I think I'll get one. If conversions are available online, who cares what the cookbook people do. I am tired of trying to add a little bit of flour to recipes when it's probably too late.
I imagine it could cause some problems, as our over intrusive government starts spying on people meticulously weighing out batches of white powder.
If I recall correctly, in the UK they almost always use weights in their recipes. On the other hand, I don't use many recipes over there, so I may be recalling incorrectly.
The lack of weights in US cookery bookeries must come from a time when no one had equipment. On that other hand, British books have usually given weights for baking.
So you could just get British books, as long as you remember that there are different ounces for weights (an ounce of feathers does not weigh the same as an ounce of gold) and for volume (an imperial fluid ounce is not the same as a US fluid ounce).
Rumour has it that grams are about the same everywhere, but I don't know how many pinches are in a gram.
It's an enlightening experience to not just measure but weigh your food. The measures on a lot of prepackaged food is ballparked, and that can make a big difference. My wife is still going to give me weird looks when I weigh stuff out, even if the kitchen scale revolution is carried out (and I have weighed carry out).
If they are using computer chips for the scales it should be easy to have the device convert the weight for you. Just punch in the code for the material and poof the volume is displayed. May be a slight pain, but you should only have to memorize 5 numbers, and have a handy chart for the not so common elements.
Here in Germany, cookbooks *only* use weights for dry ingredients (flour, sugar etc). Volumes are used for wet ingredients (water, oil etc). *Everybody* has a low-cost scale in their kitchen, nowadays electronic, in olden days mechanical.
The US insistence on volume measures (cups) in recipes has been baffling Europeans for the last 50 years.
The problem with automatic conversion formulas is that you have no idea what precise kind of flour the author was using, or how densely it was packed. Depending on your assumptions, you could easily be off by a factor of two. Obviously, for non-powdered ingredients, this matters a whole lot less.
Am I offended by the lack of weights in modern baking cookbooks, though? Not really.
For one thing, it provides an easy way to tell if a given author actually gives a shit about whether you're able to successfully reproduce his/her recipes, which is the primary difference between a good cookbook and a bad one.
Buy one of these and await a visit from your friendly local DEA agent; if you (God forbid) have more than twenty bucks cash in your house when they come, enjoy the slammer.
Bergamot has it right. Conversions don't do you any good - if they did you could just measure by volume and throw the scale away. Scales get you a lot closer to standardization than volume measurement, but there is still variation in the moisture content of flours (and of course variation by season). In the end, feel is still important in baking, but measuring by weight instead of volume is a good start.
I've used a digital scale for a few years mostly for baking. The tare function is very sweet.
These are also extremely useful for dieters who really want to keep a detailed log of not only what they eat but how much. It's much easier to way things out in grams and then do the calorie conversions.
It also keeps your diet honest - you can no longer fool yourself into believing that that whole inch and a half thick ribeye is "close enough" to your intended 4 ounce portion. Dammit.
Njorl is brilliant, all your appliances should be hooked to your computer (bluetoothed preferably). You text message your scale and get back a text message, which has done the conversions for you, that has both the volume and the weight of the ingredient. The software you should be able to download from an users group.
I was just talking to a visiting friend last weekend who is a professional chef who works in Ireland, and she tells me that American cookbook try to make recipes more robust to measurement errors than European cook books, since Europeans use scales and Americans do not.
How detrimental for baking is the lack of a scale? My friend suggested that it is a significant factor, both in terms of what you can do with a given recipe and in terms of what recipes will be feasible.
I'm lazy... I'd rather use a scoop that is the correct volume, scoop out the right amount and dump it in. That's faster then setting the bowl on a scale and adding ingredients until the correct weight is achieved. What happens if you accidently go over a little bit? You scoop it back out?
I can see why people would use a scale, but I can also see why people would use measuring cups. I have a dishwasher, so a pile of dirty measuring cups is easy enough to clean...
But then I don't use cast iron skillets or $300 knives, so I'm not a real cook.
In my reading as well as my experience, the only ingredient for which having the weight is essential is the flour. There are other fine dry powders in use in baking, but for the most part they're used in such tiny amounts as to make errors meaningless (baking powder or soda, creme of tartar, spices) or else in such amounts that one's experience has to take over anyway, such as powdered sugar-- it doesn't matter what the recipe says, you keep adding the stuff until the frosting is just right.
