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WEIGHING VERSUS MEASURING
For years, chefs, professional bakers, and cookbook authors alike have urged home cooks to become comfortable with a scale, but habits are hard to change. Your mother and grandmother probably didn’t use scales, and you may even have their measuring cups in your kitchen drawer. But using a scale will change the way you cook and bake for the better in many ways.
And the merits of weighing are not only about accuracy: weighing is also more convenient. Weighing is a much easier and cleaner way to measure peanut butter, molasses, or corn syrup, for example—you simply set the mixing bowl on the scale, tare the scale (set it to zero), and measure the ingredient into the bowl, rather than having to scrape it into and out of a measuring cup. And, of course, there is the additional bonus that more than one ingredient can be measured into that same bowl.
Precision matters more in baking than in savory cooking, which is why Sebastien and Matthew provided exact weights, for optimum results. You’ll see that most of these recipes have what may seem crazily specific weights: 519 grams of flour, for instance, or 234 grams of sugar. This is because we converted these recipes from the larger-scale recipes used by the bakery. (This is another benefit of using weights—all recipes can easily be halved, doubled, or tripled, and so on, and they will work.) Do not be intimidated by these specific amounts—when you use a scale, it’s easy to measure 234 grams. However, when converting those weights to volume, we often had to round them off (despite Sebastien and Matthew’s preference that we not). In a short time it should become readily clear why weighing is the preferable route.
We strongly recommend using digital scales, either a bigger one that weighs to the tenth of a gram, or a basic kitchen scale for larger quantities and a palm scale that weighs smaller quantities.
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