Weighing ingredients is more accurate than using measuring cups.
Measuring cups use volume to obtain the amount needed for a recipe.
This doesn’t take into account packing brown sugar, flour that has been packed into a measuring cup, or just sifted flour.
Weighing ingredients takes all of these concerns into account because air doesn’t add weight to the food.
Therefore, weighing the ingredient is the most precise, accurate measurement you can get when baking.
- Turn your kitchen scale on using the power button
- Place a bowl on top of the kitchen scale for measuring.
- Push the power button or scale tare button to make the scale go to zero.
- Change the measurements by using the other button for what your recipe requires. Change the measurements to grams, fluid ounces, ounces, milliliters, or lbs.
- Pour your ingredient into the bowl until you reach your desired measurement.
- Add your ingredient to your recipe. You can reuse the same bowl for your next food to measure. But make sure you zero the scale again after you place the bowl on the scale.
See video here.
Scale tare vs Zero
A scale when turned on measures zero.
When a bowl is added to the kitchen scale, this adds weight.
You can use the scale “tare” button to make the scale measure zero again.
According to the scale you can now measure your ingredient, without having to worry about how much the bowl weighs.
The scale tare tells the scale you don’t want to measure anything you have added to it yet, aka the bowl your using to measure your ingredient.
What foods can you use a kitchen scale for?
Where can you find recipes measured by weight?
King Arthur Flour and The Joy of Baking have all of their recipes in weight and volume.
Why are measuring spoons measured with volume and not weight?
Measuring spoons are measured with volume instead of weight because they are very small amounts.
These low weight foods generally cannot be measured accurately with a kitchen scale because the weight is too low for a large kitchen scale. Kitchen scales can measure heavy weights over 10 lbs.
You would need a much smaller scale with a smaller weight range (only up to 15 g or 0.03 lbs) to accurately measure the weight used by measuring spoons.
Kitchen scales are not calibrated to measure very low weights.
These small volumes do not dramatically change recipes because of their size.
Therefore, measuring spoons are ok to use volume to measure instead of being weighed.
