The Real Reason You Should Weigh Your Baking Ingredients

Baking is a love language. A lot of time and care goes into making delicious baked goods for family and friends. Whether you are a pro or novice when it comes to whipping up your grandmother's moist and sweet red velvet cake or the family recipe for that loaf of fluffy dill bread, you probably find yourself breaking out the measuring cups and spoons for your flour, sugar, nuts, chocolate chips, and whatever ingredients are needed to make said baked goods. However, you might want to think twice about using these favored kitchen measuring tools and dust off your kitchen scale instead. 

We know what you are thinking — you either don't have a scale and have no plans to purchase one, or you have no idea which cupboard or drawer it's hiding in. But before you poo-poo the suggestion, it may interest you to learn that journalist Samuel Fromartz revealed to Food Network that you get better accuracy when baking if you weigh your ingredients instead of using the measuring cups, which are based on volume. Apparently, the amounts can differ vastly and Fromartz says a scale gives a baker more control over both the ingredients and the end product.   

Samuel Fromartz went on to explain in his interview with Food Network, saying, "If I measure a cup of flour and you do the same thing, the amounts we get will be different." Why? Because, generally speaking, we all measure a little differently with those measuring cups. Fromartz describes how some bakers are going to scoop up an ingredient with their measuring cup, while others are going to pack said ingredient into the cup and level it off, which leads to different results. He says, "By weighing your ingredients you will be more consistent and you can control the variables."

Furthermore, The Spruce Eats sheds light on the importance of weighing ingredients, telling readers that they are actually using a "formula" to create their baked goods and if you do not use the exact formula, your results are not going to be consistent. While they advocate for use of a scale for ingredients like sugar, brown sugar, butter, and flour, they note it is fine to use measuring spoons for salt and baking powder because they require such minuscule amounts. For this reason, they recommend using a digital scale set to grams. Follow this advice, and your baked goods are more likely to be perfect every time you bake.