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.
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.
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.
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.
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
So go to Europe.
What, I’m supposed to use my kitchen scale for something other than cocaine?
A cup of cocaine please.
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
Downvoted for popular opinion.
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.
Ain’t nobody in the US got a fancy kitchen scale.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I want to get into baking. Let me start with this recipe. Oh well, I guess baking’s not for me!
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.
