I try to include weights for ingredients for almost every recipe on Smitten Kitchen, and I can’t recommend using them enough. [Btw, if you see one that’s missing weights, give me a shout and I’ll add them.] I’m a big fan of weighing ingredients for two reasons:
Accuracy: Do you realize that, depending on how you measure a cup of flour, it can weigh anything from 120 to 190 grams? The difference between the outcomes these amounts of flour will impart in a cake, cookie, or bread dough is staggering. Weights will never do this to you. But beyond accuracy, there are ingredients that actually hurt my brain to measure in cups because you will never get the same weight twice. At the top of this list is almond flour (which you can press and pack to almost double the volume in a cup), followed by flaked coconut, oats, nuts, and [actually cringing while writing this] chunks of fruits or vegetables.
Ease: An inexpensive scale will last you years and years and — this is key! — give you far fewer dishes to do. You simply add the first ingredient to your bowl until you hit the weight you’re looking for, tare it out (i.e. zero the scale), then the second, then the third. And you will never again have to do something I find maddening — measuring things like mayonnaise, peanut butter, or honey in measuring cups (all of that shoving ingredients into a small space just to scrape them out again). Weigh your peanut butter and you’ll never look back, promise.
Shoutout to measuring spoons, however, for very tiny amounts: Do I have a gram scale, i.e. a scale that’s highly accurate in small amounts and often is made by brands like “G Dealer” suggesting that maybe it’s not marketed for cream of tartar precision? Yes, I do, but I’m a pedant and a person who develops recipes for a living, so it makes sense for me. But for a half-teaspoon of cinnamon? A quarter-teaspoon of baking soda? It’s going to be fussier to try to get a read on a 10-pound scale than it is to just scoop and level it. [I love these measuring spoons, btw, as they fit in small spaces. Mine are in perfect condition after nearly a decade of use.]
Last week when I made the chocolate layer cake (in the Ding Dong cake recipe page, my goodness it was delicious btw) for my son’s birthday, I needed to measure out 3 oz of chocolate, and I remembered I had a digital scale in my basement that I had used for soap-making. I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of using the scale before, because it made the process so much easier and more accurate. And if any of you need another excuse to buy a scale–you can also use it to weigh packages and save time by printing shipping labels or postage at home.
Anyway, my question is, suppose your recipe doesn’t include weight; is it worthwhile to convert the volume measurements, or do you just measure by volume? Perhaps I should just make some notes to keep on the fridge of common conversions. I don’t imagine that many ingredients other than sugar and flour would be used in enough quantity to be useful to measure by weight. I don’t think I can afford a scale that can give me a more accurate measure of a teaspoon of baking soda than an actual teaspoon.
I’m curious about the effect of dry or humid climates on weighing flour (or other dry ingredients) for recipes. I live in a fairly dry climate, and my brother told me recently that when he makes pizza dough, he has to add significantly more water than the recipe calls for. Doesn’t that mean that our flour has less moisture in it than flour in other places? So if I weigh out 100 grams of flour, aren’t I going to end up with too much flour because of the lack of moisture?