Course sugar measures pretty accurately by volume, as does brown sugar, which always assumes packing unless otehrwise indicated.
Also, many books indicate a method of measuring flour-- if they spoon it into the measuring cup, assume a lightweight cup of flour. If they scoop and sweep, assume a heavier one. If they pack the flour in, get a new cookbook.
Megan, I think we, maybe with the help of one or two trolls, can bust this conspiracy wide open. Where do I go to apply to create with the Atlantic blog a density list for common cooking ingredients. Re: the discussion of flour, your earlier commenters as you have led met to suspect have no SciFi proclivity, real girls probably. We only need a low cost spectrophotometer for the kitchen and we can determine the flour density. We could be Woodward and Bernstein, almost.
I always use a kitchen scale to weigh my food when I'm on a diet, and then calculate the number of calories. I pretty much gain or lose exactly as I'd predict based on the amount I eat.
The people who would carefully weigh out 4.0 (or 4.2!) ounces are the same people who would carefully measure exactly 1 teaspoon of a spice. False precision, especially if the weights are provided in whole numbers or something else arbitrary like 3.5. The whole number, being arbitrary, likely is subtly wrong -- instead of 4.0 being the right number, it's probably better at 3.8 or 4.2 -- so why bother weighing exactly 4.0?
The false precision goes extra for spices. Not only might 0.8 or 1.2 teaspoons be better in general, but different people have different tastes and might prefer more or less of the spice. Just dump some of the spice in your hand and eyeball it.
I think I'll get one. If conversions are available online, who cares what the cookbook people do. I am tired of trying to add a little bit of flour to recipes when it's probably too late.
I imagine it could cause some problems, as our over intrusive government starts spying on people meticulously weighing out batches of white powder.
If I recall correctly, in the UK they almost always use weights in their recipes. On the other hand, I don't use many recipes over there, so I may be recalling incorrectly.
The lack of weights in US cookery bookeries must come from a time when no one had equipment. On that other hand, British books have usually given weights for baking.
So you could just get British books, as long as you remember that there are different ounces for weights (an ounce of feathers does not weigh the same as an ounce of gold) and for volume (an imperial fluid ounce is not the same as a US fluid ounce).
Rumour has it that grams are about the same everywhere, but I don't know how many pinches are in a gram.
It's an enlightening experience to not just measure but weigh your food. The measures on a lot of prepackaged food is ballparked, and that can make a big difference. My wife is still going to give me weird looks when I weigh stuff out, even if the kitchen scale revolution is carried out (and I have weighed carry out).
Aaron
If they are using computer chips for the scales it should be easy to have the device convert the weight for you. Just punch in the code for the material and poof the volume is displayed. May be a slight pain, but you should only have to memorize 5 numbers, and have a handy chart for the not so common elements.
Here in Germany, cookbooks *only* use weights for dry ingredients (flour, sugar etc). Volumes are used for wet ingredients (water, oil etc). *Everybody* has a low-cost scale in their kitchen, nowadays electronic, in olden days mechanical.
The US insistence on volume measures (cups) in recipes has been baffling Europeans for the last 50 years.
link
Is weighing at all useful when you're not baking? It's never occurred to me to invest in a scale because all I do is cook
Blaine:
Sorry, you've just doubled the price of the scale. The chips are cheap, but the firmware is expensive to program, and the keypad hardware is costly.
We call this feeping creatureism.
Is the greater precision that ingredient-weighing provides really necessary for producing satisfactory baked items?
For baking, yes, for cooking, no.
"We call this feeping creatureism."
I'm sure we could make it programmable from an iPhone, though. That would be worth any price.
The problem with automatic conversion formulas is that you have no idea what precise kind of flour the author was using, or how densely it was packed. Depending on your assumptions, you could easily be off by a factor of two. Obviously, for non-powdered ingredients, this matters a whole lot less.
Am I offended by the lack of weights in modern baking cookbooks, though? Not really.
For one thing, it provides an easy way to tell if a given author actually gives a shit about whether you're able to successfully reproduce his/her recipes, which is the primary difference between a good cookbook and a bad one.
