Baking by Weight, Not Volume

It might be hyperbole to say that baking by weight rather than volume has changed my life. But it has certainly changed my life in the kitchen.

When I got into sourdough bread baking a few years ago, I read somewhere that measuring by weight is much more accurate than measuring by volume, especially for flour.

This got me interested, since my usual baking routine went something like this.

  1. Carefully measure ingredients.
  2. Bake.
  3. Blame the cake-like or gooey outcome on how poorly I must have measured the flour.

Now, I have a new routine.

  1. Convert volume to weight for each ingredient. I write it right on the recipe for future use. Here’s a list of conversions for almost any ingredient.
  2. Get out the kitchen scale.*
  3. Place the mixing bowl or bread machine pan on the scale. Tare.
  4. Pour my ingredients directly into the bowl, taring after each ingredient.
  5. Bake.
  6. Feel delighted with the outcome AND the lack of measuring spoons and cups to clean up!

*My scale is actually a 10-year-old postal scale. Any scale with accuracy to 0.01 oz (or 1 g) will work. Look for a scale with a capacity of at least 5 lb (~2 kg).

At first I thought that ingredients of just a teaspoon or two, like salt, wouldn’t measure by weight with sufficient accuracy. But I enjoyed the lack of clean-up with measuring cups so much that I went ahead and tried it with the smaller ingredients too. Everything is turning out well so far!

What do you think? Will baking by weight change your (kitchen) life too?

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