4 Reasons a Food Scale Belongs in Every Kitchen (and How to Use One)

In professional kitchens, where food is often prepared in much larger quantities than home kitchens, you'll find recipes that list ingredient amounts by weight instead of cups and tablespoons. Naturally, these kitchens rely on food scales. But a trusty kitchen scale can benefit home cooks, too. While there are several kitchen tools designed to save time and improve food preparation in the kitchen, few products are more useful than a digital food scale. These have numerous benefits that include achieving better consistency, simplifying preparation, and making portion sizes more accurate. Having a food scale is a must-have for every kitchen, and here are a few reasons why.

Reasons You Need a Food Scale in Your Kitchen

If you just can't imagine why you would need a kitchen scale, here are the best reasons we can think of.

Consistency

How many times have you attempted a family recipe and followed the directions precisely, only to have it turn out not quite as expected? If this happens to you often, you may be measuring your ingredients wrong. Achieving consistent, accurate results is one of the main reasons to stop scooping ingredients and start weighing them. The final product's flavor or texture can easily become altered if you lightly scoop or pack the ingredients into the measuring cup. Leveling off the top or leaving it heaping can change the appearance or size. By weighing ingredients with a food scale, you are much more likely to create a consistent product every time.

Don't forget that you can also weigh out portions of things like cookie dough before baking to ensure consistent size and even doneness throughout an entire batch.

Simplify Your Prep

Does your countertop become cluttered with the teaspoons, tablespoons, dry measuring cups, and liquid measuring cups? Instead of using all those, you can save time and space by using larger mixing bowls ($20, Target) to weigh your ingredients.

Using a kitchen scale makes this easy: set your bowl on the scale and tare it (reset the scale to zero). Add your first ingredient to the amount indicated in your recipe and reset it again before adding the next. Make the process easier by doing this with both dry and wet ingredients when your recipe requires them to be mixed separately.

A kitchen scale will help your kitchen remain cleaner and more organized without all those extra tools. Just remember to tare the scale between each ingredient so you aren't stressing about math while baking.

Easy Conversion

Nearly all modern digital kitchen scales have the option of easily converting food from pounds and ounces to grams with the push of a button. While people might be a little apprehensive about weighing ingredients in metric units, measuring in grams makes things exceptionally precise and much easier when needing to increase or decrease a recipe amount. Instead of spending time thinking of how to reduce the recipe by ⅓ cup of flour with a measuring cup or spoon, you will find it so much easier to decrease 40 grams of flour using your kitchen scale.

Knowing Portion Sizes

By using a kitchen scale, you can adequately measure the serving sizes of ingredients and food items. Nutrition labels include information such as how much the item weighs, portion size, the number of portions per package. This is especially helpful with dinner planning to make sure there is enough food for each person. Knowing how much a serving size is can also be helpful in meeting dietary needs and goals.

You can also use a food scale to help portion out unpackaged products, such as ground meat. A kitchen scale will take the guesswork out of dividing up a pound package of hamburger into four equal portions. Place your bowl on top of the scale and tare it before putting all the ground meat into the bowl. A pound equals 16 ounces, so remove four at a time before rolling them into a ball and pressing them.

Now that you've weighed the benefits of a kitchen scale, listed below are some of our top choices of cooking scales that will ensure your success in the kitchen:

• Escali Primo Precision Kitchen Food Scale ($25, Amazon)
• ZWILLING Enfinigy Food Scale ($50, Crate & Barrel)
• Cuisinart PrecisionChef Digital Kitchen Food Scale ($40, Bed Bath & Beyond)
• Ooni Dual-Platform Digital Scales ($50, Williams Sonoma)

If the idea of simplifying your cooking process and achieving more accurate results in the kitchen sounds appealing, start your new kitchen adventures by ordering a food scale. See for yourself how beneficial it can be for your cooking and baking.