Why Weigh?
1. Because it’s easy
All you need to do is pour your ingredient into a bowl until the scale reads the amount that you want. No more scooping and leveling cups. And no more using cups means no more washing cups. Hooray!
2. Because it’s fast
Typically, your dry rations go in one bowl and wet rations go into another bowl. For each bowl, all you have to do is press the ‘tare’ button in between each ingredient, which takes mere seconds. All your doing is resetting the scale back to zero so you can measure the next ingredient by itself, but within the same bowl. This allows you to measure quickly and get the baked good put together in no time flat. This is a total win if you’re short on time and patience like me.
3. Because it’s accurate
When you weigh out your ingredients, there is no guesswork involved. 8 ounces is 8 ounces no matter how you slice it. This eliminates a common problem in the baking world of two people getting two different results out of the same recipe. When using a scale, we get to skip the lecture on how to properly measure a cup of flour, a cup of brown sugar, and so on. Who has time to listen to that? And I don’t know about you, but I tend to make a mess when using cups. Mess means wasted materials, and I hate waste.
I think it’s interesting seeing people’s reactions when I tell them I bake by weight. Most of them think it’s overkill, or that I’m just really enthusiastic about baking and that’s the only reason I do it.
I am really enthusiastic about baking, but I’m also heavily invested in the idea that baking is made easier when done by weight. And I think if baking were viewed as easy, more people would be willing to create baked goods at home.
The scale is not a newfangled object. It was being used as far back as Ancient Egypt’s time, and in every century since. Europeans have been using weight in culinary applications for ages. So why are Americans so resistant to embrace the scale in their own kitchens? We eagerly buy every other contraption that is available to us (quesadilla maker, anyone?) but a digital scale mostly gets overlooked.
I’m assuming it’s for the following reasons:
1. Americans are following the approach of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ when it comes to measuring by volume. But it is broke. They just don’t realize it.
2. Scales, even a digital one, can seem really mundane. Especially when compared to a gadget that can make pizzelles, paninis, and Belgian waffles, all in one. But that’s the beauty of the scale, it’s utilitarian nature. It needn’t be fancy for all the applications you can use it for.
I’d be willing to bet that most people who claim that they can’t cook/bake have too many doodads and not enough workhorses in their kitchen. The scale is a workhorse.
3. Scales appear to make things complicated. Where there once was a specified container to fill for your desired amount, now there is a piece of technology with numbers on it.
Oh noh, numberz!!
But seriously…it’s not that hard. My scale has a total of two buttons. One is to turn it on/off, and the other is the tare function and to switch between American and metric weights. In my recipes I’ve chosen to use pounds and ounces to appeal to Americans because it’s familiar, since we’re not trained on grams like the rest of the world.
Simply put, get a scale and give it a try. Chances are you’ll adapt to it faster than you thought and your baking endeavors will go much smoother and quicker. Once you get comfortable with some basic recipes you can start getting creative and adapting them to your own personal preferences.
