There Is No Justice for Scales in the Kitchen
July 16, 2008; Wall Street Journal
A low-cost, easy-to-use piece of digital technology could make millions of people more productive in their everyday lives. If you don't have one in your home, it's another victory for a small cabal that suppresses these devices every way it can.
I know this sounds like "The Da Vinci Code." But believe me, it's real.
The device is the digital kitchen scale. These aren't the cheap plastic scales of questionable accuracy that have long been sold to dieters. They are, instead, sleek pieces of battery-powered electronics with LED displays and high-precision results. Thanks to the Chinese manufacturing boom and constantly declining prices for computer chips, digital kitchen scales can now be found for as low as $30.
The machines are a godsend to two often overlapping groups of people: the lazy and the precise.
They help make cooking -- baking especially -- a snap. Stick a bowl on the scale, add the flour you need, reset the scale to zero, add your sugar, and so on. You can work through most ingredients like this in a single bowl, quickly, to a high degree of accuracy and without having a lot of measuring cups to wash up when you're done.
There is just one thing you need to make this bit of kitchen magic come true: the weight of each ingredient of a recipe, as opposed to just their volumes. So, the first line of the recipe for brownies might be: "Flour, 1½ cups (6.3 ounces; 180 grams)."
This is where the conspiracy comes in. The small clique known as "cookbook publishers" refuses to provide those weights, despite cookbook authors' wishing they would. Check the cookbooks in your home; chances are they don't list weights. Most of the baking books at the big Borders near my home were similarly weightless.
Publishers don't put weights in recipes for the simple reason that they think you're stupid.
"A lot of cookbook publishers say that adding weights tends to look daunting, and a lot of cookbook publishers try to keep things simple," said Hannah Rahill, baking editor with Weldon Owen, a San Francisco company that creates cookbooks at the behest of publishers. That attitude, she explained, is especially pronounced in celebrity cookbooks.
Ms. Rahill said that she is strongly proscale herself, and that her company puts weights in cookbooks whenever it can. Nonetheless, the antiscale sentiment of publishers is so strong that her company produced "Baking at Home with The Culinary Institute of America" without weights.
This is the same Culinary Institute of America, by the way, whose baking instructor, Francisco Migoya, says he drills into his students the importance of weighing things.
The absence of weights in U.S. cookbooks has long been a sore point not just of cookbook authors but also dedicated home bakers. Gripes about it run through the discussion groups of cooking sites like egullet.com. When a new baking book is released, the first question often asked of it is, "Does it have weights?"
In addition to worrying about digital scales allegedly being recondite and thus off-putting, cookbook publishers may still labor under the illusion that the scales are expensive.
They should talk with Rick Zarr, technologist at National Semiconductor, who says that in the past five years or so, the electronics industry has so squeezed prices that the handful of chips needed to build a scale can be bought for just a few dollars.
The workhorse part in a scale is called a "strain gauge." It's a little ceramic dot that sits under the platform of the scale and passes more or less current, depending on how much weight is sitting on it. Sundry filters clean up that signal (the kitchen is a very noisy place, electromagnetically speaking) before it's amplified and passed on to a tiny CPU that converts it to the weight, which is displayed in either the metric or imperial system, as is the baker's wont.
The typical kitchen scale, says Mr. Zarr, will be accurate to a tenth of an ounce. My $50 Oxo did even better when I tested it against the Denver Instrument M-310, an expensive precision machine, kindly supplied by the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at San Francisco State University. It matched the "real" digital scale gram for gram over a number of trials.
In case you want to retrofit old recipes to your cool, new digital scale, you can start by knowing that on my chemistry-lab scale, a cup of properly sifted flour weighed in the neighborhood of 4.2 ounces, or 120 grams. (In a fully scaled-up world you usually could dispense with sifting except for some sensitive mixtures, such as those with whipped eggs or cream.)
