Go to the Article: Great Gravy! How to Thicken Anything With Cornstarch or Flour
As a new Studio Pass subscriber I'm starting to get irritated at your universal exclusion of measures in your explanations in favor of ONLY listing weights. This is not a language home cooks are familiar with. If, as teachers, you want us to focus on this unfamiliar explanation you would use an old teaching trick, REPETITION, to help us learn the new language. I'm convinced weights are essential in baking, like bread, but not so for other cooking. Whether you help me learn will determine my extension of my subscription. I'm hoping for help, and hope you are open to feedback.
Digital scales are cheap, Greg. Adapt or perish.
Hi Greg, I understand as a new member and home cook some of the ways we do things might seem a little overly complicated. But we design all of our activities so that they can be replicated by you at home with the closest results to what we tirelessly do research and development on, so you don't have to try and fail. To do that we have to give you the most precise information we can. Here are a few of our older activities that give you some reference on why we scale... everything. Hope this helps you on your cooking journey.
https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/chefsteps-101
https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/weight-vs-volume-speed
https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/weight-vs-volume-accuracy
A year old, but feel compelled to reply. All serious recipes are in weight form, including baking/pastry. Only savory recipies that are “to taste” would be written in volumetric terms, or in cases where there was a one-to-one correspondence between weight and volume (as in liquids). Weights also make scaling recipes much easier, at least if elementary math is not an insurmountable challenge. If you know that the additive weight is 22% of the liquid, that’s pretty easy to scale, right?
Where you might be right, particularly since CS tends to use metric, is if they gave “about” volumes. For example, few in the US know what 225g of something is, but listing it as, about .5 lbs somewhere might help, and similarly as around 8 oz if it were a liquid measure.
I’m surprised that you didn’t give even a mention to buerre manié, a wonderful item to keep in your refrigerator when you need to thicken a soup or sauce but didn’t plan ahead. An equal, by weight, mixture of butter and flour, kneeled together until homogeneous, a table spoon will thicken a cup of hot liquid. Essentially an uncooked roux, don’t try to thicken quarts of sauce or you’ll have an uncooked flour taste. The blend of flour and fat dissolves readily in hot liquid without forming lumps.
It’s great to add by pinches to a simmering soup to get the consistency you want. Mix up a batch to keep in your fridge, it lasts for weeks in a covered container.
