I have watched at least 10000 hours of cooking shows-- at one time I could recite every word of Julia & Jacques Cooking from home, Julia Cooking w/ Master Chefs, In Julias Kitchen w/ Master Chefs, I’ve seen all the Great Chefs shows (East, West, NO, Chicago, France, etc.) at least once, Frugal Gourmet, Yan Can Cook, Dinner at Julias, Jacques Pepin (all), almost every PBS cooking show since 1983 (and early FoodTV)-- never once have I heard them say “we only use Diamond Salt.” I do know Diamond sponsors a lot of those shows.
NB I stopped watching Test Kitchen/Cooks Country after Kimball left. I do not follow food Blogs, however I used to post on Egullet, but left 20 years ago. I subscribe to NYT Food.
I have migrated to a hybrid method. I always weigh the flour, and anything hard to get out of its measuring container (shortening, molasses). I always use measuring spoons for tiny quantities, like salt and spices and vanilla. Well, unless i just eyeball them. But i never attempt to weigh tiny quantities.
I always use volume for brown sugar. Just as flour can pack and is more reliably measured by weight, brown sugar can be more or less hydrated, and the weight of the same amount of sugar can fluctuate a surprising amount.
I always use “volume” for butter, because it comes in convenient marked containers. Chocolate and eggs often come pre-measured, as well. (I mean, eggs vary a bit, but i can’t be arsed to weigh or measure the eggs. If the recipe calls for n eggs, i use n large eggs.) For that matter, I’m using some whole number of carrots and onions. It might be one more or less than the recipe says, if they are smaller or larger than typical, but I’m not putting a third of a carrot back in the fridge.
But for most other things that pour, like white sugar and lemon juice and olive oil, i find measuring cups handy. I’ll often reuse the same measuring cup, unless i need to keep the wet and dry ingredients separate. I know people who don’t put their measuring cups in the dishwasher, but I’m not one of them, and they seem to do fine.
But weighing the flour and just dumping everything else into that bowl has made a lot of recipes easier.
Yeah, I can weigh the first ingredient right into the bowl, because I can take some out again, but I will invariably add too much of the subsequent things.
Depending on what you’re making and whether you overshoot by 2%, 10%, or 200%, it may not matter in the slightest.
Exactly.
Never heard it being so loved that any Television cooking show ever mentioned it by name.
Like I said above. I knew the brand existed because I’ve bought bags of their water softener. (Btw, it’s not kosher, I checked)
I still think people are putting too much stock in a particular brand of salt. How hard can salt be to figure out? The simplest and plainest of ingredients. It ain’t rocket science.
I definitely weigh multiple ingredients into the bowl. The molasses pours slowly. I can take smaller chunks of shortening out of the tin. The corn meal pours smoothly out of the jar i store it in…
All my cookbooks have tiny handwritten entries where i added weights.
And you know, if you DO add too much cornmeal, it’s still on the top. You can spoon a little off. But i find that almost never happens.
I mostly weigh when i bake. A 10% difference might be okay, but you might notice. A 200% difference is not okay.
Of course, i intentionally double the cinnamon… But it matters.
Now, if you are making soup, just toss it in.
'Zactly.
Baking demands reasonably tight tolerances.
Folks who are making 2 gallons of soup and sweat whether they add one level or one heaping half-teaspoon measure of e.g. oregano do not understand cooking. They understand recipe following, but that’s a different skill.
If I’m measuring, I’m baking. And the thing I inadvertently dump in will be the baking powder or the sugar.
I use a measuring spoon for the baking powder. That needs a tight tolerance, and the quantity is too small for my scale to be reliable. And it’s freaking easy to stick a measuring spoon into the container, which even comes with a built-in shelf to level the spoon. The sugar, on the other hand, can be gently poured out of the scoop that lives in the sugar bin, and is very easy to weigh.
It’s also easy to measure in a measuring cup. So which i use kinda depends on the recipe. If I’m adding sugar directly to the bowl I’ve just weighed flour in, I’ll probably weigh it. If the flour bowl is to the side, and I’m adding the sugar to the mixing bowl, which already has butter in it, I’ll use a measuring cup.
