January 15, 2018 - 3:37pm
Another thing I wish I had known earlier: how to measure with a scale
Yeah, I must be slow. I thought that when I measured ingredients, I had to measure out each one into its own little dish and then add it to the mixing bowl. Which made a lot of dishes and took too much time. And then I thought ... there must be a better way ... and I googled and I discovered the obvious:
Set mixing bowl on scale and use tare to zero it out. Add first ingredient (usually flour, right?) to the bowl. Leave bowl on scale. Use tare to zero out weight, again. Add next ingredient (probably liquid), dribbling carefully until you have just the right weight. Zero out again and add another ingredient ....
Just one bowl :)
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for the most part. I did learn though not to do this with salt or low weight ingredients. If you put too much in, it’s hard to remove.
By using sea salt and dropping it grain by grain as I got close to the right weight. Though perhaps getting ONE extra bowl dirty wouldn't be all that burdensome :)
I measure the flour in a tared mixer bowl. But I measure the water separately, in a measuring cup. With the quantities of salt and yeast being less than the sensitivity of my digital scale, I use the teaspoon method. I add the salt to the flour, then the yeast to warm water and mix. I prefer not to mix salt and yeast together to prevent killing the yeast. The only added cleaning is to rinse the water cup. I usually make small batches at a time for occasional home consumption.
except my old cheap kitchen scale wasn't coming close to volume measurements for low weights, so in 2016 I bought a micro-digital from Amazon for salt & yeast; my recipes worked better with it. The kitchen scale died a in June and was replaced with a MyWeigh 8000 (great customer service). The MyWeigh does pretty well with salt & yeast, but since I have the micro scale and it stays calibrated I often use it as a double-check. Water is weighed in a separate container so I can monitor how much is held back if necessary. Wish I'd realized the value of weight rather than volume years ago; there would have been many more successes than bricks.
Although I use the teaspoon method to measure salt and yeast (works for me), there is another way. I have a powder scale that I use for measuring powder and shot for reloading shotgun shells. It measures in grains, of which 7000 grains equal one pound. The scale is accurate to 1/10 grain. So it's possible to accurately weigh 1/70,000 pound, or .006 grams. That's a bit of overkill, but powder scales (digital and balance beam) are readily available for $15-20 and up if you feel the need to be that accurate.
As the lab manager where I used to work once said, "I can measure a grain of sand, but not if it's in the bed of a dump truck."