How to Use a Kitchen Scale for Baking
Whether you are a professional cook or a home baker, a kitchen scale can go a long way towards the success of your cookies, bread, or your other favorite dishes. Although some people are used to the cup-measuring method, it can never be as precise as a scale. Additionally, by investing in a food scale, you will be saving both time and money, as instead of wasting more flour or other ingredients, you will be able to set everything according to the recipe, whether it is in kg, oz, lb, or gram units.
While there are a few food scale types, including trial beams and mechanical ones, our personal recommendation is to get a digital kitchen scale. It is a worthy investment, especially if it includes a percentage weighing feature – something that is highly valued by bakers and other cooks. On top of all that, buying one will not break your budget as the market offers more than a few top quality models that sit at an affordable price. Bearing this in mind, let’s go ahead and take a look at why and how to use a kitchen scale for baking.
Why You Should Invest in a Kitchen Scale
First, with a kitchen scale, you will be saving time that you would usually spend on getting those cup measurements just right. While some scales have a few seconds delay between the time you put the product on the scale and you get the weight results, this method is still more efficient than any of the traditional scales.
Apart from that, you will save yourself a lot of stress that is related to figuring out various problems like how many nuts equal one cup, should you sift the flour before putting it in the cup, and should the sugar be packed firmly in the cup before weighing it. Additionally, with a proper kitchen scale, you can manage and control portion sizes, and thus contribute to your healthy lifestyle habits.
How to Bake With a Kitchen Scale
One of the most common questions related to this product is how to use a kitchen scale for baking. While it is as easy as figuring out the weighing modes and included buttons, there are still a few things you should consider.
A feature that you will be using a lot is the tare reset, that will allow you to set everything back to zero when you need to measure a new ingredient. Also, you need to consider that leaving a kitchen scale inactive for more than a few minutes may result in it turning off and erasing your results.
In order to prevent this, and maximize the convenience of a kitchen scale in the baking process, we offer you a few tips.
Let’s start with the tare feature. As we mentioned above, the digital model does outweigh any other, including a mechanical or a triple beam model. Whether you are baking bread, cookies or a cake there are more than a few ingredients involved the process. On the other hand, a recipe often requires these to be combined in one bowl. In order to avoid using 10 containers for a single dish, you should get familiar with the tare function as this is one of the biggest advantages of using a digital scale.
Start by putting the container on the scale’s platform; once you have done that, push the tare button and wait for the screen to display a zero weight reading. Next, add the first ingredient and measure it according to the amount needed. Press the tare reset button, and add the second ingredient; the value you will get is going to exclude the weight of the bowl and the first ingredient which is just what you want.
If you are just getting to know how does a digital scale work, we suggest that you don’t measure liquid and solid ingredients at the same time, as reading different values can be quite complicated for a beginner.
Conclusion
With a proper kitchen scale, everything will be much easier. Apart from looking nice on a kitchen counter, this product will save you time and energy. Baking should be a fun process, and in order to keep it that way, you will want to escape all measuring difficulties — by investing in a digital food scale, all those problems will be gone, and you will be able to nail that recipe each and every time.