December 11, 2011

Scales

In order to bake German recipes, I bought my first kitchen scale in college. It's a Soehnle, it's turquoise (it was 1989), it has a spring mechanism, and it has a clear plastic collar that you turn to reset the scale to zero. Easy to use. Moderately accurate, down to five or ten grams. Turquoise! It had its own bowl, which was damaged in later years.

One of the advantages of using a scale is less dirty equipment. The dry ingredients can be measured into one bowl and then whisked together right away. Rather than forcing the cook to add measurements, all modern scales can be reset to zero (also called "taring") very easily. On my old scale, after measuring out 200 grams of sugar, you would literally move the the clear ring with the lines indicating 0, 20, 40 gram so that the scale read 0 grams again.

After renovating the kitchen, it was time for a sleeker, more accurate kitchen scale. (Because the difference between 198 grams of sugar and 205 grams of sugar is vast, vast I tell you!) I picked up another Soehnle, which could measure in pounds and ounces, if I wanted it to, which I don't. Easy to use. Accurate down to one gram. Sleek! Brushed steel!

Some ingredients are easier to measure by weight than others. After using a scale for a while, you'll develop a feel for how much sugar weighs 150 grams. Butter seems to be especially problematic for American cooks to estimate, but it's easy if you remember that a stick weighs just over 100 grams.

Most German recipes measure smaller amounts of baking powder, spices and liqueurs by the teaspoon or tablespoon, which is roughly equivalent to an American measuring spoon. Some German recipes, and most professional recipes, measure then down to the gram, half gram or tenth of a gram. There is a big difference between two and three grams of baking soda. After admiring the small scale that my husband, the amateur photographer, uses to develop film, he bought me a laboratory grade scale for the kitchen. It's accurate down to a tenth of a gram, but it does have a boot time, and an annoying "feature" of resetting to zero when you tap it, so that I grated 1.8 grams of nutmeg into the bowl, but it never measured higher than 0.1 gram.

For anything over 25 grams, being accurate to a tenth of a gram is not necessary, and over 100 grams, accuracy to within 5 grams is sufficient. In my opinion. You might even argue that an extra gram of baking powder or nutmeg won't alter a recipe that much. But I do so like being accurate within a 10 percent tolerance. There are also smaller, less expensive scales that measure to the tenth of a gram, but don't measure more than 100 grams.

This is the coolest scale I own, something we just inherited from my husband's aunt, the food writer Anne Mendelson. The spoon balances on the base, and the fulcrum slides up to the desired weight, up to 200 grams. Tricky to use, not wildly accurate, especially at higher weights. But is this not the cooles scale ever?