Comment by moron4hire
13 hours ago
The baking industry isn't really measuring by weight, they are measuring by bag, which happens to be delineated in weight.
Look, this is arm chair, YouTube cooking. There is so much variation in recipes that 10% here and there is not going to make or break any recipe.
There is zero ability to make a "universally better" version of a recipe by micro optimizing ingredients. For one thing, you can't easily control temperature and humidity variations on your environment. If people think 2% difference in flour content is going to make or break their bread recipe, then daily humidity variations will definitely have an impact. But it doesn't, really. It's the sort of thing people blame when they don't have good process or good technique.
For another thing, there is no way to evaluate the outcome as "better". Better for you, perhaps, but even then, it's mostly psychosomatic. I've doubled the amount of baking soda in a recipe before and it has had zero impact. I've never measured flour by weight and my cookies come out exactly the same as my wife's when she breaks out the microscale
I've been cooking for a long time. I have family members who refuse to come to Easter Dinner unless I'm the one cooking. I barely measure anything, ever. Even when I'm baking. It matters to have things in the right ballpark, but 5% variations don't matter.
The difference between weight and volume measurements could easily be a 20% or 30% gap. I’ve measured two of my cups of flour before and they were off by roughly that amount.
Maybe I’m just bad at measuring, but it’s a lot more than 5%.
It always gets me how the exact proper amount of an ingredient seems to coincidentally round off to an even number of units. You don't often see something that requires 2.07 cups, or 71 grams.
If measurements are rounded off for convenience, a few percentage difference won't be noticeable. People would be better off acquiring a feel for how liquid a batter should be, or how seasonings smell when they're toasted the right amount, etc.