i cant imagine this would be unpopular for anyone who actually bakes.
its so frustrating not having exact amounts for what is essentially chemistry.
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Unpopular Opinion
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I wanted to believe my opinion is popular yet recipes I've seen are almost in volume and I don't know why.
Baking is chemistry for sure.
My total guess is weighing scales used to be expensive / inaccessible for the common home baker and one of the first popular recipe books thus used volume, became wildly popular, and indirectly taught a generation of home bakers that baking recipes are by volume, not weight.
In my opinion every recipe should be in weight unless there's a good reason to put it in volume. The idea of washing half a dozen individual little measuring cups to prepare one recipe is absurd. Slap a bowl on your scale and go to town.
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I feel like this is just a remnant of a time where a container with a bunch of lines on it was cheaper than a sufficiently accurate scale. It might just go away over 1-2 more generations.
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Use non-American recipes.
The rest of the world does this. And guess what, 1 milliliter of water is exactly 1 gram, unlike stupid ounces.
If I want a recipe in English I always end the search query with "UK" to make sure it's in weight, not cups. I'm not a fucking toddler
I try that too for English recipes but then I get things in tablespoons, teaspoons, pinches, good pinches, full pinches, and small bunches.
Or my favorite "a good knob of butter"
At least they aren't using stone for flour though lol.
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If you bake regularly then this is a popular opinion. I generally won’t bother with a recipe that does not have the weights.
But then you bake REALLY regularly, and you don't follow recipes anymore. I know exactly what the doughs and batters look like and how they pour. I know how adding sugar and water will loosen up the batter. I know exactly how the pizza flour should ocillate between the dough hook and the walls of the bowl.
It's like this bell curve of measuring
Just because no one in your life cares enough about your niche opinion to actually have an opinion does not make that an "unpopular opinion." When your opinion is the opinion of hobbyists, professionals, and elites alike, it's certain not unpopular, even if it is niche.
You're certainly right in your opinion, and that's the point of bitching at you.
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What, I'm supposed to use my kitchen scale for something other than cocaine?
A cup of cocaine please.
Scale, fancy. I just keep going until the feelings disappear.
You're doing it right. The scale is for selling not measuring doses.
Downvoted for popular opinion.
Cleanup is so much easier also. I don’t have to use a measuring spoon or cup for ingredients—I just dispense them into the bowl until I hit the correct number.
Overshoot? Then what, scrape the flour out from the sugar?
You weigh ingredients in one bowl and pour into your mixing bowl. You still end up washing less
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I have done this many times. But I also got better at not overshooting.
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Flour's ability to absorb water changes depending on what variety of wheat and where it was grown and what the weather was like during the season. Weight is also just a guideline. Baking is not an exact science.
Pretty sure any pastry chef will strongly disagree with that. If anything, baking is the cooking activity most akin to an exact science. The amounts need to be carefully measured, the temperatures need to be exactly right (e.g. Italian merengue), the baking time needs to be correct to the second for some dishes (lava cake).
Yes, the measures can change based on the flour or its substitutes (ground pistachio for example), but the processes involved require an equal amount of precision.
A lot of chefs call cooking an art, but baking a science.
I am a former pastry chef and baker. You'd think it's very precise work but it's actually mostly intuition based on experience. You know the recipes and tweak them as you go. Also the batch sizes are many times bigger than a home cook ever makes so a cup of flour more or less usually makes no difference to the end product. With leavening agents the margin of error is smaller obviously.
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I am a proficient baker and I can get behind this.
So go to Europe.
- 2 cups of flour
- 1oz of water
- 50g of salt
IMO anything sold by weight should be measured by weight in a recipe.
I could have an exception for things under 20g, which scales seem to get wrong a lot. I can do spoons, but not cups.
Also: Metric only. A tablespoon is anywhere from 13g to 20g depending on who you're talking to. A gram is always a gram.
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The only exception to this should be militers/liters. Because if you have to use, as example, 1l of milk, this would, if you want to be exact, be about 1.05kg
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My kitchen scale won’t measure below one gram, and a lot of things (spices and flavorings, mostly) are used in amounts below one gram.
So I can either dirty up some spoons, or go buy a second scale that only gets used for the small stuff…
In general I agree, of course, but there definitely is a use case for volumetric measuring spoons.
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"One pound of milk"
454 ml! Because 1 gram of water is also 1 milliliter.
Density of whole milk according to first google answer is 1,034g/cm^3.
It's been a while, but would that make it 438,68 ml?
Edit: But I totally agree with your statement. SI/ metric units is superior in every way with how easy it is to convert between them. At university in Norway I had American textbooks in all but one of my chemistry classes and all used SI/metric and proper names for the elements
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yes. It's far easier to measure liquids by mass accurately
Yes, but in real units :P
I have one bowl and I just measure in all my wet by weight without dirtying a cup or spoon
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I've never seen a commercial scale that didn't measure Grams and Lbs. Really common stuff.
It might be more of a concern for industrial scales, but I'm sure industrial food processing use Weight for all their ingredients already.
In the civilized world, they are. Except for liquids, but that's a given.
This stupid "How many grams is a f-ing cup of again?" is a pain in the a...
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