Search

The overwhealming reason to measure recipe ingredients by weight instead of by volume is precision and repeatability. If you measure by weight, the amount of a particular ingredient is not affected by how tightly it is packed, how finely it is chopped, whether it is a large, medium, or small item, whether it is precisely leveled in the measuring cup, which country your measuring cup comes from (U.S.cup = 237 milliliters, U.K.cup = 284 milliliters, and Australia cup= 250 milliliters), or what brand of flour you are using. The number one complaint of home cooks is that they followed a recipe, but it didn't turn out. The reason is that while they used the same number of cups of each ingredient as the recipe author, they actually used a different amount. If you have experienced this frustration first hand, and are now ready to try a modern digital kitchen scale using the latest load cell technology, you still need to know how to use your kitchen scale effectively.

Before doing anything else with your kitchen scale, you must tare it properly. Taring means eliminating the weight of the scales's bowl from the weight of the food item it contains. Put the empty bowl on the scale by itself. On digital scales this is trivially easy--there will be a tare button which will reset the scale to zero.

Once you are ready to use your scale, you may find it difficult to find recipes that list ingredients by weight instead of volume. If you have a cookbook published in Europe, this is no problem. It is common in Europe to measure dry ingredients by weight and liquid ingredients by volume. But if you live in the United States, you already know that cookbooks usually list ingredients by volume. What do you do?