Photo by timlewisnm
When you collect old cookbooks you come across strange instructions like, “Place in a quick oven” … “Bank the coals and move the pot to the back” … “Split the hog’s head down the middle”. (Yes, I’ve seen all of those.)
But just recently I found a recipe that listed ingredients by weight. This is very unusual for an American cookbook. Listing ingredients by weight is much more common in most of the rest of the world. Even in England — the other major metric holdout — they use weight instead of volume.
Fortunately I have a postal scale. Yup, it’s exactly the same as a kitchen scale, except it’s not made to hold a bowl.
The other difference is mine only has a 3-pound capacity.
Still plenty of capacity for what I’m doing. If you’ve never used a digital scale, you probably haven’t heard of the “tare” button. The way it works is you place your empty bowl on the scale. You’ll see the weight of the bowl.
Then you just press “tare” and it zeros-out the weight.
Then you add whatever it is you’re weighing and you don’t have to do any math.
Just pour until it’s (in this case) exactly 12 ounces.
Dammit! Okay, fine … twelve point one ounces.
If this seems like a lot of effort to go to, and you’d rather just use your measuring cup, check out this video from Jenny, the Online Pastry Chef, about why you should always weigh your ingredients when baking.
I’ll be back shortly with the recipe that I was doing with the scale.
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
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5 Comments
Can we have a ‘how to measure with cups’ for those of us in Rightpondia who wonder how on earth you’d need telling how to weigh stuff (much like most readers of this comment will wonder how it’s possible to not know how to measure with cups)! I love the look of your recipes, but the idea of measuring flour by volume fills me with fear! Liquids fine, but anything packable I can’t get my head round. Maybe I should just find some UK-based tasty food blogs.
Touché.
Along the way to showing why you shouldn’t measure dry ingredients by volume, Jenny’s video that I linked to shows all the different ways that you can if you want to.
I am a strong believer in measuring everything by weight. If nothing else is guarantees consistency. I didn’t understand how much measuring dry ingredients by volume could vary until I started milling my own flour. 8 oz is 8 oz all day but 2 cups of wheat berries IS NOT equal to 2 cups of freshly milled flour, there is too much air in the flour from the milling process. I strongly recommend measuring by weight, but then again I’m 24 and have the patience to convert all my recipes over.
You can also weigh multiple ingredients in one bowl by hitting the tare button after each ingredient.
Alton Brown did an episode on baking and weighing ingredients. He took two containers that contained equal volume of flour then weighed them. One weighed almost twice as much as the other.
Another one from Rightpondia here – I’ve bought some US measuring cups, but still give up on recipes as soon as I see them calling for cups and tablespoons of butter, for crying out loud.
Think I just found the answer, thanks to Google:
http://www.ochef.com/837.htm