All baking recipe ingredients should be in weight, not volume.
All baking recipe ingredients should be in weight, not volume.
I'm tired of guessing which country the author is from when they use cup measurement and how densely they put flour in it.
So go to Europe.
- 2 cups of flour
- 1oz of water
- 50g of salt
Downvoted for popular opinion.
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.
I am a proficient baker and I can get behind this.
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
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.
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.
Any recipe that gives me the ingredients in weight is my mortal enemy. Most sites I've been to now have a one click conversion for metric or Imperial
Definitely not an unpopular opinion. Anybody that bakes more than once a year ends up wishing it was by weight. And I agree fully with your opinion.
Mind you, it doesn't actually matter with all baking, and even then it matters less what the actual measures are as long as the person using the recipe is consistent in how they measure.
What measuring by weight achieves is consistency more than ideal results, though consistency leads directly to ideal results. So, if you measure by volume, and you measure out each cup the same every time, you'll get the same results every time, within the degree of variability in things that can't be standardized like humidity, water content of flour, precise gluten amounts, etc.
Where volume measurements in baking fail is when you hand the recipe to the next person, which is what your post is really about. But, even that has limited impact on results since there are factors in end results that can't be standardized. The difference between a densely packed cup and a loosely packed one matters for sure, but it also won't make a cake recipe fail entirely in most cases.
For things like quick breads, you don't worry as much about measurements at all, since you're going to be adjusting liquid amounts no matter what the measures are. The only part that matters there is the ratio of leaveners to flour, and there's more leeway in that than there is in cakes.
But, even with cakes, you'll have as much or more difference in results from the type of flour as the measures. If your recipe is built on using AP flour, me using cake flour is going to end up different, even measured by weight. Noticeably different even to a non baker. But it'll still be yummy no matter what the measures are.
Bread baking is where you see weight measures used the majority of the time, and there's still a ton of variability between loaves because the environment plays such a big role. A five degree difference in room temp during proofing has more effect on the end results than those caused by measures.
The key is that you can actually control the measures, which is why I agree fully with your opinion. If you're enough of a baker to be publishing recipes (as opposed to just sharing them with people that ask), and you aren't giving the recipes in weights, you're a prat lol.
The book "flour water salt yeast" is awesome for a lot of reasons, one of them is that all of the recipes are in grams, us volumes, and bakers percentages. I primarily use the grams measurements, but the bakers percentages makes it much easier to scale recipes up or down
Yes, weight is more accurate when you have scales however if you are doing something on the fly or don't have scales then volume gets you better results than trying to guess the weight.
My biggest problem with volume recipes is that very often they don't abide to the 250ml cup but use slightly larger or smaller cups, which causes variations. There is also the caveat of not having a measuring cup available just as I previously mentioned not always having scales available.
With all that said, ideally recipes should include both weight and volume measurements at all times.
Stop getting recipes from whatever random source pops up in Google, and start getting recipes directly from sources you trust. Reputable test kitchens usually use mass for recipes, and at least the ones I look at will also include volumetric measurements for people who prefer them.
The thing with baking, though, is that there are many ingredients that require below gram level accuracy, and for those, volumetric measurements are more accurate for most people who have scales with a gram resolution.
Highly recommend this book for baking for this and many reasons. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/250188/the-bread-bakers-apprentice-15th-anniversary-edition-by-peter-reinhart/
Not really unpopular. That said, while flour (kind of the backbone of most baking recipes) is prone to being inaccurate when measured by volume, there are a lot of ingredients which do not have this problem and are not as sensitive to being measured wrong. If a cookie recipe calls for a quarter cup of chocolate chips that's probably fine. I think a lot of people don't have a scale sensitive enough to measure a half gram of yeast, either.
You can get your panties in a twist over accuracy (it doesnt matter as much as you think it does) but what youre really mad it is American cultural hegemony. So yeah good luck yelling in to the void I guess.
I like weight measurement best, except for a few things I don't really want to bother measuring closely, like cornbread or ricotta cake. Those I just know by volume and can scale up based on the number of eggs, and aren't fussy.
So for cornbread I know the dry mix is half cornmeal half flour, with a spoonful of baking powder, half spoonful of salt, big pinch of baking soda for each cup of that mix. One cup of that for each egg you have; melt a whole stick of butter in the iron skillet at 425F while you mix the dry stuff, when it's hot add the eggs and enough buttermilk to make a thick batter (have literally never measured the buttermilk), pour the melted butter in, stir briefly, then pour batter into pan and bake 20-25 minutes. Has never failed, and I'm sure it's never exactly the same twice. It doesn't matter.
"Recipes" like that I enjoy. And most of my cooking is loosey goosey like that.
But bread, and fancy cakes, and even cocktais, 100% agree, I would prefer to pull out the scale and SO much easier to do weight, in grams.