All baking recipe ingredients should be in weight, not volume.
I'm tired of guessing which country the author is from when they use cup measurement and how densely they put flour in it.
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I'm tired of guessing which country the author is from when they use cup measurement and how densely they put flour in it.
i cant imagine this would be unpopular for anyone who actually bakes.
its so frustrating not having exact amounts for what is essentially chemistry.
I wanted to believe my opinion is popular yet recipes I've seen are almost in volume and I don't know why.
Baking is chemistry for sure.
My total guess is weighing scales used to be expensive / inaccessible for the common home baker and one of the first popular recipe books thus used volume, became wildly popular, and indirectly taught a generation of home bakers that baking recipes are by volume, not weight.
In my opinion every recipe should be in weight unless there's a good reason to put it in volume. The idea of washing half a dozen individual little measuring cups to prepare one recipe is absurd. Slap a bowl on your scale and go to town.
What does 1/8 tsp of pepper weigh?
Here you go. It weighs about 0.21g
That's a small pinch of pepper. I don't even own a measure that size.
I have a 1/8 teaspoon but the idea is... why? Anything being pinched, I'm not digging out a measuring spoon for.
Measuring by volume is definitely ridiculous. I'm an USAmerican baker.
You mean a separate bowl from the main container, right? So you can remove over-scoops without disturbing the previous ingredients? I'm still trying to get comfortable with my scale. I get frustrated because there's not parts of grams, and it doesn't seem to constantly update, it just jumps from too little to too much.
Always 2nd bowl. Having a more sensitive scale helps with it updating faster. You can also tap the scale to try and get it to update.
I use a 0.1g/2kg scale for most things, I also have a 1g/5kg one I never use. I can't find it rn but I also have a 0.01g/100g scale for when smartasses on the internet tell me to weigh a 1/8 tsp of pepper.
I feel like this is just a remnant of a time where a container with a bunch of lines on it was cheaper than a sufficiently accurate scale. It might just go away over 1-2 more generations.
Anyone who gets into baking today will quickly learn volumetric measuring doesn't work.
Basic baking you can get away with volumetric (simple breads, for example). Anything beyond that... Well, good luck.
Scales have been cheap for a couple generations now. Digital scales didn't exist until I was an adult, but the cheap spring type did. And those were maybe $5 decades ago. It's more about awareness and knowledge. Cookbooks 50 years ago wouldn't have had weight measurements because people didn't have scales.
While it's chemistry, there is a bit of an art to it, and you can be off by a bit and still have perfectly good bread.
I can't get my octogenarian mother to bake by weight, but she's certainly not on Lemmy.
Black magic chemistry at that, since local, varying conditions can affect baking so much.
It really doesn't matter that much. When was the last time you had your kitchen scale calibrated? Are you actually putting in exactly 200g of flour? Or are you calling it good at anything between 190-210? I was a chemistry minor in college and no one was meticulously measuring out the eaxct amount or reagents they needed, they got it to the ball park and made sure to record exactly how much they used. You're a home cook making a treat for your friends and family, not the royal pastry chef. And guess what? Those royal pastry chefs in the 18th century were also doing recipes by volume since precision scales weren't readily available. Meanwhile i get frustrated when i run into a recipe that only uses weights because I'm not used to it. I already have incredibly limited counterspace, and find somewhere to set up my kitchen scale immediately throws me off my game.
As someone said elsewhere in this thread, you aren't upset at volumetric measurements, you're upset at American cultural hegemony.
bad practices become bad policies. minor issues scale terribly. its not crazy to want to do things appropriately.
as others have pointed out, scaling is far easier than washing handfuls of measuring devices. i can easily counter with your process sucks and takes more work just because you lack counterspace as opposed to dishwashing space.
just because you dont want to be exact doesnt mean others cant or shouldnt.
I'm getting high as fuck and baking treats for my friends and coworkers, not making something for a competition or dignitary. The process is irrelevant, what i was saying is that whatever you are comfortable with you should use. I can quickly scoop out 3 cups of flour and a cup and a half of sugar in the same time you can weigh them out. And at the end of the day no one will be able to tell the difference between our cookies. The temperature and humidity of your kitchen is going to have way more of an impact on your final product than a 2-5% variation in the quantity of ingredients.
If you are wondering why your cookies come out different every time you bake, it isn't due to variance of temperature and humidity -- IT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE USING WILDLY DIFFERENT AMOUNTS OF FLOUR.
And yes you ducking can tell the difference between a batch of cookies where the flour is weighed vs scooped.
You can't accurately measure flour by volume. The amount you get in a scoop will vary depending on how compressed it is. You weigh flour to remove that variance, which can be far greater than 5%. Don't believe me? Put a cup of flour in a measuring cup, then start pressing on it to pack it (you won't have anywhere near a cup anymore). Controlling for flour density (ie: consistently measure by volume) is nearly impossible.
