Happy Father’s Day friends!

It has been a few weeks since I posted, so let’s do a little catch up. A lot has been going on, some of it good. We got to see all our kids, at one place and one time even. That is fantastic. The bad part is that we were together in Orlando (my regular readers know how much I do not love hot humid weather) and we were all there for a funeral. That’s the not so good part. I am not ready to write about that yet. I will whine that while I love my family who live in Orlando, I respectfully request that the next time anyone has some life emergency, could they please do it in February?

Soooo, let’s move on to something fun. Why you need to cook with a scale. If you bake, you already know why this is important. But we are on the subject so I will work on convincing the rest of you. And yes that- weight is more accurate stuff is true, but here is a big additional reason- it is less mess to clean up. Got your attention now I’ll bet.

For the non-bakers: weight pops up in recipes all the time. 1 1/2 pounds of potatoes. 3/4 pound of ground beef, 5 ounces of grated cheddar. Sometimes the traditional volume measurements are included- often after some kid of processing. Like for the potatoes- cut into quarters that 1 ½ pounds is x cups. Grate a whole lot of cheese until you have half a cup. It is easier to take a bowl, a plate, or a paper towel, plop it on the scale, press the tare button which sets it to 0, select whatever unit you need, ounces or grams for example, dump in whatever it is you need, and you are done. No washing a bunch of potatoes, cutting them up, getting your measuring cups dirty and then figuring out what to do with the extra. And it is easy to get 1 and a quarter pounds of ground beef out of that big package using a scale for the recipe you need. Then you can measure out whatever size bundles you usually use with the rest of the package, label, and freeze.

You already know that I am weird and obsessive about some things. Cleaning is not one of them. In this recipe you would dirty up 4 different dry measuring cups and 1 wet one. And measuring sticky stuff like peanut butter is a pain. Ditto, molasses, honey, shortening… How much of the ¾ cup of peanut butter you so carefully jammed into the measuring cup gets into the bowl and how much do you have to clean out later? With a scale you do not need to do any of that. Just spoon the peanut butter into the bowl until you get to the 185 grams you need. Then you lick the spoon. Press the tare button and measure the next thing right into the bowl, repeat until done. Easy, precise, and less to clean.

Weight is also easier to scale. No pun, I mean doubling or cutting down a recipe. Half of ¾ cup of sugar is a pain to measure. Half of 150 grams is easy. Depending on what you are doing, precision may not matter. For meat loaf it probably does not. But for a cake recipe it does. I am terrible at eyeing things- is that hunk 1 pound? What does a 5-ounce chicken breast look like? Finally, let’s get further into the avoiding mess thing. Peanut Butter Cookies are my favorite example. Below are the ingredients for a recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction. The link has the instructions and lots of other information including multiple variations on the recipe. Most of the baking recipes you find online these days include weight measurements and there are numerous sites with conversion tools for those that do not.

For what else can you use a scale? I measure the beans for coffee on mine before I dump them in the grinder. Remember the weird obsessive thing? I worked for Maxwell House coffee, way before Starbucks introduced the world to $5.00 coffee that takes 10 words to order. People drank Maxwell House or archrival Folgers, based on which brand was on sale or had the biggest coupon. The coffee buyers said that the beans used in these brands were crap, Europeans would not feed them to the pigs. In the office we drank Yuban, a Maxwell House brand that was as good as it got at the time. I remember noticing that I really liked the coffee at a French restaurant, wow, this tastes so much better than what I was used to; and for the first time I understood what the coffee geeks were talking about. French Roast coffee was just not a thing in the early 80’s. So why do I weigh the beans? That is what they do at geeky coffee places. Different roasts and beans have varying densities, so they weigh to get a consistent taste. Do you care? Back in the 80’s a product research firm did a blind tasting study which showed that most people could not tell the difference between instant coffee and ground, much less more subtle distinctions. But a lot more people smoked then too. But I digress. I noticed that sometimes the coffee I made came out good (or how I like it anyway) and sometimes not so fantastic despite using the same beans and same water. I looked up recommended ratios and played around with it from there. And again- it is easier to dump beans into a cup than use a spoon- level or rounded, wait was that 5 TB or 6??? Way too much work.

So, order a scale from Amazon (I see a number for less than $10) and save yourself a lot of mess and bother.