@ retired baker, yep, only $20, it's a good price and 2 year guarantee.
Customer is excellent too. The one I bought developed some scratches on the screen and they just sent me a new one. Your cast iron scale looks amazing, a real classic piece of hardware built to last.
I've been meaning to ask about volumetric measurement on this forum, perhaps you and retired baker can help me.
I always measure ingredients in grams and always look for recipes that specifically state grams.
But there are many youtube recipes from the US which I want to bake from that only give cup measurements which I struggle with. It wouldn't be a problem if I know a cup of flour is a specific amount of grams. The thing is, I keep seeing differing amounts. For example, one site will say a cup of flour is 125g, another site says its 128, another says it's 150g and so on. And I've seen this with other ingredients. So, why does there not appear to be a standard amount for cup measurements and how can I bake accurately if I don't know how much a cup, 1/2 a cup, 3/4 cup, 2 cups, actually is?
I've got a set of metal cups that were given to me. Should I just not worry about grams and if something says 1 cup of flour, just go ahead and fill that cup?
That's actually a much more complicated question than it might seem! Volumetric is the world's worst measuring system for powders....the only reason it persisted so long is that accurate scales were expensive and impractical for home use until the modern digital age, and by then, volumetric had been a standard since forever it's hard to get rid of. It works fine for liquid since nothing changes about it. A liquid filling a specific amount of volume in a cup will be the same everywhere no matter the liquid. But for powder, it's a mess.
The reasons for differing weights depending on where you look it up are compound. In some cases it's just a matter of who measured, and/or how they measured. Usually it's an average. But did they scoop, then level, then weigh? Sift, then level, then weigh? Did they take good averages? What flour did they use, etc?
The last one gets into the more complicated one specifically with flour that doesn't apply as much to, say, corn starch, or baking soda. What wheat/flour did they weigh? The weight even if the measurements were taken post-sifting, etc. properly will vary by wheat species, crop year, and flour milling process/composition. A hard red spring wheat won't have the same mass as a soft white winter wheat, for example even if it fills the same volume, and a hard red spring wheat grown in Des Moines won't have the same mass as a hard red spring wheat grown in Syracuse the same year. And 1998's crop in Syracuse won't have the same mass as the water-logged 2019's crop from Syracuse, so the year matters as well. So then you try to translate that to a crop grown in Yorkshire, of a whole different crop species, and who knows what its relative mass is?
When it comes to flour, it gets worse! For all purpose flour, different brands have very different compositions. In the US, it's further split by regional brands and what people there tend to bake most. So up North, you'll see mostly Gold Medal, King Arthur, Pillsbury. Among those three, they are all different. KA uses mostly hard red spring wheat high in protein, and is unbleached. At near 12% protein it's almost a bread flour more than AP flour and has higher mass on the scale than most AP flours. For theirs, you really have to go by their published weight conversion. It won't compare to most other brands. Then there's normal AP of which Gold Medal and Pillsbury fall into. Usually it's a 40-70% blend of soft and hard wheat species, making it truly "all purpose." On the other extreme, in the South you have popular brands like White Lily. It's sold as all purpose, but it's almost all soft wheat and at its low, low protein actually puts it in cake flour land! I'm not sure how or why they even sell that as AP flour, but they do. Why? The most common baked thing in the South is going to be biscuits (the baking powder leavened bread rolls, not the UK meaning of "biscuits" that would be called cookies - though coincidentally that's another good use of such soft flours!)
So after all that...if you're looking at a recipe calling for "3 cups AP flour - sifted" from the US, you're going to have quite a time trying to figure out the actual mass of flour! Without knowing the brand of flour (the recipes never say), or at least the region of the author, it gets very confusing. Did they sift at all? How did they level their cup? What brand of flour did they use? You can't use the same brand, so it's a different mix, but even approximating the brand might help. But even if you approximate hard vs. soft etc, the local wheats are all different. Italian wheats are all hard, hard hard. Everything they use is "durum or harder", ground extremely fine. Even what they use for pastry is hard. Their wheat growing is mostly at high altitude. French flours are all soft. Even what they use for bread is on the soft end of wheat. US and UK tend to have more similar wheat conditions due to a similar growing climate in most areas, so it's actually a little more equivalent than trying to convert recipes from Italy or France - assuming the flour you're using uses UK-grown wheat. If any of the grain is from France or Scandinavia, who knows what the blend is. Even across North America, Canadian wheat tends to average harder and higher in protein than US grown wheat, while Mexican wheat tends to be soft, and low protein. Temperatures and rainfall are a huge factor.
So all that brings us to the fact that it's not actually possible to get a real direct conversion to weights from a volumetric recipe. And technically even identically matching the volume won't give you the same result with a different flour. The only way to really go about it is pick a brand of flour you usually stick with and find out their own weight by volume (even if you have to buy a US measuring cup to come up with your own average mass.) From there just do a direct conversion (eg. if you come up with your brand being about 110g per US cup, just start there and learn from a few recipes if you think you're using too much or too little flour, and adjust your numbers from there. It's imperfect, and trial and error stinks, but in reality, even if a recipe someone came up with in Alabama told yo to use 365g of flour, you'd have to experiment anyway. They flour they probably used is probably more like pastry flour, and your AP would perform very differently!