Brown sugar is similar but easier to manage (most recipes tell you to use packed measures instead of scooping).
Things like white sugar, sure -- scoop away.
No wonder your opinion is wrong
Please tell me about how your universities ran their chemistry labs then, because that's how they were at every college i attended.
I have a chemistry B.S. and Ph.D. Some reactions don't need to go to completion or are not expected to, like organic syntheses. In other cases it's important to get the ratio of the reactants correct, otherwise you get precursor mixed in with your product. For baking you don't want leftover baking soda, or flour, etc.
And with those methods, you'll never amount to anything more. Why improve your craft when you can be an underachiever, right?
Especially such an easy win as weighing out ingredients? It takes even less effort than counting the spoonfuls or having to sift flour into a measuring cup to prevent compacting and ruining the volumetric measurement.
It's not chemistry as much as chemistry is chemistry.
Like 1/4 cup of sugar being like 2% off isn't going to matter.
Then you want to weigh out your teaspoon of baking powder? I guess you'll need a small scale made for such tiny amounts to go along with your larger one. Hope you like cooking taking longer with more little things to clean.
Doing it all by weight is a waste of time and something no one with a real amount of experience cooking would bother with. Where your butter comes from is more important than how much of a weight difference can be from measuring out 3 tablespoons of it compared to weighing it out.
You pour ingredient 1 into the bowl up to X grams. You push the tare button on the scale and pour ingredient 2 into the bowl up to Y grams. Repeat as necessary.
You end up with less shit to clean and less time wasted, not more.
Baking powder isn’t too bad for a lot of recipes, but baking soda and spices are used in such tiny amounts that my kitchen scales do not measure them accurately.
Use non-American recipes.
The rest of the world does this. And guess what, 1 milliliter of water is exactly 1 gram, unlike stupid ounces.
I try that too for English recipes but then I get things in tablespoons, teaspoons, pinches, good pinches, full pinches, and small bunches.
Or my favorite "a good knob of butter"
At least they aren't using stone for flour though lol.
a millilitre of water is a gram, dog
Geez, you and the other commenter have good timing. It was a temporary edit to mess with an active commenter. Started as gram 😉
Density differs for other ingredients though.
It does, but I would still rather use grams usually. My ice cream base recipe says 500g skim milk and 470g heavy cream. I don’t have to get a measuring cup dirty—I just pour them into the bowl.
Wait, why on earth would you use skim milk in ice cream when you're adding in basically equal parts cream anyway?
The only thing that really matters is the average milk fat %. I like Costco’s 40% heavy cream from a price and quality standpoint. My family drinks skim milk. If I mix those two equally I will end up with about 20% fat which makes a very nice ice cream.
Yeah I guess if you already have skim milk around the house then that makes sense.
1 mL water is 1 gram
Hah, that was a temporary edit to mess with the other commenter 😉 Good timing for you I guess.
That's more an issue of its too hard for you to learn, then. Also, for cooking, that's great that 1ml of water weighs 1mg. Why does that help with cooking? All the weights of everything else will be different from that. It's much quicker and easier to use a measuring cups to get half a cup of flour than it is to get a scale and weigh out 60 grams.
one fluid ounce of water is one (weight) ounce of water
Not exactly true. See other comments.
A fluid ounce of water is an ounce of weight
Except that's not true.
So we have 28.4g, 29.6g or 30g of water. An ounce is 28.3g (closest to the imperial measures and neither of the US ones, despite the ounce being common to imperial and US systems)
I'd consider that within the margin of error for a volumetric measurement. Especially if you are being lazy like me and measuring something like milk by weight.
Funny enough, you made me go check my kitchen scales. They report in grams, ounces, and weirdly milliliters and fluid ounces. I used my scale that reports in hundredths of a gram to measure out exactly 1 oz mass. I then placed it on my other three scales to see what it would read. 2 of them correctly reported that they weren't quite at 1 fluid ounce, while the other said it was. I never actually put my scales in ounce mode, though.
Just because no one in your life cares enough about your niche opinion to actually have an opinion does not make that an "unpopular opinion." When your opinion is the opinion of hobbyists, professionals, and elites alike, it's certain not unpopular, even if it is niche.
You're certainly right in your opinion, and that's the point of bitching at you.
OP is probably from Western Europe, where a kitchen scale is common. Ain't nobody in the US got a fancy kitchen scale.
The solution to their problem is use mL for volume.
Lots of us have them. (Well, basic scales which weigh a tenth of a gram.) They're useful when weighing compressible dry ingredients like flour and brown sugar, and viscous wet ingredients like molasses and corn syrup. They're also helpful when you're multiplying a recipe by a factor that doesn't result in useful units; it's annoying to figure out how to measure out fractional cups that involve teaspoons.