I’m an absolute madman in the kitchen. I don’t bake much, so I get away with it. I eyeball teaspoons, tablespoons, and fractions thereof. Cups, half, quarters, also are estimated. If I have a bit of cilantro leftover from yesterday’s meal I use it if I can.
Slight aside here, but back in the 1980s, you would have been “My People”. Cooking shows were my thing when I was a teen.
Plus eyeballing measurements can be quite accurate in practiced hands. I remember tv chef Justin Wilson one time responding to critics where he poured salt into the palm of his hand, then poured it into a measuring spoon. The camera zoomed in. Yep, precisely one level teaspoon of salt.
Sure but much of his audience isn’t capable of that.
We are kindred spirits. With a tablespoon and a 1c measure I can come close enough for any non-baking purpose I might need. I’m no pro, but the tolerances just aren’t that tight for non-restaurant cookery where exact repeatability doesn’t really matter.
I’m reminded of a thread from many years ago where somebody supposedly writing a cookbook asked the 'Dope how to convert recipes between metric and customary measures since he wanted to preserve all the decimal places “so the recipes worked better”. He Could. Not. Comprehend that every measure in the original recipe, metric or customary, was already a rounded off amount to a convenient unit of measure, so converting to the other unit system then rounding that to a convenient tolerance would be fine.
Huh, yeah. I never have trouble converting recipes from metric to English or back. And i always round.
I mentioned that i added weights to a lot of my cookbooks. I did it by measuring the flour (etc.) the way i customarily do, then dumping that measured food into my scale, and then rounding whatever the scale said. That way, I’m reproducing how I made the dish. I only messed up once, for cornbread, and adjusted the weight by saying, “hmm, that needed more flour, I’ll add another 30 grams and see how it comes out.” That worked, so I’ve stuck with it.
I guess going from weighed flour to volume-measured flour would be trickier, because weighing it would fluff it up. But a lot of the typical “metric” measures are already very close to “English” measures.
I’ve had people ask what a “cup” of flour is, because they found a recipe from the U.S., and have no idea what it means. Until recently, it was almost impossible to buy U.S. measuring cups here in Switzerland. I’m glad to see more U.S. cookbooks and recipe sites including weights, but I have my own notes for comparison, just to make sure that the weights are realistic.
Ingredients such as salt are usually measuring in spoonfuls, either teaspoon (TL, Teelöffel, approximately 5 ml) or Tablespoon (EL, Esslöffel, approximately 15 ml).
Teaspoon of salt weighs 6.5 g, and a Tablespoon weighs 20 g, according to my Swiss cookbook. But I use measuring spoons, and even the recipes in the same cookbook use volume measurements for salt.
The same cookbook has an overview of different salts:
Tafelsalz: Default salt. Has iodine or iodine and fluoride
Meersalz: Sea salt
Sel Gris: Wikipedia
Fleur de Sel: Wikipedia
Himalayasalz: Himalayan salt
Kala Namak: black salt
Hawaiisalz: salt from Hawaii
Aromatisierte Salze: flavored salts
No mention of kosher salt.
I don’t measure too much, rice:water is a big exception. I tried a new meat rub recipe a few weeks ago and made sure to roughly measure the component spices to properly assess the recipe.
250 mL dry gets 95% of the way, and good as I’d expect a scoop of flour, anyhow. Sifting characteristics and water absorbsion via ambient humidity are probably bigger wildcards.
I’ve lately (like in the last two years), just been using the “water up to the first knuckle” method of measuring and have been surprised at how well it works. I’m somehow not surprised, as there is a good amount of fudge factor even with rice. My bags all say 2:1 water:rice, but I’ve usually found 1.5:1 to be a better ratio for the rices I use. And that’s about where my knuckle seems to land when I check it with that measurement. But I remember doing 2:1 way back and that made perfectly fine rice, if not a bit moister to my tastes than I like.
Perfect.
I keep telling mid-dau sometimes you just have to go with your gut. She frets over amounts. Two more leaves of some herb ain’t gonna make or break a recipe.
I mix cornbread, pizza crust and biscuits by my eye because it’s rote memory. I know exactly how much to put in.
I used to could make yeast rolls like this. I’ve maybe lost that skill. It’s too easy to buy decent rolls now.