December 13, 2009

Confession: I've gone metric

Occasionally, an American food blogger will mention she (most of the food bloggers I read are women) is considering buying a scale for more accurate baking. My first thought is, unless she's baking from European recipe, a home baker doesn't need a scale, because all American recipes are given in cups.

My second, very ungenerous thought, is: she does't need it, unless she wants to bake properly.

I'm a metric snob.

It started with all those German cookbooks; European bakers weigh ingredients, and to bake from those recipes, a scale is necessary. Then I realized that a cup of pre-sifted flour weighs 4 ounces, and an unsifted cup (dip and sweep method) weighs 5, so I could either multiply the measure for sifted flour by 4/5 to get the measure for unsifted flour, or I could just start baking with the metric system, which is just damned easier.

So I learned XML and wrote a perl program to parse the recipes and convert them from cups to grams, or the other way around.

Baking by weight is more accurate. First there's the business of the density of the ingredient — sifted vs. unsifted flour, and why brown sugar is always packed into the measuring cup. There is just less sifted flour or unpacked brown sugar in the measuring cup. Secondly, not all measuring spoons and cups are accurate; in one of her books Rose Levy Berenbaum described weighing the water in her measuring cup.

It's just easier. There's only the bowls and pans to wash after baking. Cross contaminating the sugar with some almonds isn't a problem because each is poured directly into its own bowl. Some bakers are annoyed by measuring more than once (say, to measure out 2 1/4 cups flour or 3/4 cup sugar); again, baking by weight means just pouring. And the metric system eliminates needing to remember how many ounces are in a pound and cups are in a quart.