Flour by weight question

And are the eggs from an African or European swallow chicken?

I just weighed each of a dozen “large” eggs from Lucerne Dairy Farms. The weights range from 54 to 61 grams, with an average of 57.3.

I suggest you make one batch with 142 grams per cup and another batch with 120 grams per cup, and compare them. For science.

What i have done, as i started to convey my recipes, is to measure a cup of flour, it whatever the recipe calls for the way i always have, and then weigh what i just measured. This reproduce the recipe as i made it.

Then i round the number and write it down. If the recipe comes out right, that’s my number of grams. If it doesn’t, i use a little more or a little less next time.

I mostly only weigh flour and things that are sticky (shortening, molasses…) I find it’s easier to with those than to carefully measure them by volume. I usually measure the sugar, milk, etc. unless i can just dump them into the same bowl as the flour, in which case the scale is already out and it might be worth weighing that, too. Stuff like eggs, carrots, onions i always count “pieces”. (One large onion, two medium carrots, whatever)

But anyway, i converted all my recipes to weights by measuring the way i always did, using the brand of flour, etc., I’ve always used. That way the recipe comes out the way it always has.

I don’t care what you consider it to be. I would like to see the “nice numbers” that would correspond to an Rx like the one suggested given that it has “1 egg” in it (as a “metric Rx” is claimed would have similarly nice numbers).

IME, you should record the brands of each purchased ingredient if you want the Rx to be repeatable, over the long term. And, there’s still no guarantee of this - but, at least you know that “something” changed to cause the Rx to turn out the way it did.

I had to reformulate all of my “tomato sauce-based” Rxs when I moved here because the brand of canned tomatoes I had previously relied upon was not available, locally. Some years ago, the Hoisin sauce that I was using “changed” rendering the Rxs that used it mostly impalatable; I have since learned how to make my own Hoisin sauce to compensate. I’ve not made an apple pie in 30+ years as the apples I use aren’t available locally and don’t “ship” well.

I’m particularly fussy with baking powder and flavorings as there are often disappointments when treating them as interchangeable products (I’ll “make” baking powder in some Rxs to precisely control the ratio of acting agents; I use anise oil instead of anise extract; specific liqueres, etc.).

Good god. Do y’all ever get around to eating?

Any chef, home cook, diner slop maker worth his salt, just tosses stuff in.

I realize there are times when being somewhere in a the ballpark is optimal. Any dry ingredient is gonna be different when you add the humidity and temperature of your kitchen.

If you have to be that particular about every tiny thing there’s no way you’re enjoying eating it. IMO.

(The scoop in my flour canister is EX-actly one cup. The flour brand is which ever is cheap. We eat well…the end)

oh the horrors and inconvenience you poor thing you :rofl:

Sure! If you’re a good baker/cook, eating good food is easy and doesn’t take much time at all! I spend more time packaging baked goods to mail/ship to friends/family.

Regular meals are even simpler. We had an oriental dish, today (thinly sliced pork tenderloin, bamboo shoots, diced scallions, and a sauce) served over brown rice. Tomorrow, chicken parmigiana and mixed vegetables.

I bake at least twice a week (though tend not to eat baked goods – the items that I like tend not to be liked by my other half and vice versa) and cook at least two meals a day.

Yet spend very little time in the kitchen.

wait until you get a recipe that…" dashes" dabs" pinches" a splash" a dusting"

we could never figure out why Great Aunt Azealas " secret Christmas cake recipes tasted different every year some years it changed slightly to What the heck is this mess?

until we read the recipe that she left us in her will;l then we also factored in it also depended on the mood and how much holiday cheer was drunk…

You have to know if it is refering FORMALLY to dashes (1/8tsp), “pinches” (1/16 tsp), “smidgens” (1/32), etc. These often approximate what you would think of when hearing the terms casually (e.g., a pinch is about what you can hold between your “pinched” fingertips).

My mother’s Rxs were all “informal” – often failing to list all of the ingredients, specifying cooking/baking times, etc.

Yet, I was able to create well defined versions of each that exceeded the qualities of hers!

On one visit, home, I set about making scatiatta for them. She opted to watch me, to “see how I made it” (as she much prefered mine to anything she could purchase in Little Italy).

And, then, proceeded to criticize each of my ingredients, technique, etc. I finally turned to her and said, “Ma, do you want me to make it YOUR way? Or, do you want it to TASTE GOOD?”

If you don’t care about what you are eating, then you likely don’t care about how it is made. Any calories are as good as any other calories! Your BODY doesn’t care.

But, IME, people actually enjoy good foods but can’t always have them (cost, availability, etc.). Each of my healthcare providers looks forward to my (unscheduled) visits around the holidays as they know there will be something tastey for them to take home. Neighbors routinely hint at “what are you baking, today” in the hope of being on the receiving end of that effort.

And, family/friends always KNOW their gifts will be edible, instead of “practical”.

If you are going to take the time to MAKE something (instead of driving to a restaurant or bakery), then wouldn’t you want that time to be “worth” as much as possible? “Fast food” is the solution for folks who don’t enjoy their meals.

