Kitchen Tools & Equipment: Episode 8 - Measuring Tools
Accuracy in measuring ingredients when cooking is often always necessary. It’s nice just to start a dish, add in the ingredients and see where it takes you. It allows for a lot of creativity on the fly. Baking, however, does not lend itself well to improvisation. I found over the years that people either love to bake or hate to bake. Accuracy is not everyone’s thing. I personally enjoy the methodology…the measuring…the accuracy…the chemistry that comes with baking…maybe that’s why I became a pastry chef?? You start with a recipe and you know each time you make it, it will be just like the last time you made it. Predictable and comforting. Unfortunately, you’ll need another set of tools to achieve all this perfection and accuracy, all things that measure, both by weight and by volume, and even though cuisine cooking doesn’t often require it, every so often you just can’t get by without them, especially when you’re just starting to learn to cook. The skill of cooking by eye or feel are ones that will need to be practiced and developed so until then, use the tools and measure what you have to until you feel comfortable. They’re there to help you!
Scales, scoops, cups, spoons. They come in different shapes and sizes, so how many of these things do we really need? Probably a lot fewer than I currently own…but I have been collecting for 30 years and if you didn’t know this about chefs, pastry chefs included, we like toys and we tend to accumulate quite a few throughout our careers. There is however a small group of measuring tools I think everyone should have handy, just in case you have an uncontrollable urge to measure something!
Ounces & pounds. Ounces & cups….
We use the same word but they are not the same thing. To make it clearer, ounces & pounds are weight measurements. Ounces, or rather it should read fluid ounces and cups are volume measurements. Unfortunately, some recipes are not clear but many will specify if something is to be weighed or if it is to measured by volume.
