And metric containers and recipes.
In metric countries, a small kitchen scale is very common. The US seems to run on volume, rather than weight.
In metric countries, a small kitchen scale is very common. The US seems to run on volume, rather than weight.
Baking is based on proportions. As long as you use the same measuring tool, the details don’t matter.
2 cups of flour works regardless of the size of your cup
> J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, the managing editor of the blog Serious Eats, once asked 10 people to measure a cup of all-purpose flour into a bowl. When the cooks were done, Mr. Lopez-Alt weighed each bowl. “Depending on how strong you are or your scooping method, I found that a 'cup of flour’ could be anywhere from 4 to 6 ounces,” he said. That’s a significant difference: one cook might be making a cake with one-and-a-half times as much flour as another.
So you have to carefully scoop precisely the same way every time to even be close to accurate??
And yet still you are right you must often adjust significantly in baking for other factors (temperature + yeast activity, humidity, flour grind and composition, and general feel on kneading).
Technically you’re supposed to sift your flour before measuring. This removes clumps and also helps you get consistent packing. I think in ye olden days it also got rid of any leftover wheat husks that made it through.
My point wasn’t that you get the same amount of flour every time. You get the same ratio of ingredients today.
Ime people way overthink home baking. If you’re not trying to make 500 perfectly identical units, you really don’t have to sweat the measurements so much. Make the dough or batter then adjust until it feels right. Having good pictures (or experience) for different stages of a recipe is way more important than detailed measurements.
As a quick sanity test, if it did, serious baking resources would just always specify to use sifted flour (as this is easier and requires less equipment than a scale), but since they don't (e.g. Modernist Bread/Pizza, if you really demand a citation), you can infer that sifting is not effective in making reproducible results. Also, note e.g. chemistry is not done using sifted volumes (peruse quickly the amount of articles trying to assess the bulk vs "tapped density" of various powders: https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22ta...). This should cause some skepticism about claims that sifting your flour is going to make baking results particularly consistent.
Sifting definitely helps remove variance (especially if you always buy the same flour and use the same sifting method into the same bowl, and then put un-needed sifted powder back into the jar), but IMO is far inferior to just weighing.
You're still right everyone overthinks home baking. Precision only matters if you are aiming for perfection, and even a horribly misspecified recipe made at home, but consumed fresh, is still generally going to be good, and definitely better than anything you buy at a supermarket. (And this is precisely why using a slide rule for precision is massively missing the point). As you said, there are many indicators that are more important to pay attention to.
And hope that if you share your recipe, or get one from someone else, that everyone is using the same tool.
Anyway, it's not really an issue.
I have no idea if this is true but it sounds like a coherent argument that isn't just volumetric vs mass units.
This is why any half-ways sane baker works off a scale.
This couldn't be more wrong and no serious baking is done by volume for dry ingredients (flour, yeast, sugar, salt preferments, other additives).
EDIT: It is clear from your other comments you almost certainly know what you are doing, but this particular part is very wrong. You can't measure powders reliably by volume, regardless of sifting, tapping, or tamping.
* and to head off the obvious "just don't worry about it if you go a few grams over" rebuttal: that defeats the purpose of using a scale for precision! So either you don't worry about the wiggle room in measurements (at which point just use volume, it's faster), or you strive for precision and it takes you much more work. Either way it's a worse solution unless you really, truly need maximum accuracy.
You're right volumes seem easier, at first blush, but the cost of this easiness is a dramatic / considerable reduction in consistency, compared to when measuring by mass.
Once you switch to regularly scaling by mass (just as a guideline, and still adjusting to taste, texture, and other factors), you'll realize the apparent easiness of volumes is pure illusion, and actually makes getting good results much harder.
You can have huge variance variance with flour or sugar depending on how hard it is packed and even humidity:
> I weighed each cup on its own, tared the scale, then scooped it into a bucket of granular sugar and bulldozed the top with the flat side of a butter knife (I figured that there's less divergence in sugar-measurement technique, and it's composed of fine granules that settle fairly evenly).
> The results ranged from 6.81 ounces (193 grams) to 8.08 ounces (230 grams).
* https://food52.com/story/16497-the-truth-about-your-measurin...
And you have to trust your measuring cups (>5% off) and spoons (>20% off):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Q21DWg0Fk&t=54s
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEXLt4gz7lY&t=59s
* https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2014/11/03/your-measur...
Have you ever verified that your cups/spoons are actually accurate?
> Takes a few seconds. If I use a scale, I have to watch the scale carefully until I'm getting close, then slow down my rate of pouring into the bowl greatly so that I don't go over.
Yes, that's the point, especially in baking: to get an accurate quantity. (Though in cooking it's less important, relatively speaking.)