When you think of a kitchen scale, it may appear in your mind as a diet device for weighing portions of food. Yes, this is legitimate, but there's a more practical and even romantic side to the kitchen scale.
In America, a kitchen scale usually does mean something to limit your intake of this or that portion. In Europe, a kitchen scale is used to weigh ingredients for recipes. European cook books and recipe magazines mark ingredients by weight rather than volume. You may well wonder why.
Let's say you're making an apple pie. An American recipe may call for “six medium green Granny apples”. This description does not take into account the juiciness or dryness of those apples. A European recipe instructs you to use “1.5 kilograms of green Granny apples”. What's the difference? Six dry apples may produce a dry apple pie. Six juicy apples will produce an entirely different result. By weighing the apples, using a kitchen scale, the element of moisture and water weight is addressed and you'll achieve a consistent result by weighing. Using volume measurements produces inconsistent results in the finished dish.
A kitchen scale is most important in baking recipes if you desire consistent results. With changes in humidity, a volume measure of a cup of flour weighs more or less from one day to the next. In winter, heating may reduce humidity and thus change the weight of a cup of flour and it's effect in your bread or cake recipe. A perfect loaf of bread today could be a dry, crumbly disaster tomorrow, using the exact same recipe and measuring ever so carefully.
You may even discard a wonderful recipe only because you prepared it on a humid day using volume measures instead of a scale. You didn't care for the result and never repeated that recipe.
Even if the kitchen scale were not a model of accuracy, it has a certain aesthetic appeal that can't be denied. There are fancy stainless steel models, old-fashioned spoon styles, brass accented, shiny digitals and modern styled plastic kitchen scales that are quite attractive. Prices vary, but they all do the job.
You don't need to spend a fortune on a good kitchen scale. Even an inexpensive scale can be calibrated with a twist of your thumb, delivering an accurate weight. A candy bar is a good test, as the package is marked with the precise weight. Calibrate the scale to zero, then weigh the candy bar. Adjust the scale as necessary to get an accurate weight. You're now ready to weigh ingredients.
All you need is a cookbook that lists ingredients both by weight and volume. Do an experiment that will convince you of the merits of the scale. First weigh the ingredients, such as flour. Then take your weighed ingredients and carefully spoon the flour into a measuring cup. Which measurement comes closest to the recipe requirements? With that,I rest my case.
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