Following a recipe seems easy enough, but did you know that there are right and wrong ways to measure the ingredients you’re using? Inconsistency in measuring your ingredients can lead to different textures in baked goods, different flavors in your dishes, and in worst-case scenarios can ruin the food entirely. Baking requires a higher level of accuracy with ingredient measurements than cooking does. It’s much easier to fix the flavor of a soup once it’s made than to change a cookie batter that’s already been baked.
When you’re baking, you can’t really change the recipe and make adjustments along the way (unless you start over entirely). Baking is more of a science than cooking. This is why professional bakers typically measure out their ingredients using a kitchen scale as opposed to cups, tablespoons, etc.
Ingredients such as flour, cocoa powder, and powdered sugar are best measured by scale. Scooping a cup of flour up will give you more flour than you need more times than not, and that goes for other types of powder-consistency ingredients too. It’s easy for these kinds of ingredients to be compacted down when measuring with cups – resulting in the wrong amount of that ingredient in the recipe. Because of this, if I am making a recipe that gives me cup measurements, I will typically convert it to weight measurements using my trusty ol’ Book of Yields. (This is a book I got while in culinary school, and still use it often).
What if you don’t have a kitchen scale yet? How do you measure these powder-consistency ingredients more accurately? The best way to measure ingredients without a scale is with the spoon and level method. This means you use a spoon to add spoonfuls of the ingredient to your measuring cup, then brush across the top to level it off once it’s full.
When using this method to measure out ingredients, be careful not to push the ingredient(s) down into the cup as you risk measuring out too much for your recipe that way. This method is great if you don’t yet own a kitchen scale, and want your baked goods to turn out even better. Kitchen scales are available at many retail outlets that carry cookware, including online retailers such as amazon.
When you’re measuring your ingredients with measuring cups, be sure to use the correct type of measuring cup. Using dry measuring cups for dry ingredients, and wet/liquid measuring cups for liquid ingredients can also change the turnout of the recipe you’re making. 8 fluid ounces of water does not weigh the same as 8 fluid ounces of corn syrup. 8 fluid ounces does not always weigh 8 ounces.
That’s why it’s so important to measure your ingredients correctly. In the image below you can see the differences between a dry measuring cup and a liquid measuring cup. Liquid measuring cups often have lines for fluid ounces, cups, and milliliters, making it easier to measure without having to convert to a different unit of measurement. Using liquid measuring cups for your wet ingredients also lets you measure them more accurately without spilling as easily (since with dry measuring cups you’re supposed to fill to the top).
When you’re trying to replicate another person’s recipe, it’s important to measure the ingredients accurately to get the same result. For example, if grandma gives you her famous peach pie recipe it might not turn out the same as hers if you measure things differently. Precision in measuring out ingredients is more important when baking than when cooking, though it will still change the final product if you change the measurement too much in cooking.
It all boils down to how you want the final product to turn out. Being more accurate when you initially measure out your ingredients will yield a better turnout, especially when baking. Let me know if you have any other tips for measuring out ingredients for cooking and baking! I would love to hear them.
My name is Autumn! I’m a food lover living in Columbus, Ohio. No matter where my life has taken me, my passion for food has…
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