Weighing Your Options
When I began cooking by my mother’s side, recipe ingredients came in one measurement style: teaspoons/tablespoons/cups—that is, by volume. I needed to know whether to use the measuring cup meant for wet or dry ingredients, but that was it. (Oh, except that I did need to know, for one special recipe, how my mother had converted my grandmother’s stollen recipe, in which a cup referred to a mug from my pastor grandfather’s church kitchen.)
When I started writing recipes, I followed that formula, but always a bit uneasily, because it left too many variables in play. How to explain just how firmly to pack that cup of brown sugar, or how much to fluff up the flour before scooping it out—and did you scoop directly with the measuring cup, or spoon up the flour gently into the cup? And augh, how much sticky honey will the average cook leave behind in the cup?
Around the time I started getting recipes published in magazine and newspaper articles, I bought my first small scale—but it wasn’t life-changing. It was a well-rated model at the time, and more accurate than the flour scoop method, but hardly precise.
Then I got a digital scale, and things began to improve. Not hugely, at first, because so few American recipes gave measurements by weight—but I laminated a list of standard ingredients based on King Arthur Flour’s chart, and began to memorize the swap. Still, even then, I was memorizing ounces, not grams: If recipes gave weights at all, they were often listed first, at least, this way, and I could more easily envision 4 ounces of flour than however many grams that might be.
Today, I measure nearly everything in grams—though I have yet to memorize the conversions for most of my standard ingredients; somehow, when numbers quickly get into the hundreds, that’s harder than ounces to keep straight. Four and a quarter ounces of flour equals a cup of flour which equals…how many hundred grams of flour? Somehow, 120 just doesn’t roll off my tongue.
But even without memorization, measuring nearly all ingredients by weight dramatically simplifies the baking/cooking process. When I can stick a bowl on the scale, tare it out (take the weight to zero), and begin to dump directly into it butter, sugar, flour, milk, and a squirt of honey, and then, using my teaspoons, add some yeast and salt, a loaf of bread becomes a one-bowl affair, with nothing more to clean up than the bowl, teaspoon, and a spatula.
And while baking still has plenty of variables—the reliability of my oven thermometer, how warm and humid the room is, room-temperature versus fridge-frozen butter—the scale removes one of the most frustrating variables for recipe writer and user alike.
So why aren’t all recipe writers using one?
I have no answer, other than to hazard a guess that it might be habit, laziness, or a fear that scale-less readers will complain. (But of course, they will also complain vociferously if a recipe fails for them, though it may be because their “dip-and-sweep” cup of flour came closer to 150 grams than 120—that is, a fourth of a cup more than called for. What recipe writers want their creations to crash over something so simple?)
But fine, for whatever reason, continue to give measurements in cups—but flip the usual and list them in grams first, with cups in parentheses. Owning one digital scale is no longer a luxury: At $25 for one such as this by Escali, or this pricier Oxo model with a pull-out screen, cooks can buy fewer dry and liquid measuring cups, reduce their storage needs, and increase the odds of success. I write this during a presidential campaign in which grocery cost complaints bedevil candidates. Wouldn’t it be nice to set cooks up to avoid failure and food waste? I’m looking at you, New York Times—having made another recipe you published just two days ago, with nary a weight to be found, and you, Washington Post, having looked at another just-published recipe that calls for 1/2 cup each of panko and parsley, in an ingredient list that did, at least, tell me my small onion should weigh 6 ounces.
I understand that American cooks may be better able to judge by feel which onion is about 6 ounces versus 170 grams, so I’m not complaining about that measurement. But at least for baking, everything that can be in grams, should be. That also means, for simplicity, no mixing of measurements. Don’t be like one recent book that listed ingredients variously by grams, ounces, and, for liquid ingredients, milliliters—that last being especially annoying when grams would have been easier and more precise, given that mL markings on my liquid cups come only in fairly large increments.
I readily admit I can be too easily vexed by life’s small annoyances, but when you cook every day, is this that small? Petty or not, my quiet, possibly tiresome crusade will continue with each book review.