Your most valuable kitchen accessory when baking is Place a bowl on it and weigh your ingredients and you're on your way. From these conversations, I've realized that it's not that they can't bake, it's that they don't really like sticking to the recipes they're baking from, let alone measure out their ingredients!
They fall into the bad habits of guesstimating amounts and eyeballing. Eyeballing may work when you're making soup, but if you're making a batch of cookies, precision really is the key to success and a consistent result, from one batch to another. And that's where your kitchen scale pays a very important role! Take a look at the photo for Bacon whiskey apple cookies below. All three cookies use the same ingredients but look how changing the amount of butter and eggs changed the shape and structure of the cookie!
Baking IS a science. It relies on chemical reactions happening between your ingredients. Unfortunately, this means that you can't simply mix up a dollop of this, a pinch of that, a handful of flour and a few eggs, and expect to get the perfect chewy chocolate chip cookie!
Baking doesn't work like that unless you have years and years of experience making your favorite cake recipe. For example, if you add too much butter or not enough flour, your cookies will spread. If you add too much baking powder, your cakes will taste funny, and will rise rapidly and then sink in the middle. Remember chemistry class when you were in school? You had all kinds of tools to make sure you had precise measurements for your experiments. Things might not have gone so well for you if you got your sulphuric acid measurements incorrect!
In the photo below, all the cakes contain the same basic ingredients, yet they are clearly not the same. The main difference between them lies in the amounts and ratios of ingredients used!
Yellow butter cake recipe. Is there a difference between dry measuring cups and liquid measuring cups? They're different tools for different jobs. Can you get away with using just one type of measuring cup set? In a pinch - for certain items like a standard chocolate chip cookie you definitely can and still have a great result. For more finicky baked goods measuring properly can be very important and the results can be very unforgiving if you screw up!
Dry measuring cups are made to be filled to the rim with a dry ingredient like flour , and then leveled. This is when liquid measuring cups come in handy.
Liquid measuring cups are usually made with a pouring spout and graduated with volume marks for easy and clear measuring of liquids. Even when using the exact same method, the amount of flour in a cup can vary. In the next two photos you see two cups of flour, measured using the same dip-and-sweep method.
I was very light handed when I scooped out the first cup, while I was a bit rough with the second. A lightly scooped cup of flour weighed grams about 4. A firmly scooped cup of flour weighed grams about 5.
That kind of difference can spell the difference between success and failure in a recipe. After many tests with various bakers and home cooks, we've found that the dip-and-sweep produces the smallest variation from cook to cook and that the average cup of flour measured using a dip-and-sweep weighs in at about five ounces grams. This is the equivalency we use in all Serious Eats recipes. You may find that other sites or cookbooks use a different method for measuring flour.
Make sure to check the equivalency charts of whatever source your using for accurate measuring and if the site doesn't offer equivalencies, consider heading to a different source! If you insist on measuring dry ingredients by volume, the trick is to make sure to practice until you can accurately scoop a cup of flour that weighs the same five ounces each and every time. I'd recommend using the dip-and-sweet method to scoop flour into a bowl set on a scale a few times in a row until it becomes second nature.
You may have noticed that when a Serious Eats recipe calls for flour, the amount called for is almost always given in both cups a measure of volume and ounces a measure of weight.
This equivalency approximates what the average cook will get using the dip and sweep method. Ounces are a unit of weight. Fluid ounces are a unit of volume. If measuring water, one fluid ounce weighs exactly one ounce of weight, however this ratio can change depending on the density of what you are measuring.
The good news is that most of the time, one fluid ounce of any liquid you'd use in cooking will weigh close enough to an ounce that it shouldn't throw your final results off too much. Our friend Stella Parks has this to say about ounces vs.
We concur. It can be very confusing. If a recipe calls for eight ounces of chocolate chips, is that eight ounces on a scale weight , or a one-cup dry measure filled with chocolate chips volume?
The convention in the US is this: If a dry ingredient is listed in ounces, it's a unit of weight and should be measured on a scale. If a wet ingredient is listed in ounces, it's fluid ounces and should be measured in a wet measuring cup.
Chocolate chips, oats, flour, pasta, and rice are all things that would be listed in ounces weight , while water, stock, milk, cream, honey, or oil would all be listed in fluid ounces volume. The exception to this rule is when a baking recipe very clearly lists weights before volumes. In that case, every ingredient should be measured by weight on a scale. At Serious Eats, many of our serious baking projects are listed in this manner.
This is because we feel very strongly that using a scale and measuring ingredients—wet or dry—by weight is the best, most accurate way to guarantee consistency in your baking projects. Perhaps you should look for a different recipe!
You want to get serious about baking? You want to make sure that your baking projects are consistent from batch to batch?
You want to save yourself from having to wash all of your cups and measuring spoons every time you bake? It's time for you to invest in a good digital scale even an inexpensive analog scale is a big step up over measuring cups or spoons.
Improved accuracy and only a single bowl to clean. Sounds like a win-win situation to me. Want to get even more serious about baking? When weighing powerful ingredients such as baking powder or yeast, one gram can make all the difference.
Adding a jeweler's scale to your arsenal ensures that you can accurately weigh ingredients to the hundredth of a gram to ensure foolproof results. Let's illustrate this by using that New York pizza dough as an example. Use a knife or other straight edged utensil to level the flour across the measuring cup. The most accurate way to measure ingredients is by weight typically measured in grams rather than by volume often measured in cups and teaspoons.
When cooking without measuring cups or spoons, always start with a small amount of a seasoning or herb, and build from there. This will just muddy the flavor of your dish. To measure liquid, place a liquid measuring cup on a level surface. View the amount at eye level to be sure of an accurate measure if using a traditional measuring cup.
Do not lift cup to check the level. Some newer liquid measuring cups are made so that they can be accurately read from above. Answer: To measure large amounts of dry or solid ingredients, like flour or butter, use dry measuring cups. Some ingredients are not liquids nor are they dry.
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