When should you use your kitchen scale and when will a measuring cup suffice?
When baking, you should weigh your ingredients. Why?
If you use measuring cups, you might be surprised to find out that not all measuring cups are created equal. Different manufacturers of measuring cups have slightly different measurements. In that case, one cup of flour could be 6.99 ounces or it could be 7 ounces. One cup of sugar could also be as similar as 8 ounces or 8.2 ounces. All in all it’s a good idea to weigh your ingredients instead of measuring them when baking.
How does this difference happen?
It could be the shape of your measuring cup. Yes, the shape has something to do with the weight of the ingredient. It could also be how well packed the measuring cup was, making that cup of sugar weigh more than it should for your recipe.
Does this matter? In baking it does. If your recipe wants one cup of flour, they want 4 1/4 ounces or 120 grams. Nothing more, nothing less. Weigh the flour and then measure it and check the difference in your measuring cups.
What do you do about it? How do you know when you have the correct amount? In baking, weighing your ingredients is much more accurate than measuring. Measuring and weighing ingredients will often yield two different amounts.
Weigh by volume using a food grade scale instead of measure. For ours, we turn on the scale. Then we place the container on the scale, zero that out, add the ingredients, and weigh again. It ‘tares’ out, meaning it remembers the weight of the container and subtracts it. We end up with the correct number of ounces or grams.
How do you know your scale is accurate?
Let’s say you order a brand new kitchen scale. Now, how do figure out its accuracy? Maybe you weighed a stick of butter and it didn’t weigh exactly what the package said. Here’s how you can easily calibrate your scale.
Turn it on and lay a nickel on your kitchen scale. Make sure the measurement is turned to read in grams. Your scale will read 5 grams if it is accurate. If the weight is off, try another nickel. If it is still off, look at your manual and calibrate it either up or down depending on how much the nickel weighed.
We suggest returning the kitchen scale and getting a new one if there is no way to calibrate it.
Want to know when to use your kitchen scale? We always weigh our ingredients for our simple and tasty pizza dough recipe.