They also help with portion control if you're watching calories.
I have had two different well-recommended scales for baking and neither does a good job measuring 1-3 grams of ingredients. Maybe I just need to spend hundreds of dollars I don’t have on some pampered chef thing….
I do have what we call the “drug scale” in our house. It can measure to 0.01g but its capacity is so low it is useless for baking. I don’t want to weigh my baking soda badly enough to get it out.
"coffee scales" are good for gram scale quantities
https://a.co/d/ehGTxCG
I use this one, it's affordable and it does a good job.
That is so cool!
I have one like that that goes up to 400g I think. I tried using it for measuring my creatine powder once but it wasn't sensitive enough. Trying to cook with it seems like it would be a pain in the ass unless I was making huge batches of stuff.
Sounds to me like you just have a bad scale?
It can do tenths of grams. That seems pretty good to me. Just seems like it's more trouble than it's worth to do small amounts like that by weight anyway.
I have a pretty good scale, but it doesn't register below 2.5g. You either need a different kind of scale for that sort of thing, or spend a lot of money on a lab-grade scale that can do both light and (relatively) heavy.
Technically oils and milk are lighter per volume than water so the mL to g conversion doesn't really work. mL only equals g of water, specifically.
I wasn't thinking about conversations, only picking a standard. A mL is a mL no matter where you are in the word.
This isn't unpopular.
Anyone who learns to bake quickly learns this.
Anyone who learns to bake knows that's silly. You don't need to try and weigh out a teaspoon of vanilla or that 1/4 cup of sugar weighs exactly X amount.
You don't need to measure spoons yes, but I'd rather not dirty a cup, a bowl, a teaspoon and a tablespoon. I'd rather dirty one bowl and zero the weight every time I'm pouring something in.
Like your kitchen scale is accurate enough to weigh out a teaspoons worth of baking powder accurately.
If you bake regularly then this is a popular opinion. I generally won’t bother with a recipe that does not have the weights.
But then you bake REALLY regularly, and you don't follow recipes anymore. I know exactly what the doughs and batters look like and how they pour. I know how adding sugar and water will loosen up the batter. I know exactly how the pizza flour should ocillate between the dough hook and the walls of the bowl.
It's like this bell curve of measuring
Flour's ability to absorb water changes depending on what variety of wheat and where it was grown and what the weather was like during the season. Weight is also just a guideline. Baking is not an exact science.
Pretty sure any pastry chef will strongly disagree with that. If anything, baking is the cooking activity most akin to an exact science. The amounts need to be carefully measured, the temperatures need to be exactly right (e.g. Italian merengue), the baking time needs to be correct to the second for some dishes (lava cake).
Yes, the measures can change based on the flour or its substitutes (ground pistachio for example), but the processes involved require an equal amount of precision.
A lot of chefs call cooking an art, but baking a science.
I am a former pastry chef and baker. You'd think it's very precise work but it's actually mostly intuition based on experience. You know the recipes and tweak them as you go. Also the batch sizes are many times bigger than a home cook ever makes so a cup of flour more or less usually makes no difference to the end product. With leavening agents the margin of error is smaller obviously.
This whole thread is pretty triggering to me. People think that if the recipe is exact enough, it'll come out perfect the first time and they won't have to make any tweaks sure to their ingredients, their equipment, or the environment.
There's a reason why I generally won't make a recipe for the first time for guests.
Lol. Dude, you're laughably wrong about this. Omg, I could just imagine trying to get lava cake out to the second or it being no good. Not even talking about how much temp, elevation, and humidity effect things to make "perfect recipes" non existent.
Also, "oh no. Your nutmeg is now 6 weeks old. You'll have to add an extra 0.9% of it to your recipe"
Cupcakes aren't like making Walter Whites blue meth, Hun.
And weather/storage. If flour is stored in a humid environment in a paper bag (like on a store shelf), it will get heavier as it takes on water. This messes up the weight of flour but also throws off the amount of water in the dough.
That said I prefer baking by weight, not because it’s more precise, but because I don’t dirty dishes for measurements.
I am currently pursuing engineering PhD working on bakery products.
Sometimes baking is indeed an exact science :D
It's just that the typical home baker has to guess and assume a lot of things. But then, a chance of failure is naturally expected.
In the industrial realm, baking is quite scientific, I'm sure. It's a much more controlled, and measureable environment than a home baker's.
Take our ovens (please!) - you want 450? OK, how about I give you 420 to 475 as I cycle on and off? Lol
Even in the industrial realm you'll deal with the variability in your ingredients (e.g. moisture content of flour), but you'll have the capability to measure that, and have systems to compensate for it automatically. (Yes, I'm jealous!)
