Unpopular Opinion
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i cant imagine this would be unpopular for anyone who actually bakes.
its so frustrating not having exact amounts for what is essentially chemistry.
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.
You mean a separate bowl from the main container, right? So you can remove over-scoops without disturbing the previous ingredients? I'm still trying to get comfortable with my scale. I get frustrated because there's not parts of grams, and it doesn't seem to constantly update, it just jumps from too little to too much.
Always 2nd bowl. Having a more sensitive scale helps with it updating faster. You can also tap the scale to try and get it to update.
I use a 0.1g/2kg scale for most things, I also have a 1g/5kg one I never use. I can't find it rn but I also have a 0.01g/100g scale for when smartasses on the internet tell me to weigh a 1/8 tsp of pepper.
What does 1/8 tsp of pepper weigh?
Here you go. It weighs about 0.21g
That's a small pinch of pepper. I don't even own a measure that size.
I have a 1/8 teaspoon but the idea is... why? Anything being pinched, I'm not digging out a measuring spoon for.
Measuring by volume is definitely ridiculous. I'm an USAmerican baker.
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.
Anyone who gets into baking today will quickly learn volumetric measuring doesn't work.
Basic baking you can get away with volumetric (simple breads, for example). Anything beyond that... Well, good luck.
Scales have been cheap for a couple generations now. Digital scales didn't exist until I was an adult, but the cheap spring type did. And those were maybe $5 decades ago. It's more about awareness and knowledge. Cookbooks 50 years ago wouldn't have had weight measurements because people didn't have scales.
While it's chemistry, there is a bit of an art to it, and you can be off by a bit and still have perfectly good bread.
I can't get my octogenarian mother to bake by weight, but she's certainly not on Lemmy.
Black magic chemistry at that, since local, varying conditions can affect baking so much.
It really doesn't matter that much. When was the last time you had your kitchen scale calibrated? Are you actually putting in exactly 200g of flour? Or are you calling it good at anything between 190-210? I was a chemistry minor in college and no one was meticulously measuring out the eaxct amount or reagents they needed, they got it to the ball park and made sure to record exactly how much they used. You're a home cook making a treat for your friends and family, not the royal pastry chef. And guess what? Those royal pastry chefs in the 18th century were also doing recipes by volume since precision scales weren't readily available. Meanwhile i get frustrated when i run into a recipe that only uses weights because I'm not used to it. I already have incredibly limited counterspace, and find somewhere to set up my kitchen scale immediately throws me off my game.
As someone said elsewhere in this thread, you aren't upset at volumetric measurements, you're upset at American cultural hegemony.
bad practices become bad policies. minor issues scale terribly. its not crazy to want to do things appropriately.
as others have pointed out, scaling is far easier than washing handfuls of measuring devices. i can easily counter with your process sucks and takes more work just because you lack counterspace as opposed to dishwashing space.
just because you dont want to be exact doesnt mean others cant or shouldnt.
I'm getting high as fuck and baking treats for my friends and coworkers, not making something for a competition or dignitary. The process is irrelevant, what i was saying is that whatever you are comfortable with you should use. I can quickly scoop out 3 cups of flour and a cup and a half of sugar in the same time you can weigh them out. And at the end of the day no one will be able to tell the difference between our cookies. The temperature and humidity of your kitchen is going to have way more of an impact on your final product than a 2-5% variation in the quantity of ingredients.
If you are wondering why your cookies come out different every time you bake, it isn't due to variance of temperature and humidity -- IT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE USING WILDLY DIFFERENT AMOUNTS OF FLOUR.
And yes you ducking can tell the difference between a batch of cookies where the flour is weighed vs scooped.
You can't accurately measure flour by volume. The amount you get in a scoop will vary depending on how compressed it is. You weigh flour to remove that variance, which can be far greater than 5%. Don't believe me? Put a cup of flour in a measuring cup, then start pressing on it to pack it (you won't have anywhere near a cup anymore). Controlling for flour density (ie: consistently measure by volume) is nearly impossible.
Brown sugar is similar but easier to manage (most recipes tell you to use packed measures instead of scooping).
Things like white sugar, sure -- scoop away.
No wonder your opinion is wrong
Please tell me about how your universities ran their chemistry labs then, because that's how they were at every college i attended.
I have a chemistry B.S. and Ph.D. Some reactions don't need to go to completion or are not expected to, like organic syntheses. In other cases it's important to get the ratio of the reactants correct, otherwise you get precursor mixed in with your product. For baking you don't want leftover baking soda, or flour, etc.
And with those methods, you'll never amount to anything more. Why improve your craft when you can be an underachiever, right?
Especially such an easy win as weighing out ingredients? It takes even less effort than counting the spoonfuls or having to sift flour into a measuring cup to prevent compacting and ruining the volumetric measurement.
It's not chemistry as much as chemistry is chemistry.
Like 1/4 cup of sugar being like 2% off isn't going to matter.
Then you want to weigh out your teaspoon of baking powder? I guess you'll need a small scale made for such tiny amounts to go along with your larger one. Hope you like cooking taking longer with more little things to clean.
Doing it all by weight is a waste of time and something no one with a real amount of experience cooking would bother with. Where your butter comes from is more important than how much of a weight difference can be from measuring out 3 tablespoons of it compared to weighing it out.
You pour ingredient 1 into the bowl up to X grams. You push the tare button on the scale and pour ingredient 2 into the bowl up to Y grams. Repeat as necessary.
You end up with less shit to clean and less time wasted, not more.
Baking powder isn’t too bad for a lot of recipes, but baking soda and spices are used in such tiny amounts that my kitchen scales do not measure them accurately.