Kitchen scale is ‘weigh’ better
(Originally published June 2024)
When it comes to measuring stuff, I belong to the school of “close enough.” I don’t care about precision.
It’s part of my charm.
NASA scientists and drug dealers might need to fuss over exact measurements, but I don’t. Instead, I use my judgment. It’s faster. It’s easier. And usually, it’s close enough.
Sure, I don’t always get the greatest results. Last summer, for instance, I sewed myself a sundress without measuring the fabric properly. The tradeoff for speed was that now, to make the hem look even, I have to keep my left knee bent when I walk.
“In the olden days, people didn’t weigh things, and they did all right.”
My nonchalance also affects my marriage. Mark, a builder, is downright obsessed with accuracy. One time he walked in on me hanging a shelf. I was holding it against the wall as straight as I could and eyeballing it for level. He didn’t speak to me for days after that.
It also irks him that I cook with the same casual attitude. I’ll make a new dish that we love, but it won’t turn out the same when I make it again. He says that if I measured the ingredients every time, I could reproduce the recipe exactly.
Why would I want to do that? The next, slightly different version could be even better. (Often it is not. But every meal is a new adventure.)
Embracing adventure, however, works better with cooking than with baking, where tossing in a handful of this and a pinch of that is not how it’s done. And whenever I let slip to one of my talented baking friends that I’ve committed yet another kitchen sin—measuring flour in a liquid measuring cup, using my curled palm as a teaspoon—they gasp.
“You really should weigh your ingredients,” they say through clenched teeth. “Baking relies on science, and accuracy is key to consistent results.”
I counter: “Meh. In the olden days, people didn’t weigh things, and they did all right.”
Here, my argument falls apart, because (a) I am objectively a mediocre baker, and (b) in the olden days, people were OK with eating hardtack and nine-day-old pease porridge. They didn’t stress about measurements because they were more focused on fending off starvation than on earning a Michelin star.
To me, baking is meant to be a pleasurable pastime, not a science test. Still, if only to get those bakers off my back, I recently purchased a cheap digital kitchen scale.
I hate to admit it, but I am a changed woman.
Now that I can calculate my ingredients to the tenth of an ounce or—even better—to the gram, my baking has improved immeasurably (ha).
Plus I can weigh out equal portions of things like ground beef for burgers and dough for English muffins. Pre-scale, my dinner rolls never look like a matched set. It didn’t bother me too much, but now that I can pinpoint their weight, I take pride in their uniformity.
The other night we had friends over for a cookout. They were too polite to gush that my homemade hamburger buns looked identical, so I straight-up told them: All the buns weighed within two grams of each other.
They were so impressed.
My newfound fascination with weighing ingredients has bumped my baking skills up to a whole new level. I’m not sure, however, how I feel about that.
It goes against my free-wheeling approach, not just to baking but to anything that requires accuracy. So now I’m wondering: Is my lifelong belief in “close enough” really part of my charm? Or am I just careless?
Lately, I’ve been imagining how nice it would feel to wear my hand-sewn sundress without having to drag one leg. And how tickled Mark would be if, instead of giving him a measurement by holding my hands a certain distance apart, I told him in actual inches. What if I finally learned how to read those super-tiny hashmarks on the measuring tape? I bet he’d marry me all over again.
On the other hand, I’m afraid I might get too bogged down in the need for accuracy. I don’t want to lose the happy-go-lucky part of me, the easygoing part that doesn’t get hung up on perfection.
This kitchen scale has given me a lot to think about, and at the moment I don’t know what I’ll do.
But, as you might expect, I’m enjoying weighing my options.