Hehe, yes, we have those and even more, because while industry can still afford some slack (but can measure moisture, humidity while proofing, precise temperature, air contamination etc.), we scientists cannot :D
We have industrial-scale ovens and proofing chambers that cycle in the range of ±5 degrees and can control humidity through steam injection, professional-grade planetary mixers and big stationary 100+kg dough mixers, automatic devices to measure moisture content (although compensating for it goes manually), devices to measure gluten deformation, sugar content on all phases, structural properties of dough and finished product, microbial contamination of flour, dough and products, leavening activity of yeast and gas retention of dough, also рН meters and automatic titrators, chromatographs, colorimeters, ultra-precise scales...and that's only what directly relates to the baking process :D
...although yep, very regular baking takes a while under those circumstances
It's not, you will be blown away at how much you can wing it and still make a delicious cake or cookies.
Wheat and Flour Testing Methods - A Guide to Understanding Wheat and Flour Quality; Wheat Marketing Center Inc, 2004
If you know the factors that affect the flour, you can control said factors, thus predict your results based on such factors, more or less a measurable margin of error. Ergo, baking is precisely an exact science.
How would you find out those factors about wheat?
Random sampling flour batches. And you'd think I'm joking. But no, this is exactly how we invented cookies. Cookies were baker's experimental tool to test their flour and, by ovserving the cookie, predict what they needed to change in their bread recipes to produce the exact result they wanted.
Did you make that up yourself, or did someone else actually get you to fall for that? Testing bread flour has nothing to do with the creation of the cookie.
The story might be apocryphal, but bakers indeed do use cookies to test proportions of ingredients. You're not going to waste a whole pound of flour just to see the effect of more or less butter in a particular recipe. You do a little bit and bake them in cookie proportions. Specially when you have to make several hundred pounds of cake at a time, you can't afford to err on the measurements, and you do need to know variations in the flour.
Dude, you're so wrong about all of this. Bakers typically use the same ingredients from the same providers. So they know what to expect.
And when it comes to a dough or batter, a baker can tell by look and feel if the proportions are off and will adjust accordingly.
Downvoted for popular opinion.
What, I'm supposed to use my kitchen scale for something other than cocaine?
A cup of cocaine please.
Scale, fancy. I just keep going until the feelings disappear.
You're doing it right. The scale is for selling not measuring doses.
Cleanup is so much easier also. I don’t have to use a measuring spoon or cup for ingredients—I just dispense them into the bowl until I hit the correct number.
Overshoot? Then what, scrape the flour out from the sugar?
You weigh ingredients in one bowl and pour into your mixing bowl. You still end up washing less
Fair enough
I have done this many times. But I also got better at not overshooting.
I use 25 lbs bags of flour but I'm sure I could manage.
IMO anything sold by weight should be measured by weight in a recipe.
I could have an exception for things under 20g, which scales seem to get wrong a lot. I can do spoons, but not cups.
Also: Metric only. A tablespoon is anywhere from 13g to 20g depending on who you're talking to. A gram is always a gram.
Volume and weight are different, a tablespoon of salt, oil, and vanilla extract are all going to weigh differently.
I am a proficient baker and I can get behind this.
My kitchen scale won’t measure below one gram, and a lot of things (spices and flavorings, mostly) are used in amounts below one gram.
So I can either dirty up some spoons, or go buy a second scale that only gets used for the small stuff…
In general I agree, of course, but there definitely is a use case for volumetric measuring spoons.
I've never even considered weighing spices. They're usually given in teaspoons or just as "a pinch" even if the rest of the recipe uses grams and milliliters.
"One pound of milk"
yes. It's far easier to measure liquids by mass accurately
454 ml! Because 1 gram of water is also 1 milliliter.
Density of whole milk according to first google answer is 1,034g/cm^3.
It's been a while, but would that make it 438,68 ml?
Edit: But I totally agree with your statement. SI/ metric units is superior in every way with how easy it is to convert between them. At university in Norway I had American textbooks in all but one of my chemistry classes and all used SI/metric and proper names for the elements
The US isn't as entirely devoid of metric as a lot of people get the impression. We all learn it in school and are perfectly familiar with it, we just never made the switch for everyday units, so a lot of people lack the intuition around what the values mean. I can't tell you what 25c feels like without thinking about it for a minute.
I'm curious though, does anyone not use the proper names for the elements?
The texts books at least used natrium and kalium for the most part as far as I remember.
Are lot of the web pages did not. But this was 2004-2010.
1 gram of pure, distilled water at average gravity at sea level etc. but close enough.
Yes, but in real units :P
I have one bowl and I just measure in all my wet by weight without dirtying a cup or spoon
3/32 Stones weight of water.
I've never seen a commercial scale that didn't measure Grams and Lbs. Really common stuff.
It might be more of a concern for industrial scales, but I'm sure industrial food processing use Weight for all their ingredients already.
