September 20, 2012 - 12:46am
So what's the deal Meausring flour by weight? Grams are in mass!??! %#^@$&
My wife bought me a Dutch over to further my bread baking hobby so I decided to get more precise with my bread so I've decided to try baking by weight.
Ive been trying out the Tartine bread recipie and it use grams to measure the ingredient.....
I don't get that because grams is just mass correct? I tried to weigh it out on my kitchen scale but it looks really off. Am I missing somthing here?
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Not sure why you think grams are volumes, but they definiltely are not. I millilitre of water weighs one gram (at 4C, IIRC) but other than that possible source of confusion, no grams are weights.
Sorry ya I meant mass; So it can be mass or weight?
-measuring by weight was a big step for me. Luckily my math skills are somewhat less than stellar and converting recipes from volume was way too much work, so I bought a scale. For some reason, gram measurement was confusing. I would look at a recipe and ask myself if they mean liquid grams (!) or if they mean grams by weight? I think I actually looked on the measuring cup to see if there were grams marked. Okay, stop laughing you guys out there, until a very few years ago, I had spent a lifetime only measuring by volume. When I first started trying to bake from a TFL formula, I would avoid any except those where volume was listed. Think of how many great things I missed, good thing search history is so efficient. Ah now, if it was only my horizon that expanded with those projects.....
No doubt you will soon find yourself using weight much more than volume, it is so much more accurate, and yes, easier once you get used to it. Most important is that you enjoy the process of turning all those individual ingredients, liquid or solids, into a wonderful loaf of bread.
Happy Baking,
Barbra
Since the pull of gravity is constant at the Earth's surface, units of mass (grams) are used as a serviceable alternative to the more unwieldy units of weight (kilogram-meter/sec²).
SteveB
www.breadcetera.com
pressing down on your loaves. They can be worse than elves!
Ok, sorry. I suppose we don't have to worry about dark matter until we travel interstellar, setting a oven timer during warp speed or something like that. I reserve my comment for the 50yr TFL celebration, Mars edition. :)
Live long and prosper...Mini Oven!
As we're not likely to be baking on other planets any time soon, most people casually interchange mass (a quality of the thing itself) with weight (a force acting on the mass as a result of gravity). So yes, things have a mass measured in grams, and a weight measured in newtons.
Although ingredient weights vary a bit from kitchen to kitchen, here are my general volume-to-weight conversions.
1 cup flour = 140 grams
1 cup sugar = 200 grams
1 cup water = 243 grams
These work great for me for bread and most other baking. Others on TFL might use slightly differnt values. Milk is about the same weight as water (depending a bit on the kind of milk you use), and oil is only slightly less heavy than water.
FWIW, I'll include the following as well.
1 teaspoon of anything = 5 grams (approximate)
1 Tablespoon of anything = 15 grams (approximate)
These last two are rough estimates. They work pretty well for things like salt and yeast, but not so good for others (like cream of tartar). But at least they get you in the ballpark.
- Greg
I was a 'volume' baker too until I discovered TFL. I never really knew what I was doing but once I learned baker's math almost all of the mysteries I was mystified by fell away. I LOVE BAKER'S MATH :-)
What I love equally is my Kitchen Calculator (HERE) because it lets me convert any recipe I want into a formula. It deals with volume, grams or ounces and has capabilities I can't figure out yet but haven't needed to use.
Not sure this even addressed the OP question but it seemed like an appropriate 'plug' for a handy kitchen gadget :-)
Have Fun,
Janet
Janet, even though I can use the Rule of Three, this calculator would come often handy. I'll then invest in a digital spoon for weighing very small amounts, too.
Otherwise, I can only recommend to get a scale that can switch between ounces and grams, and can be put back to zero whenever adding a new ingredient. I compared several volume/weight conversion tables in different cookbooks (from Cook's Illustrated, Berenbaum, ITJB, Peter Reinhart) and what a cup of my own flours weigh - the difference is remarkable. Especially for larger amounts this can affect the result quite a bit. This is the scale I use for years.
Sometimes I feel a little bit of schadenfreude that you Americans with your prehistoric measurements have to learn how to deal with metric measurements....:)
Karin
We aren't all alike over here. ;) But really, I am surprised that someone with enough scientific knowledge to distinguish between weight and mass has never encountered grams used as weight since metric units are used in science. Grams are on most of our products as an alternative unit of weight, right after lbs-and-or-ounces.
Karin My second favorite scale (I have the same one you linked to and it is my 'favorite') is this one by DigiWeigh that cost less than $15.00. Does the small stuff which I really don't have to use much but it is a fun little gadget to have around. Helped my son out today for one of his chemistry assignments :-)
Never heard of a digital spoon.... or the Rule of Three????
Janet