Thursday, December 19, 2013

Stephanie's Kitchen Drawer: Scale


I learned the virtue of a kitchen scale years ago, but recently even more.  When I started grinding my own spelt I learned that freshly ground grains don't measure the same as flour that I purchase milled by a factory.  I stated converting the cup measurements to weight measurements using online converters, an example is here.  

On the Joy of Baking website is says "Professionals seldom measure their ingredients by volume (cups). They usually prefer measuring by weight, and there are many reasons for this. Baking is not like cooking where you can add a little extra of this ingredient or leave out that ingredient. Baking is all about precision and accuracy so that you can achieve consistent results. And there are so many variables when baking - your ingredients, how you measure your ingredients, the mixing technique, your pans, temperature and humidity, and your oven. Some of these variables are hard to control, but you can control accuracy by weighing ingredients. Unfortunately this is not always true when measuring by volume (cups), especially with dry ingredients. One excellent example is flour. If you "dip" the measuring cup into the flour bag you will get a different amount of flour than if you "spoon" the flour into your measuring cup. This is because flour tends to compact with transportation and storage and there is also the problem of humidity affecting its' density (volume). However, neither of these things will affect the weight of flour. Because a 130 grams of flour is always 130 grams of flour."  More information can be found here

The pictured scale I bought at Costco on sale for $12, it does everything you need a kitchen scale to do. It has multiple measurement choices, on/off button, and a Tare(zeros out weight) button.  I use mine to measure ingredients, also to measure dough so I can portion it equally.  I like when I make two loaves of bread to be the same amount of dough, and my tortillas all to be the same relative size.  This scale can also be found at Amazon here.http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AQMGFDI?ie=UTF8&creativeASIN=B00AQMGFDI&tag=quefoomam-20

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