Weight Of Ingredients?

So, I've been doing a lot of baking and to make sure I am producing a consistent product, I've been trying to make sure I weight everything out. So I'm taking recipes in cups and converting them to grams. In doing this I've stumbled on to some contradictions. Particularly in flour. Modernist Cuisine says that one cup of AP flour is 80 grams. Huh? Seem very light to me. King Arthur Flour says it weights 120 grams. That's very far from 80 grams but still seems light. How are these weights determined. Should I make a cup of flour and weigh it out 10 -20 times and take the average? This is very mind bottling.

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Comments

michaelnatkin

I don't know where the 80 figure comes from; if that is in MC it has to be a mistake. I've found 125 g (4.5 ounces) per cup of flour to be a solid conversion for volumetric recipes.

trev_teich

I'll give that a shot, but where do they come up with these weights?

DiggingDogFarm_65362

I found, back when i was still doing a lot baking, that it can often take some trial and error to determine the proper weight of flour when converting recipes because folks measure flour volume-wise in different ways...some scoop flour with the measuring cup......some are spooners and levelers....some sift flour into the cup.....some, well, I don't know what the heck kind of measurer they are!!!!! LOL!

Each technique will yield different amounts of flour.

michaelnatkin

@Trevor Teich " but where do they come up with these weights? " - just as you said, measure it a few times and take an average. But as @DiggingDogFarm says, different measurement methods can yield pretty big differences in weight. So 125 is a good starting point, but after you try a recipe that way, you may well want to adjust it for next time. As with anything in baking, there are so many variables, so at least working by weight reduces one of them.

trev_teich

Right, totally agree, but how has M.C. and King Arthur coming up with their weight for ingredients? I would be interested in what the process they use is.

trev_teich

@Michael Cool, wrote my responce to @DiggingDogFarm before I saw your comment.

trev_teich

I'm going to start just testing everything. Grrrr why dose anyone write in cups and TB. So anyoing.

Samuel_68313

Yeah I agree. Obviously people believe cups/spoons to be easy but reality is that it's not quicker, or more convenient, and it's just a pain. All you can really do is convert recipes personally because one mans 1/2 cup is another mans 2tbs.

Brendan_Lee_56950

Blame the government, always gotta be different.

davidattala

Not to mention that you have to have measuring cups of varying sizes, measuring spoons, etc. I'm sure we all have that one drawer that is full of those things that could easily be replaced by a scale, period.

tjdubas

Oh dear god, and how some cups say 250ml is a cup and others its 235ml.. it doesn't make that big of a deal for small quantities but it does if you are say making a large amount of soup or something. A guy in my apprentice class found this out the hard way (and we still mercilessly ridicule him). Also how much room does a scale take up compared to some cups. I found one that slips into my knife bag for $39 and so far its fantastic.

Mike_Minh_Truong_54120

I think you could take an arbitrary amount of barley grains, then find out how much volume it displaces by putting it into a measuring cup containing water. By both weighing and displacing the barley grains with water, you can obtain the conversion factor that is necessary to find the amount of barley flour that would equal to one cup.

For example, say you weighed a handful of barley grains and got a measurement of 50g. Next, you placed the same 50g of barley grains into a measuring cup and found that it displaced 80mL of water. Therefore, the conversion factor is 50g barley/80mL .

From here you can convert the conversion factor (50g barley/80mL) to cups of barley by multiplying it with 240 (since 240mL/cup) to finally obtain 150g of barley flour/cup.

trev_teich

I would think the grains, rice or what have you, would absorb some of the water and give an inaccurate result, also barley grains would not give a weight for AP flour. I see where you are going with this and could defiantly work with some foods.

Mike_Minh_Truong_54120

I have heard of 3D laser scanners that can measure the exact volume by scanning three dimensionally, but not much people have the luxury to purchase something like that for home use, except for, maybe the guy who owns a glider plane on this site.

Peggy_G_27722

The flours from different brands definitely have different weights. Temperature and humidity also play a big role in weighing out flour - you'll find flour on a rainy day weighs differently than that same cup of flour on a sunny day. Such is the science of baking

As for the MC weight of 80 grams, must be a typo, because I just checked my own copy and it says 160 grams?

trev_teich

Really? I have the first run, must be an oversite.