Take heart. Weights for a variety of common baking ingredients are readily available online, and thus beyond the control of the cookbook-publishing conspiracy -- at least for now.
http://www.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121615156094855585.html
July 16, 2008; Wall Street Journal
A low-cost, easy-to-use piece of digital technology could make millions of people more productive in their everyday lives. If you don't have one in your home, it's another victory for a small cabal that suppresses these devices every way it can.
I know this sounds like "The Da Vinci Code." But believe me, it's real.
The device is the digital kitchen scale. These aren't the cheap plastic scales of questionable accuracy that have long been sold to dieters. They are, instead, sleek pieces of battery-powered electronics with LED displays and high-precision results. Thanks to the Chinese manufacturing boom and constantly declining prices for computer chips, digital kitchen scales can now be found for as low as $30.
The machines are a godsend to two often overlapping groups of people: the lazy and the precise.
They help make cooking -- baking especially -- a snap. Stick a bowl on the scale, add the flour you need, reset the scale to zero, add your sugar, and so on. You can work through most ingredients like this in a single bowl, quickly, to a high degree of accuracy and without having a lot of measuring cups to wash up when you're done.
There is just one thing you need to make this bit of kitchen magic come true: the weight of each ingredient of a recipe, as opposed to just their volumes. So, the first line of the recipe for brownies might be: "Flour, 1½ cups (6.3 ounces; 180 grams)."
This is where the conspiracy comes in. The small clique known as "cookbook publishers" refuses to provide those weights, despite cookbook authors' wishing they would. Check the cookbooks in your home; chances are they don't list weights. Most of the baking books at the big Borders near my home were similarly weightless.
Publishers don't put weights in recipes for the simple reason that they think you're stupid.
"A lot of cookbook publishers say that adding weights tends to look daunting, and a lot of cookbook publishers try to keep things simple," said Hannah Rahill, baking editor with Weldon Owen, a San Francisco company that creates cookbooks at the behest of publishers. That attitude, she explained, is especially pronounced in celebrity cookbooks.
Ms. Rahill said that she is strongly proscale herself, and that her company puts weights in cookbooks whenever it can. Nonetheless, the antiscale sentiment of publishers is so strong that her company produced "Baking at Home with The Culinary Institute of America" without weights.
This is the same Culinary Institute of America, by the way, whose baking instructor, Francisco Migoya, says he drills into his students the importance of weighing things.
The absence of weights in U.S. cookbooks has long been a sore point not just of cookbook authors but also dedicated home bakers. Gripes about it run through the discussion groups of cooking sites like egullet.com. When a new baking book is released, the first question often asked of it is, "Does it have weights?"
In addition to worrying about digital scales allegedly being recondite and thus off-putting, cookbook publishers may still labor under the illusion that the scales are expensive.
They should talk with Rick Zarr, technologist at National Semiconductor, who says that in the past five years or so, the electronics industry has so squeezed prices that the handful of chips needed to build a scale can be bought for just a few dollars.
The workhorse part in a scale is called a "strain gauge." It's a little ceramic dot that sits under the platform of the scale and passes more or less current, depending on how much weight is sitting on it. Sundry filters clean up that signal (the kitchen is a very noisy place, electromagnetically speaking) before it's amplified and passed on to a tiny CPU that converts it to the weight, which is displayed in either the metric or imperial system, as is the baker's wont.
The typical kitchen scale, says Mr. Zarr, will be accurate to a tenth of an ounce. My $50 Oxo did even better when I tested it against the Denver Instrument M-310, an expensive precision machine, kindly supplied by the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at San Francisco State University. It matched the "real" digital scale gram for gram over a number of trials.
In case you want to retrofit old recipes to your cool, new digital scale, you can start by knowing that on my chemistry-lab scale, a cup of properly sifted flour weighed in the neighborhood of 4.2 ounces, or 120 grams. (In a fully scaled-up world you usually could dispense with sifting except for some sensitive mixtures, such as those with whipped eggs or cream.)
Take heart. Weights for a variety of common baking ingredients are readily available online, and thus beyond the control of the cookbook-publishing conspiracy -- at least for now.
http://www.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121615156094855585.html