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.
- Carefully measure ingredients.
- Bake.
- Blame the cake-like or gooey outcome on how poorly I must have measured the flour.
Now, I have a new routine.
- 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.
- Get out the kitchen scale.*
- Place the mixing bowl or bread machine pan on the scale. Tare.
- Pour my ingredients directly into the bowl, taring after each ingredient.
- Bake.
- 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?
