Why volume is unreliable
A cup is a measure of space, and flour occupies wildly different amounts of space depending on whether it was scooped, spooned, sifted or shaken down. The same cup can hold 120g or 160g of the same flour.
In a stew that does not matter. In a cake, where the ratio of flour to fat, sugar and egg is what determines the crumb, a third more flour is a different recipe. This is the main reason people find that the same recipe works one week and not the next.
Weight has no such ambiguity. 200g is 200g regardless of how it got into the bowl, which is why every professional recipe and every serious baking book uses it, and why bakers weigh liquids too.
What to look for
- Digital, not balance
- Faster, more precise, and far easier to read.
- A tare button
- Zeroing the display with the bowl on it lets you weigh everything into one bowl in sequence. This is the feature that makes scales genuinely convenient rather than a chore.
- 1g increments
- Sufficient for nearly all cooking.
- 0.1g increments
- Worth having for yeast, salt in bread, spices and coffee. A separate small set is cheap.
- A capacity of at least 5kg
- So you can weigh into a heavy bowl or a pan.
- A flat surface with no bowl attached
- More versatile, and much easier to clean.
How to use them well
- Weigh straight into the mixing bowl, taring between each ingredient. Fewer bowls, less washing up, and less chance of losing count.
- Weigh liquids too. 1ml of water is 1g, and milk, stock and oil are close enough for cooking. It is faster than a jug and more accurate.
- For bread, work in baker's percentages — everything as a percentage of the flour weight. It makes scaling and adjusting hydration trivial.
- Weigh the empty tin before filling it, so you can divide cake batter evenly between two.
- Keep them somewhere you will actually use them. Scales in the back of a cupboard get used twice a year.
Where volume is still fine
- Anything savoury and forgiving — soups, stews, sauces, stir-fries.
- Liquids in quantity, where a jug is quicker.
- Small quantities of seasoning, where a spoon is fine and a scale is fussy.
- Anything where the recipe is a method rather than a ratio.
- The distinction is roughly baking against cooking: baking is chemistry with fixed proportions, cooking is a running set of adjustments.
Weighing into one bowl
The tare button turns a scale from a measuring device into a working method, and it removes most of the washing up from baking.
- Put the empty mixing bowl on the scale and press tare, so the display returns to zero.
- Add the first ingredient until it reaches the weight you want.
- Press tare again. The display returns to zero with the first ingredient still in the bowl.
- Add the second ingredient to its own weight, and repeat.
- For liquids, do the same — most recipes work in grams for water, milk and oil, and a millilitre of water is a gram.
- For bread, weigh the flour first and calculate everything else as a percentage of it. Salt, water and yeast all scale from that one number.
- The whole recipe goes into one bowl with no measuring jugs, no cups and nothing to wash.
Common questions
How do I convert cups to grams?
It depends entirely on the ingredient, and for flour it is unreliable even then. Find a conversion table you trust and note that it will be approximate.
Do I need scales for savoury cooking?
No. They are useful for pasta portions and for brining percentages, and otherwise optional.
What about measuring spoons?
Fine for small quantities of seasoning and raising agents. A level teaspoon of baking powder is consistent enough.
My scales are inaccurate at low weights.
Common with cheap scales. If you weigh yeast or salt for bread, buy a small 0.1g set separately.
Try this next
- How to read a recipe why recipes vary
- Bread where weighing matters most
- Dense cake what mismeasuring flour causes
- Recipe scaler scaling by weight