Not really unpopular. That said, while flour (kind of the backbone of most baking recipes) is prone to being inaccurate when measured by volume, there are a lot of ingredients which do not have this problem and are not as sensitive to being measured wrong. If a cookie recipe calls for a quarter cup of chocolate chips that's probably fine. I think a lot of people don't have a scale sensitive enough to measure a half gram of yeast, either.
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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I like weight measurement best, except for a few things I don't really want to bother measuring closely, like cornbread or ricotta cake. Those I just know by volume and can scale up based on the number of eggs, and aren't fussy.
So for cornbread I know the dry mix is half cornmeal half flour, with a spoonful of baking powder, half spoonful of salt, big pinch of baking soda for each cup of that mix. One cup of that for each egg you have; melt a whole stick of butter in the iron skillet at 425F while you mix the dry stuff, when it's hot add the eggs and enough buttermilk to make a thick batter (have literally never measured the buttermilk), pour the melted butter in, stir briefly, then pour batter into pan and bake 20-25 minutes. Has never failed, and I'm sure it's never exactly the same twice. It doesn't matter.
"Recipes" like that I enjoy. And most of my cooking is loosey goosey like that.
But bread, and fancy cakes, and even cocktais, 100% agree, I would prefer to pull out the scale and SO much easier to do weight, in grams.
Milk
All baking recipes should be in mass for the dry ingredients and volume for the wet ingredients, definitely NOT weight. Because measuring flour by grams (mass) makes sense, but measuring flour by pounds (weight) is fucking stupid. Lots of people in this thread pretending to be smart by using SI units, but were apparently asleep in class when the teacher covered the difference between weight and mass. If you're going to get picky about such a trifling difference between a volume of sugar and a certain mass of sugar at least get the details correct.
Actually it should be measured in the appropriate metric way. Liquids in liters and milliliters, solids in kilograms and grams.
Cause those are always the same.
I had my wife try to measure water in a glass measuring cup accurately and consistently. I had her measure the same amount multiple times. Her variance was so far off the variance of the scale, that I convinced her that liquids should be done by weight when possible.
I think that if I had a cylinder like I used decades ago in chemistry class, I might be able to get consistent kitchen measurements. But my glass pyrex measuring cup with numbers on the side is terrible.
If I make a recipe multiple times, it gets re-written for weight versus volume.
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