Except there’s that special something a crusty deep fryer at Sonic that makes the Corndogs so so good.

You can’t replicate it at home. You can’t fool me. I even can taste the day when they change the generic food service oil.

Hmmm? Maybe they add one bay leaf to the oil for that mmm “chef kiss” flavor.

I do include the brands of some items in my recipes. And some things it’s implicitly included (i only use one brand of oyster sauce. Don’t actually know the name, but i recognize the bottle) and others it doesn’t matter. (I’ve never had a problem using different brands of peanut oil.)

As for apple pie, you should experiment with locally available cultivars. There are lots of apples that make good pies, and what works depends on the season, because some apples are better early or late in the season. I like Jonathan early and idared late, but there are backups i like, too, when u can’t find those.

If a recipe is stated with flour measurements in cups, there is very little point in converting it to weight measurement unless you do that as part of a process where you make the recipe one time using the given volume measures, and weigh the amount of flour that gives you.

That is: taking a cups recipe, converting it to weights, then making it, will not really yield any of the benefits of precise measurement by weight, because the formula you use for converting cups to weight will inevitably have some approximation, bias or error in it.

However, making a recipe using cups, and weighing as you go, then recording that information, will give you a way to more precisely reproduce exactly the same result next time.

The local climate doesn’t lend itself to growing apples (no winters).

I found pies made with Macouns are the only ones worth the effort (else, just BUY something).

And, there’s no better “eating” apple!

So, if I’m going to bake a pie, I will do lemon meringue with Meyer lemons freshed picked from the yard.

You seem quite upset about this for some reason.

My point is only that weighing bulk dry ingredients like flour is perfectly reasonable. Your objections about the non-nice numbers is not well grounded IMO.

And, it’s easier to weigh flour into the mixing bowl than to measure it in cups. That’s why I’ve converted a lot of my recipes. And the result is weird hybrid recipes that have the flour, and any large quantity of stuff that goes directly into the bowl with the flour, weighed, and everything else (including small quantities, like teaspoons) measured by volume.

I find it does make a slightly more consistent recipe, as flour varies so much from day to day in moisture content and even how tightly it’s packed. But i do it for convenience, not consistency. I was pretty good at measuring flour consistently enough with cups.

And how does that differ from recording the actual VOLUME that you’ve used?

E.g., I doubled my “best” biscotti recipe at one point. Then, found a different technique to make it easier (less time) by cutting the dry ingredients in thirds to perfectly fit the pan I was going to use (and create “cookies” of a more repeatable size/shape) while simultaneously increasing the wet ingredients.

[Biscotti are hygroscopic so you don’t want a batch to sit “on the shelf” (in a jar) for long]

Verify with feedback from my other half as to the outcome (I don’t eat that type of biscotti). Adjust baking times accordingly.

[Amusingly, one (Japanese) neighbor deliberately leaves them “out” to soften them as she doesn’t drink coffee or vin rose. In their deliberately dry state, they are too hard for her to chew!]

I’m not “upset”. And, I didn’t bring up the “nice numbers”! I merely pointed to the corresponding numbers when that same Rx was expressed as a matter of weights. If you consider those to be “nice”…

E.g., volumetrically, the salt and baking powder are “identical” quantities (1 tsp) in the Rx cited by @needscoffee. Would you strive for identical WEIGHTS in your weight-based version? Adding more baking powder to meet the same weight of salt? Or, reducing salt content to meet the same weight as the baking powder? (either approach would, of course, alter the Rx)

Or, would you weigh different amounts of each (as indicated in the conversion I provided)? Especially in light of the “nice numbers” observation…

[This is a legitimate question as someone who would interpret the stated Rx to indicate identical VOLUMES are required]

So, for an Rx that calls for 2C flour, 2t baking powder and 1t of salt, would you first weigh the flour, then ADD the (equivalent of) 2t baking powder and finally 1t of salt? Or, would you weigh each individually and later combine – before folding into the liquid mixture (which would already contain the measured sugar)?

I mix all my drys in a single bowl, dumping measured cups/spoons of each ingredient in, successively. Then, whisking to combine in that bowl before adding into the wet ingredients (already sitting in the mixer’s bowl).

One difference between flours is the grain size. Any convenient measure of volume will include varying amounts of air in the flour. Measuring flour by volume and then weighing it will be affected by how finely ground the flour is and the amount of water it may have absorbed by the time it reaches your kitchen. In addition to that flours differ in gluten content which for yeast breads make a difference. Does weight or volume help determine the result if the gluten content is unknown?

Another measure of flour quality is the remaining ash content after burning the flour. From high ash to low the difference by weight is somewhere between 1-2% but that is enough to make a difference to bakers. My overall impression is that neither weight nor volume can be all that accurate of a measure and experienced bakers have to be able to tell from the consistency and rise time of a dough if the mix needs some adjustment. Using the same measure of either kind each time you bake is important to have a fixed point to make adjustments from but no adjustment of weight or volume will hold up across all recipes or types of flour.