In the civilized world, they are. Except for liquids, but that's a given.
This stupid "How many grams is a f-ing cup of again?" is a pain in the a...
Years ago I printed out a copy of a weights and measures chart with common ingredient substitutions and taped it inside a kitchen cabinet. I've found it incredibly convenient.
And this is how we become our grandparents. 🥴
I do like when recipes give me liquids by weight as well. One tool for measuring everything is nice.
Here the metric system comes to help: almost any liquid in the kitchen is about as dense as water, so 1ml = 1g.
Oils are a bit less dense, but there you just subtract 10%, i.e. 100ml rapeseed oil is about 90g.
Honey is a far outlier with 1.4g/ml, but it usually given in grams.
If you live in a place that uses cups, the container the food comes in typically has both measurements as part of the nutrition facts on the back label. US nutrition facts are per-serving not per-100g like the EU, so for flour for example, it will have "serving size 1/4 cup (30 g)". The main exceptions are items meant to be eaten in their entirety like a candy bar or, unfortunately, liquids, which give you milliliters.
Luckily, I live in a metric country, and nobody uses cups for measuring except from my wife who waters the plant with two cups of water.
The problem always arises when I find an American recipe with such fantastic measurements like "two cups of spinach". Yes, that is a real one.
Volumetric leafy greens are the worst, lol. I guess salad greens don't matter too much cause it doesn't really change anything, but something like basil, you probably want relatively accurate. Same thing with shredded cheese, it can be a huge difference to the recipe if you grate the cheese through the large holes on a box grater vs something like a microplane.
I think, especially in American recipes, cups are basically the missing link between "grandma recipes" and modern "accurate" recipes. Everyone has gotten recipes handed down that call for "some onion" or "1 handful of nuts". It's fine for lots of recipes: no one is going to actually measure out 200 grams of onion for a stirfry, they'll just grab an onion and chop up the whole thing.
I share the idea that this is indeed based on recipes from ancient times, but the rest of the world has moved to the 21st century (actually, we even did this for most part of the 20th century already). I think this is in line with the "we will not use metric" attitude of Americans.
Okay I grew up using cups and find scoopscrapedump more convenient than trying to get the exact amount on a scale, BUT You are so right about 2 cups of spinach! Or really any leafy green, even worse than lumpy nutts or variously sized berries! Considering how much a cup of spinach can vary depending how you pack it, (not to even get into fresh/wilting/deflated/cooked and grown/baby leaves!) I grab 2 handfuls, although your hands may be a different size. Or I use as much spinach as I have, unless I want to save some for whatever reason.
That was the point. The recipe stated exactly that "two cups of spinach" without mentioning the state or kind of it. While it could have benefited greatly by including words like "fresh", "cooked", or "blended", it simply shows that volumetric is not exactly the best measuring method for such things.
While I agree (see previous) I think weight would be similarly unhelpful without specifying the state, since water (or the lack of it when cooked) is so much a part of the mass. If you are going to cook it in a quiche or fritter for instance, you should start by wilting it, or thawing if frozen, and then squeezing as much water out as possible. But in a salad you disturb it as little as possible, to keep the volume and mass, and feel like you're eating something even though it's mostly water.
Brazil got a weird twist on that: metric everywhere, except for most kitchen ingredients. Including stuff like "a can of milk" (milk is not sold in cans here), "a requeijão glass of [ingredient]", so goes on.
Good that I have not tried to get into Brazilian cooking so far.
Yup, it is that messy.
On a lighter side, although cups/Tbsp/tsp are still in use, they got padronised to 240/15/5ml.
Which does not help with non-liquid foods, as their density varies widely.
Yeah, it doesn't. Specially not for stuff like butter, as it's really hard to measure a "normal" tablespoon.
(It could be worse though. My grandma's measurements were basically "put an amount of [ingredient]", "aah, you eyeball it", or "enough to fill that dish". I guess cup/tbsp/tsp is a progress from that.)
Normally liquids are pretty standard, but I picked up a gallon of milk the other day and thought I must be sick or something. I handed it to my partner and she was along the same lines that it was extremely heavy. Not sure what happened there, but usually they weight around 4kg, this one had to be a lot more, 6kg maybe. I needed extra money to pay for some debts, so I was working instacart at nights. So I probably picked up 50 of them a week, always felt the same, this one... Not a single clue how it weighed so much, I figure if it goes bad the sun of the ingredients should be the same, its a closed environment.
Now that is strange. Did you open it?
Nah, I gave it to one of the Kroger employees telling them something must be off. The date was the same as the rest on the shelf, but I wasn't going to open it in the store
Heavy cream weighs less, about 95%, than what water weighs. I can’t really think of a liquid that I would expect to weigh 50% more than water. I remember reading once about something called “heavy water”. Maybe that is what they were referring to?