See also: TV Tropes' article "Viewers are Morons"
Buy one of these and await a visit from your friendly local DEA agent; if you (God forbid) have more than twenty bucks cash in your house when they come, enjoy the slammer.
Bergamot has it right. Conversions don't do you any good - if they did you could just measure by volume and throw the scale away. Scales get you a lot closer to standardization than volume measurement, but there is still variation in the moisture content of flours (and of course variation by season). In the end, feel is still important in baking, but measuring by weight instead of volume is a good start.
I've used a digital scale for a few years mostly for baking. The tare function is very sweet.
These are also extremely useful for dieters who really want to keep a detailed log of not only what they eat but how much. It's much easier to way things out in grams and then do the calorie conversions.
It also keeps your diet honest - you can no longer fool yourself into believing that that whole inch and a half thick ribeye is "close enough" to your intended 4 ounce portion. Dammit.
Njorl is brilliant, all your appliances should be hooked to your computer (bluetoothed preferably). You text message your scale and get back a text message, which has done the conversions for you, that has both the volume and the weight of the ingredient. The software you should be able to download from an users group.
I was just talking to a visiting friend last weekend who is a professional chef who works in Ireland, and she tells me that American cookbook try to make recipes more robust to measurement errors than European cook books, since Europeans use scales and Americans do not.
How detrimental for baking is the lack of a scale? My friend suggested that it is a significant factor, both in terms of what you can do with a given recipe and in terms of what recipes will be feasible.
I'm lazy... I'd rather use a scoop that is the correct volume, scoop out the right amount and dump it in. That's faster then setting the bowl on a scale and adding ingredients until the correct weight is achieved. What happens if you accidently go over a little bit? You scoop it back out?
I can see why people would use a scale, but I can also see why people would use measuring cups. I have a dishwasher, so a pile of dirty measuring cups is easy enough to clean...
But then I don't use cast iron skillets or $300 knives, so I'm not a real cook.
In my reading as well as my experience, the only ingredient for which having the weight is essential is the flour. There are other fine dry powders in use in baking, but for the most part they're used in such tiny amounts as to make errors meaningless (baking powder or soda, creme of tartar, spices) or else in such amounts that one's experience has to take over anyway, such as powdered sugar-- it doesn't matter what the recipe says, you keep adding the stuff until the frosting is just right.
Course sugar measures pretty accurately by volume, as does brown sugar, which always assumes packing unless otehrwise indicated.
Also, many books indicate a method of measuring flour-- if they spoon it into the measuring cup, assume a lightweight cup of flour. If they scoop and sweep, assume a heavier one. If they pack the flour in, get a new cookbook.
Real chefs don't need no stinkin scales!
Megan, I think we, maybe with the help of one or two trolls, can bust this conspiracy wide open. Where do I go to apply to create with the Atlantic blog a density list for common cooking ingredients. Re: the discussion of flour, your earlier commenters as you have led met to suspect have no SciFi proclivity, real girls probably. We only need a low cost spectrophotometer for the kitchen and we can determine the flour density. We could be Woodward and Bernstein, almost.
PureGuesswork: Real chefs don't need cookbooks either, so what's your point?
I should add that at least two sets of cookbooks on my shelf contain weights for all ingredients: Rose Levy Berenbaum's, and Alton Brown's.
And hell, if you have those, I'm not sure you need other cookbooks ^_^
I always use a kitchen scale to weigh my food when I'm on a diet, and then calculate the number of calories. I pretty much gain or lose exactly as I'd predict based on the amount I eat.
The people who would carefully weigh out 4.0 (or 4.2!) ounces are the same people who would carefully measure exactly 1 teaspoon of a spice. False precision, especially if the weights are provided in whole numbers or something else arbitrary like 3.5. The whole number, being arbitrary, likely is subtly wrong -- instead of 4.0 being the right number, it's probably better at 3.8 or 4.2 -- so why bother weighing exactly 4.0?
The false precision goes extra for spices. Not only might 0.8 or 1.2 teaspoons be better in general, but different people have different tastes and might prefer more or less of the spice. Just dump some of the spice in your hand and eyeball it.