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.
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.
You’re a home cook making a treat for your friends and family
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.
when I was a chemistry minor we did things the wrong way
No wonder your opinion is wrong
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.
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.
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.
Hope you like cooking taking longer with more little things to clean.
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.
Black magic chemistry at that, since local, varying conditions can affect baking so much.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Baking is not an exact science
It’s not, you will be blown away at how much you can wing it and still make a delicious cake or cookies.
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!)
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.
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
Downvoted for popular opinion.
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
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
So go to Europe.
What, I’m supposed to use my kitchen scale for something other than cocaine?
A cup of cocaine please.
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.
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.
If it works why change it
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.
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.
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”.
