Why are baking ingredients weighed rather than measured by volume?

Answer 1

Excellent question.

The short answer: Weight measures in recipes are simply more accurate than volumes, especially with dry items like flour or peas.

A longer answer: An unscientific test of volumes vs weight measures a short while back by people on a bread making forum showed that even semi-pros could have vastly different amounts of flour when using volume measures. What they did was have several participants, ranging from very experienced to relatively new bakers, use a volume measure to get "one cup of flour" (they were to do this four times) then actually weigh what they had measured in their trusty cup-sized measure.

What they found was that when weighed in grams, the difference in what each baker thought was 'a cup" ranged from 100 grams to 240 grams. That is a HUGE difference. And they also found that even with one person measuring a cup four times over, there was a discrepancy of up to 60 grams between one person's numerous attempts.

How much you get in your volume cup will depend on many factors such as how you get the flour out of the bag, whether you sift and spoon gently or scoop right out of the bag. The scoops all ended up being way too much flour since the action of scooping compresses the flour and allows for too much to get picked up. Conversely, sifting and gently spooning might result in a cup that's too fluffy.

A cup of flour, according to the flour manufacturers themselves (and they'd know), is supposed to be 120 grams of flour. So in the test, those who were scooping 240 grams were in fact scooping two cups of flour. If your cake or bread recipe wanted 3 cups of flour (360g) and you inadvertently added six cups instead, this would decidedly affect the outcome of your cake or bread.

On the other hand, if you weigh your flour, it wouldn't matter if you packed that scooper or sifted and fluffed like crazy, or just grabbed handfulls out of the bag, you'd still add enough flour (or sugar or milk) until you had the amount by weight. There's no fudging 360g of flour, you have it or you don't.

Let's consider 2 and a half cups of blueberries. That's going to be completely different if the blueberries are small and fit more in a cup than if the blueberries are bigger and less fit in the cup. But if it's 250g of blueberries, it makes no different what size they are. Once you've got 250g of blueberries on your scale, your stop.

Using grams instead of ounces is also a lot easier. It's all divisible by 10's where when you get to ounces and pounds, you need to divide by 16th, halves or quarters, etc. Also, grams are a smaller unit so they let you get much more precise. And ounces are confusing: if a recipe says it wants 9 ounces of milk and five ounces of flour, do you weigh the milk? There's liquid ounces and weight ounces, both are called "ounces" and it's not always clear which is required. Eight ounces of flour by volume (a cup) is NOT eight ounces by weight.

Then there's the matter of where the recipe was written: a cup in the US is not the same as one in Canada or the UK. I don't think this stuff could be more confusing if they tried to do it deliberately.

"But I don't know metric, it confuses me" If that's you, then you need dropkick the mental block, just let it vanish. Don't think of it as "that crazy metric stuff". It's just numbers. If the recipe says "218 grams of this" you set your scale to grams and just keep adding until you get to 218. It could just as easily be grams or glorniblops or flooberhoots; it's irrelevant what it's called, all you're interested in is getting 218 of them.

Weight is better because it's more accurate, weight in grams is better still because it's even more accurate.

Answer 2

if they were measured in volume it wouldn't work quite the same as say 8 grams of butter can't really be measured in volume and granules of salt are smaller than sugar so...

Solids are weighed liquids are measured. solids don't always change to a needed shape so by weighing it is more accurate.

I think I'm rambling but you get the point I hope it's not as easy as it sounds.

Answer 3

Because of the mass. for example, 16 pounds of flour will take up much more volume space than one 16 pound shot put.

Answer 4

A weighing scale is essential for accurate recipes where each ingredient needs to be exact. This helps maximize the success rate of the finished product.