use of additives (that’s a post for another day, but this is often the reason gluten-intolerant people can eat bread without issues in Europe), as well as mineral content. In the US, these regulations are near non-existent. The US regulates “safety” instead of quality. With a lack of quality regulations, US flour milling can run wild, and so it is easy to get varying characteristics that will measure differently across flour brands.

The point here is that measuring via cups is wildly inaccurate; there is a reason the US is the only country in the world to use cups as a catch-all for measuring. This is also the reason why professional kitchens and skilled bakers use weights. Dependable accuracy every time.

If a recipe calls for 100 grams of flour, there is no ambiguity on whether the amount of flour you’re putting in your recipe is accurate. 100 grams is 100 grams. When using a scale, you simply place your bowl over the scale, zero it out, add x grams of your ingredient, and move on to your next ingredient.  

The benefits of using a scale are significant. The most important facet is accuracy; there is no more precise method of measurement for cooking than using weights. And for those of you who dislike doing dishes, well, this is a match made in heaven. There is no need to wash measuring cups and spoons.

To properly use a scale, there are some things you need to be aware of. First, make sure the area around the scale, and the scale itself, is clean. You don’t want a spoon or bowl touching the scale and then giving you an inaccurate reading. Additionally, many scales can measure in different weights such as grams, ounces, and pounds. Be sure you’re using the correct unit before adding your ingredients. Finally, before adding in your ingredients, place your bowl or plate on the scale and zero the scale out by pressing the tare button. By doing this, you are essentially resetting the scale to measure only the ingredients and not the bowl.

So, what is the future of measuring in the kitchen? While professional kitchens and nearly every recipe from other countries use weight measurements, many recipes from cooks and bakers in the US haven’t caught up. Slowly but surely, more food writers are adding weights to their recipes, but it’s a slow process. In the future, we may very well see weights be the dominant measurement in US households, but until that time, we must either use recipes from other countries or stick to our inaccurate measuring cups for the time being.

Cheers,

Chef Olson

“The Flying Chef”

Sources

Consider the Fork written by Bee Wilson