"Heavy water" is water molecules where the hydrogen atoms have an extra neutron, and pure heavy water is only about 10% heavier than regular water. Also, not something people should be drinking a lot of.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water
This is not unpopular. At least acc. to my experience.
So go to Europe.
All dry ingredients should for sure and they are where I am from. I still measure them in a special cup in the end that converts different ingredients from grams into volume but I wouldn't know what to do with a "cup of flour" in the instructions either.
Same. Is the cups thing an american problem (again)?
It is. All recipes I have seen use weight. It wouldnt surprise me to see an american recipe use "2 bald eagle heads worth of sugar".
It would take way more than two bald eagle heads to equal a cup, smh.
The only exception to this should be militers/liters. Because if you have to use, as example, 1l of milk, this would, if you want to be exact, be about 1.05kg
Definitely not an unpopular opinion. Anybody that bakes more than once a year ends up wishing it was by weight. And I agree fully with your opinion.
Mind you, it doesn't actually matter with all baking, and even then it matters less what the actual measures are as long as the person using the recipe is consistent in how they measure.
What measuring by weight achieves is consistency more than ideal results, though consistency leads directly to ideal results. So, if you measure by volume, and you measure out each cup the same every time, you'll get the same results every time, within the degree of variability in things that can't be standardized like humidity, water content of flour, precise gluten amounts, etc.
Where volume measurements in baking fail is when you hand the recipe to the next person, which is what your post is really about. But, even that has limited impact on results since there are factors in end results that can't be standardized. The difference between a densely packed cup and a loosely packed one matters for sure, but it also won't make a cake recipe fail entirely in most cases.
For things like quick breads, you don't worry as much about measurements at all, since you're going to be adjusting liquid amounts no matter what the measures are. The only part that matters there is the ratio of leaveners to flour, and there's more leeway in that than there is in cakes.
But, even with cakes, you'll have as much or more difference in results from the type of flour as the measures. If your recipe is built on using AP flour, me using cake flour is going to end up different, even measured by weight. Noticeably different even to a non baker. But it'll still be yummy no matter what the measures are.
Bread baking is where you see weight measures used the majority of the time, and there's still a ton of variability between loaves because the environment plays such a big role. A five degree difference in room temp during proofing has more effect on the end results than those caused by measures.
The key is that you can actually control the measures, which is why I agree fully with your opinion. If you're enough of a baker to be publishing recipes (as opposed to just sharing them with people that ask), and you aren't giving the recipes in weights, you're a prat lol.
As a baker where the outdoor temperature can vary as much as -40 to 40C (-40 to 104F) and the humidity can range from very low to complete saturation at any part of that range, I really appreciate weighted measurements (and baker's percentages). It makes adjusting the hydration much simpler!
If I kept up with journaling I'd have it mapped out now but try keeping your journal handy with 3 young ones running around.... Good thing they will eat nearly anything.
Yes, weight is more accurate when you have scales however if you are doing something on the fly or don't have scales then volume gets you better results than trying to guess the weight.
My biggest problem with volume recipes is that very often they don't abide to the 250ml cup but use slightly larger or smaller cups, which causes variations. There is also the caveat of not having a measuring cup available just as I previously mentioned not always having scales available.
With all that said, ideally recipes should include both weight and volume measurements at all times.
in baking mise en place is even more important than in cooking. On the fly baking is not adviced
If it works why change it
Because it could work better
Stop getting recipes from whatever random source pops up in Google, and start getting recipes directly from sources you trust. Reputable test kitchens usually use mass for recipes, and at least the ones I look at will also include volumetric measurements for people who prefer them.
The thing with baking, though, is that there are many ingredients that require below gram level accuracy, and for those, volumetric measurements are more accurate for most people who have scales with a gram resolution.
The baking recipe sites I use regularly like kingarthurbaking.com and nytimes.com/recipes pretty much always use weights. Some old recipes will still use volume. Unless the source is old (printed cookbooks, historical recipes online) I definitely have a prejudice against sites that rely on volume.
Those 2 are for sure on my good list. Also Bon Appétit and serious eats, too
Highly recommend this book for baking for this and many reasons. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/250188/the-bread-bakers-apprentice-15th-anniversary-edition-by-peter-reinhart/
My personal favorite experience relating to this was buying some ice cream with nutritional information by the milliliter, but with serving size by the gram...
Here it's nutrition information by the gram, serving size by the gram, packaging by the millilitre.
The only way you can compare the relative value of different ice creams is by using the serving size and # servings info from the nutrition panel to calculate the grams per package. (Or even better, comparing g/fat per package because that's where the value is).
