4 ms·
For main ingredients, sure: when baking bread, I measure flour and water into a bowl sitting on a kitchen scale, and it's great. But there's no way that I coul
by Steuard 6y ago
For main ingredients, sure: when baking bread, I measure flour and water into a bowl sitting on a kitchen scale, and it's great.
But there's no way that I could measure the yeast with my kitchen scale! When a (US) recipe calls for "1/4 tsp yeast", I'd be lucky if that were even one gram, and that's my scale's resolution. Same for salt, and for lots of other seasonings. (I suppose I could get a high-precision lab-grade balance for that sort of thing? Seems a bit more complicated than just using a few measuring spoons.)
That said, I completely agree about the ambiguities involved. If anyone out there happens to know what the heck "1/4 tsp of saffron threads" is supposed to mean, I'm all ears. (Thoroughly crumbled, I'll bet I could fit $20 of saffron into 1/4 tsp. Not crumbled at all, even half a dozen threads arch up above the spoon like some sort of abstract wireframe sculpture.)
- kevinmchugh 6y agoI have two scales for cooking, one of them a "drug scale"* with hundredth gram resolution. It was as cheap as my kitchen scale. Still, I only use it for modernist ingredients like emulsifiers, where small variations can cause big outcome changes. For a quarter teaspoon yeast, yeah just use the quarter teaspoon. Measuring by mass has a lot to recommend it, but converting a volumetric recipe to mass is not worth it. It's not as precise a process as you'd like and will still need ad hoc adjustments. * All scales are drug scales, if you're bold enough
- smoe 6y agoIn Europe, it is common to use alternative measurements, for amounts where you’d need a lab grade or drug dealers scale. A tablespoon, a knife tip, half a sachet, etc. At the same time it also used to implicitly indicate that how much you use exactly doesn’t really matter as long as it is in the ballpark.