Baking by Weight vs Volume: Which Is More Accurate?

Why Professional Pastry Chefs Never Use Cups

In professional bakeries, recipes are not written in cups and spoons; they are written in grams as a formula known as Baker’s Percentages, where every ingredient is measured as a percentage of the total flour weight.

The Problem With Volume Measuring

• When three people scoop 1 cup of flour using their own measuring cups, experiments consistently show results ranging from 110 grams to 160 grams!
• That is a 45% variance in the principal structural ingredient of a cake or loaf of bread.
• Humidity also changes the density of flour: dry winter flour packs differently than humid summer flour.

Advantages of Weighing With a Digital Kitchen Scale

1. Consistency: 250 grams of flour is exactly 250 grams every day of the year in every kitchen on earth.
2. Speed & Fewer Dishes: Instead of using 4 different measuring cups and spoons, you simply place your mixing bowl directly onto your digital scale, press the "Tare" (zero) button, pour in your flour, tare again, pour in your sugar, tare again, and you're done.
3. Flawless Recipe Scaling: Scaling a recipe up or down by 1.7x or 2.5x is trivial on a scale, whereas calculating fractions of cups in the heat of cooking is prone to arithmetic mistakes.

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Summary Takeaway

Use cups when convenient for soups, stews, sauces, and casual cooking where precision is flexible. For cakes, pastries, sourdough bread, and macarons, keep your kitchen scale handy and convert your cup measurements to grams!