So besides being a strong believer in human rights, I’m a cooking enthusiast, of the Alton Brown/www.cookingforengineers.com variety. Both of these recommend using a scale to measure ingredients instead of measuring cups. This combined with the fact that European recipes are often given in weight (www.onlineconversion.com makes metric to US no problem; it’s so cool it can also do weight to volume, but you know the accuracy of that is just not perfect) and that I HATE digging in the flour or sugar bag trying to fill a cup measure and that pouring till I get the right weight, taring, and repeating with the next ingredient all in one bowl sound super easy, have convinced me to invest in one. Digital, to be precise (actually, accurate, but who’s counting).
The problem is, there are a lot of choices out there and I have some idea of what matters but the descriptions don’t always explain everything. So if anyone out there happens to have a digital kitchen scale, let me know how it works, which things you like or don’t like about it. For instance, does it really work when they measure liquid in volume units? I assume they assume that the liquid is water-based and calculate the volume based on the density of water, but that seems likely to be really inaccurate. But I can’t figure out how else they’d do it without having a catalogue of liquids and densities, which they don’t seem to (and which I don’t care to mess with). Following Alton Brown’s advice, I plan to measure liquids in medicine droppers and turkey basters as soon as I find graduated ones.
I really want MyWeigh’s Uber Deluxe 6000, mostly because I can’t believe it’s really called that. It looks like a fantastic scale though, although it has some extra stuff that I don’t need (I’m ok with actually touching buttons) and costs too much (I wouldn’t pay more than $60 for a scale, and the only reason that figure isn’t $50 is that Alton Brown recommends a $60 Salter one in his book Gear for Your Kitchen). But still…Uber Deluxe 6000, guys!
Anyway, if I’ve convinced you to get one, here’s a page on why and how to buy. But watch out, especially if you’re struggling with/recovering from an eating disorder; scales can be used for dieting and the people selling them know that, talk about it, and try to convince you how great it would be to have a pocket-sized dieting scale so you could check the serving size and caloric content of everything you eat no matter where you are. If that sounds like a great idea to you, I recommend Shapely Prose as an antidote.
