The food lab better home cooking through science ( PDFDrive ) 78

conversion for a cup of all-purpose flour), there’d be no problem at all: each person would weigh out exactly the same amount, regardless of how they handled a cup measure With its fluffy texture and easy-to-aerate nature, flour is probably the most extreme example of this lack of correlation between volume and weight, but it extends to other ingredients as well • Easy cleanup Think of it this way: to make a pizza crust recipe that calls for a couple cups of flour, a half teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of olive oil, a cup of water, and a teaspoon of yeast using volume measures requires you to dirty at the very least a mixing bowl, a dry cup measure, a liquid cup measure, a half-teaspoon measure, a tablespoon measure, and a full teaspoon measure Total items to wash: six Not too nice Here’s how I make my pizza crust: place the bowl on the scale and weigh the required ingredients one at a time directly into the bowl Total items to wash: one Get it? • Measuring sticky items is easy Ever try and measure out, say, teaspoons of honey? It’s not easy Sure, getting the honey into the teaspoon measure is simple enough—it’s getting it out that’s the problem You end up either getting about half of it out and eyeballing an extra squirt or so directly from the bottle or, if you’re anything like I used to be, you end up with most of the honey stuck to your finger as you try to scoop it out in desperation With a kitchen scale and volume measurements, fretting about sticky ingredients is a thing of the past Here’s the thing: We all grew up in this country using volume measurements instead of weight We also unfortunately grew up without a firm grasp of the metric system, a system of measurement vastly superior to our ridiculous feet, inches, cups, and gallons It might be harder to convince people to switch to metrics, but using weights instead of volume should be a no-brainer for anyone Trust me Buy yourself a good kitchen scale  ... ingredients is a thing of the past Here’s the thing: We all grew up in this country using volume measurements instead of weight We also unfortunately grew up without a firm grasp of the metric system,