Yeah, it was something along those lines. I don't remember the exact specifics. I don't really understand why that is. I guess it's because they're copying and pasting nutritional information from the tubs where it's more properly measured by volume. But one would think that regulations would require the same units for serving size and nutritional information. Or at least the same type of unit (mass/volume).
50g of egg
You can get your panties in a twist over accuracy (it doesnt matter as much as you think it does) but what youre really mad it is American cultural hegemony. So yeah good luck yelling in to the void I guess.
Milk
Any recipe that gives me the ingredients in weight is my mortal enemy. Most sites I've been to now have a one click conversion for metric or Imperial
Not really unpopular. That said, while flour (kind of the backbone of most baking recipes) is prone to being inaccurate when measured by volume, there are a lot of ingredients which do not have this problem and are not as sensitive to being measured wrong. If a cookie recipe calls for a quarter cup of chocolate chips that's probably fine. I think a lot of people don't have a scale sensitive enough to measure a half gram of yeast, either.
Depending upon the country, salt and sugar can also have different textures and grain sizes that can cause complications. I say this as I convert my US family recipes here in Japan.
True. Also brown sugar can be packed. I just object to the idea that volumetric recipes are always bad. Especially outside of baking.
When I cook? Dish needs salt? Grabs a bit with my fingers and throws it in... Taste.. Repeat as necessary.
When I bake? Electronic scale comes out that is accurate to three significant digits. EVERYTHING is weighed using it.
Anyone that doesn't bake from a box knows this.
I like weight measurement best, except for a few things I don't really want to bother measuring closely, like cornbread or ricotta cake. Those I just know by volume and can scale up based on the number of eggs, and aren't fussy.
So for cornbread I know the dry mix is half cornmeal half flour, with a spoonful of baking powder, half spoonful of salt, big pinch of baking soda for each cup of that mix. One cup of that for each egg you have; melt a whole stick of butter in the iron skillet at 425F while you mix the dry stuff, when it's hot add the eggs and enough buttermilk to make a thick batter (have literally never measured the buttermilk), pour the melted butter in, stir briefly, then pour batter into pan and bake 20-25 minutes. Has never failed, and I'm sure it's never exactly the same twice. It doesn't matter.
"Recipes" like that I enjoy. And most of my cooking is loosey goosey like that.
But bread, and fancy cakes, and even cocktais, 100% agree, I would prefer to pull out the scale and SO much easier to do weight, in grams.
All baking recipes should be in mass for the dry ingredients and volume for the wet ingredients, definitely NOT weight. Because measuring flour by grams (mass) makes sense, but measuring flour by pounds (weight) is fucking stupid. Lots of people in this thread pretending to be smart by using SI units, but were apparently asleep in class when the teacher covered the difference between weight and mass. If you're going to get picky about such a trifling difference between a volume of sugar and a certain mass of sugar at least get the details correct.
Actually it should be measured in the appropriate metric way. Liquids in liters and milliliters, solids in kilograms and grams.
Cause those are always the same.
Liquids expand and contract under different temperatures. They are not always the same.
And things like flour compact.
Yes they do.
This is true. If the recipe says sift first, do it or you'll have too much flour. Otherwise most assume you'll scoop, scrape, pour. If I think my flour may have settled too much I might turn my canister upside down once and back upright before scooping.
I seriously doubt your kitchen scale is accurate for your measurements to be any better.
We tested this in our kitchen. A glass pyrex used as precisely as possible was off by more than 5% in repeated tests. Our kitchen scale was off by less than 1% for weights over 5g.
And honestly, I am comfortable just pouring the milk/water/vanilla directly into the bowl that is on the scale. No utensil to get dirty. I recognize that I could over pour and mess things up but it just doesn’t happen. I can hit 15g of vanilla more accurately with the scale than with a measuring spoon.
I just disagreed with the statement
It may impact you, but the same would happen climbing and having different boiling points. It may be extreme, but we are talking about convincing folks who use a spoon as a standard.
Tablespoons and tea spoons are fine as a measurement because they are made to a standard size. That's like complaining people are using a piece of tape as a measurement. That's what i grew up with, and it is what i am comfortable with. I'm not saying it's better, I absolutely agree that variables in cooking such as elevation and ambient temperature/humidity matter way more and the overwhelming majority of the population wont notice a difference if you measure by volume, by weight, or are so experienced you just eyeball it.
The difference of expansion is so little at room temperature +- 10°C that it makes less sense, especially because some liquids have varying density by default and the same temperature.
Its not necessary to be accurate to the degree you want.
Makes zero difference in end results.
If anything, measuring by weight only is better for liquids other than water. You try measuring other liquids by volume, you run into issues with it not matching as well. One container of milk may have more or less grams per liter than another. Maybe only a gram difference, but still.
Besides, a cup is always a cup the same way a liter is always a liter. A pound is a pound. You might run into crappy measuring devices that aren't accurate, but the units themselves are standardized.
