What is the best way to measure your ingredients???
Correctly measuring ingredients is essential to successful baking and batch cooking. Baking is an exact science and requires precision to achieve consistent final products. Baking is in essence kitchen chemistry. Adding too much or too little of each ingredients gives you an end result that may be dry, tough, running, overly sweet, bland, or even collapsed.
You may say to yourself that “I always correctly measure my volumes with measuring cups”. We can go ahead and chalk that up to another kitchen myth. To prove this to you, try testing your measuring skills.
Experiment time…
Measure out 5 individual cups of flour with your dry measuring cups keeping each cup separate. Now weight each of these portions of flour and you will see a large variance in measurements. It could be a difference of 20-30 grams or more between each portion.
Take in to consideration that you were trying to prove me wrong and did you best to measure the volume as close to the same for each cup. Now think about how you normally measure and it is most likely with less focus on being as precise.
Resolution-
There has to be an easier way that is fast and consistent. The solution is measuring by weight using a kitchen scale instead of volume using measuring cups. Weight is the most dependable way of measuring your ingredients. The advantages are…
- Faster
- Easier
- More Accurate
- Consistent Final Product
- Less mess (weight everything using one bowl and the “tare” or “zero” button)
Your recipes do not come with a weights assigned to the ingredients? Here is a good rule of thumb chart for common volume to weight conversions.
|
Volume |
Weight |
| Butter |
.5 cup |
.25 lbs. |
| Brown Sugar |
1 cup |
6 oz. |
| Granulated Sugar |
1 cup |
8 oz. |
| Powder Sugar |
1 cup |
4.25 oz. |
| All Purpose Flour |
1 cup |
4.5 oz. |
| Cake Flour |
1 cup |
4 oz. |
| Bread Flour |
1 cup |
5 oz. |
| Chocolate Chips |
1 cup |
6 oz. |
| Cocoa Powder |
4 cups |
1 lb. |
| Milk |
2 cups |
1 lb. |
| Sour Cream |
1 cup |
8 oz. |
| Corn Meal |
1 cup |
6 oz. |