Metric makes some things easier, but other things harder.
What makes it harder?
And you don't need to be accurate to the milliliter for cooking. At that point you can get a laboratory pipette if you want to.
Metric is essentially a blend of two things; a set of units (meters, liters, etc) and dividing them by decimals.
Where both the units and the decimal divisions have a problem is when you don't have well labeled measuring devices. Anyone can figure out a third, or a half or a quarter, and then divide down from there with any given container. Dividing a container into tenths, and then more tenths isn't as viable. Not impossible, just not as easy as fractional divisions.
Then there's the units. To get a cubic centimeter, you first have to take a meter and break it down.
This applies to weights and volumes as well. Grams are such a small base unit that estimating with it is difficult. Liters are the exception to that, you can easily visually estimate a liter or a gallon, and if it's a liquid that's familiar, do so by feel as well.
But milliliters, cubic centimeters, those run into trouble.
Which is whatever. But the point is that the units are arbitrary. You could take a foot and divide it into ten and have a unit just as useful for decimal maths as centimeters. It's decimal vs fractional calculations that most people bitch about. And fractional is just as useful, and no harder to do on the fly once you've gotten to about the 6th grade.
All of that may seem moot when you're baking at home and have your scale and measuring devices of choice. But when you aren't in a kitchen set up for your preferences, relying on the smaller units becomes a problem. If you're away from an actual kitchen, the gap becomes even more significant because it's not that hard to make containers that approximate cups with accuracy, less so with liters, and even less with milliliters.
That's because most of the cooking units in imperial pretty directly fit readily available objects, with a small enough variance to not waste resources in the process.
Now, you can learn to visually or tactilely approximate SI units too. You can get used to the weight of what a hundred grams feels like, or what it looks like when it's known material. It's just not as simple as the imperial units in that regard.
Now, if you want to run into where imperial units really suck, look into the different standards for what sets dry and liquid measure by volume. They're different, but a gallon and a cup are rarely specified as liquid or dry, which means that the other units derived from them are a pain in the ass if you don't know the difference. And don't get me started with the fact that us standard units and imperial units aren't actually the same in every case.
But, again as units they are standardized and no more or less useful than SI units inherently. Nor is fractional vs metric/decimal a comparison that's inherently better on one side or the other for all uses in the kitchen (and definitely not in the general sense).
I had my wife try to measure water in a glass measuring cup accurately and consistently. I had her measure the same amount multiple times. Her variance was so far off the variance of the scale, that I convinced her that liquids should be done by weight when possible.
I think that if I had a cylinder like I used decades ago in chemistry class, I might be able to get consistent kitchen measurements. But my glass pyrex measuring cup with numbers on the side is terrible.
If I make a recipe multiple times, it gets re-written for weight versus volume.
Idk what is so hard about measuring with a measuring cup.
And some liquids have varying density wich would result in bad consistency as well.
And rice? Its just 1 unit to 3 units of volume to be good. You can mesure with whatever you want for that, it doesn't need accuracy.
It would be kind of annoying if you had do weigh all your liquids.
As someone who actually weighs their liquids. it's really not. Instead of pouring liquid into a measuring cup until it reaches how much ever you need, you put a cup/bowl on the scale, tare it, then still just pour in liquid until the scale reads how much ever you need.
If anything it's easier because it's more consistent. You can also re-tare and continue pouring more liquids or other ingredients into the same cup/bowl, cutting down on dishes.
The only annoying part is the first time you do it on a new recipe, where you have to do both measurements, so you can write down the mass for future reference.
Not really, not like the bowl has holes in it. Just pour it in until you hit the right amount like with everything else.
Seriously, i don't know why all these people keep saying they do volume for liquids. Unless you are using a skinny graduated cylinder, liquid measuring cups could easily get you 10% off your target.
And stuff like honey? No way I'm measuring volume for that.
I usually just run a table knife along the inside of the measuring cup and it does a good enough job of getting everything out, same as if you were pouring the hiney into a bowl to be weighed.
It is hard for me to believe the people who are pro-volume have really tried the weight method with a decent scale. I am so with you on things like honey, corn syrup, molasses. Those require both a volumetric measure and a scraping spatula and it is still so much harder than squeezing the bottle until you hit the right number of grams.
Also most liquids are water basically, so you can just convert it 1:1 to volume if you want to use a measuring cup.
I'm of the opinion that if you're good at what you do, you should be able to eyeball all the ingredients. You shouldn't need exact measurements to be able to tell if you're using enough if you know what you're doing.
Of course, very experienced people made the recipe by eyeballing, but there was probably still trial and error to get to the desired result. But I don’t have time for this when I’m trying to bake a birthday cake for my son.
I want to get into baking. Let me start with this recipe. Oh well, I guess baking's not for me!