All baking recipe ingredients should be in weight, not volume.

i cant imagine this would be unpopular for anyone who actually bakes.

its so frustrating not having exact amounts for what is essentially chemistry.

Use non-American recipes.

The rest of the world does this. And guess what, 1 milliliter of water is exactly 1 gram, unlike stupid ounces.

Just because no one in your life cares enough about your niche opinion to actually have an opinion does not make that an "unpopular opinion." When your opinion is the opinion of hobbyists, professionals, and elites alike, it's certain not unpopular, even if it is niche.

You're certainly right in your opinion, and that's the point of bitching at you.

This isn't unpopular.

Anyone who learns to bake quickly learns this.

Flour's ability to absorb water changes depending on what variety of wheat and where it was grown and what the weather was like during the season. Weight is also just a guideline. Baking is not an exact science.

If you bake regularly then this is a popular opinion. I generally won’t bother with a recipe that does not have the weights.

Downvoted for popular opinion.

What, I'm supposed to use my kitchen scale for something other than cocaine?

Cleanup is so much easier also. I don’t have to use a measuring spoon or cup for ingredients—I just dispense them into the bowl until I hit the correct number.

IMO anything sold by weight should be measured by weight in a recipe.

I could have an exception for things under 20g, which scales seem to get wrong a lot. I can do spoons, but not cups.

Also: Metric only. A tablespoon is anywhere from 13g to 20g depending on who you're talking to. A gram is always a gram.

I am a proficient baker and I can get behind this.

My kitchen scale won’t measure below one gram, and a lot of things (spices and flavorings, mostly) are used in amounts below one gram.

So I can either dirty up some spoons, or go buy a second scale that only gets used for the small stuff…

In general I agree, of course, but there definitely is a use case for volumetric measuring spoons.

• 2 cups of flour
• 1oz of water
• 50g of salt

"One pound of milk"

The only exception to this should be militers/liters. Because if you have to use, as example, 1l of milk, this would, if you want to be exact, be about 1.05kg

This is not unpopular. At least acc. to my experience.

In the civilized world, they are. Except for liquids, but that's a given.

This stupid "How many grams is a f-ing cup of <whatever> again?" is a pain in the a...

All dry ingredients should for sure and they are where I am from. I still measure them in a special cup in the end that converts different ingredients from grams into volume but I wouldn't know what to do with a "cup of flour" in the instructions either.

Yes, weight is more accurate when you have scales however if you are doing something on the fly or don't have scales then volume gets you better results than trying to guess the weight.

My biggest problem with volume recipes is that very often they don't abide to the 250ml cup but use slightly larger or smaller cups, which causes variations. There is also the caveat of not having a measuring cup available just as I previously mentioned not always having scales available.

With all that said, ideally recipes should include both weight and volume measurements at all times.

You can get your panties in a twist over accuracy (it doesnt matter as much as you think it does) but what youre really mad it is American cultural hegemony. So yeah good luck yelling in to the void I guess.

It would be kind of annoying if you had do weigh all your liquids.

I'm of the opinion that if you're good at what you do, you should be able to eyeball all the ingredients. You shouldn't need exact measurements to be able to tell if you're using enough if you know what you're doing.

The book "flour water salt yeast" is awesome for a lot of reasons, one of them is that all of the recipes are in grams, us volumes, and bakers percentages. I primarily use the grams measurements, but the bakers percentages makes it much easier to scale recipes up or down

Definitely not an unpopular opinion. Anybody that bakes more than once a year ends up wishing it was by weight. And I agree fully with your opinion.

Mind you, it doesn't actually matter with all baking, and even then it matters less what the actual measures are as long as the person using the recipe is consistent in how they measure.

What measuring by weight achieves is consistency more than ideal results, though consistency leads directly to ideal results. So, if you measure by volume, and you measure out each cup the same every time, you'll get the same results every time, within the degree of variability in things that can't be standardized like humidity, water content of flour, precise gluten amounts, etc.

Where volume measurements in baking fail is when you hand the recipe to the next person, which is what your post is really about. But, even that has limited impact on results since there are factors in end results that can't be standardized. The difference between a densely packed cup and a loosely packed one matters for sure, but it also won't make a cake recipe fail entirely in most cases.

For things like quick breads, you don't worry as much about measurements at all, since you're going to be adjusting liquid amounts no matter what the measures are. The only part that matters there is the ratio of leaveners to flour, and there's more leeway in that than there is in cakes.

But, even with cakes, you'll have as much or more difference in results from the type of flour as the measures. If your recipe is built on using AP flour, me using cake flour is going to end up different, even measured by weight. Noticeably different even to a non baker. But it'll still be yummy no matter what the measures are.

Bread baking is where you see weight measures used the majority of the time, and there's still a ton of variability between loaves because the environment plays such a big role. A five degree difference in room temp during proofing has more effect on the end results than those caused by measures.

The key is that you can actually control the measures, which is why I agree fully with your opinion. If you're enough of a baker to be publishing recipes (as opposed to just sharing them with people that ask), and you aren't giving the recipes in weights, you're a prat lol.

If it works why change it

My personal favorite experience relating to this was buying some ice cream with nutritional information by the milliliter, but with serving size by the gram...

Highly recommend this book for baking for this and many reasons. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/250188/the-bread-bakers-apprentice-15th-anniversary-edition-by-peter-reinhart/

Stop getting recipes from whatever random source pops up in Google, and start getting recipes directly from sources you trust. Reputable test kitchens usually use mass for recipes, and at least the ones I look at will also include volumetric measurements for people who prefer them.

The thing with baking, though, is that there are many ingredients that require below gram level accuracy, and for those, volumetric measurements are more accurate for most people who have scales with a gram resolution.

I like weight measurement best, except for a few things I don't really want to bother measuring closely, like cornbread or ricotta cake. Those I just know by volume and can scale up based on the number of eggs, and aren't fussy.

So for cornbread I know the dry mix is half cornmeal half flour, with a spoonful of baking powder, half spoonful of salt, big pinch of baking soda for each cup of that mix. One cup of that for each egg you have; melt a whole stick of butter in the iron skillet at 425F while you mix the dry stuff, when it's hot add the eggs and enough buttermilk to make a thick batter (have literally never measured the buttermilk), pour the melted butter in, stir briefly, then pour batter into pan and bake 20-25 minutes. Has never failed, and I'm sure it's never exactly the same twice. It doesn't matter.

"Recipes" like that I enjoy. And most of my cooking is loosey goosey like that.

But bread, and fancy cakes, and even cocktais, 100% agree, I would prefer to pull out the scale and SO much easier to do weight, in grams.

Milk

Not really unpopular. That said, while flour (kind of the backbone of most baking recipes) is prone to being inaccurate when measured by volume, there are a lot of ingredients which do not have this problem and are not as sensitive to being measured wrong. If a cookie recipe calls for a quarter cup of chocolate chips that's probably fine. I think a lot of people don't have a scale sensitive enough to measure a half gram of yeast, either.

All baking recipes should be in mass for the dry ingredients and volume for the wet ingredients, definitely NOT weight. Because measuring flour by grams (mass) makes sense, but measuring flour by pounds (weight) is fucking stupid. Lots of people in this thread pretending to be smart by using SI units, but were apparently asleep in class when the teacher covered the difference between weight and mass. If you're going to get picky about such a trifling difference between a volume of sugar and a certain mass of sugar at least get the details correct.

50g of egg

When I cook? Dish needs salt? Grabs a bit with my fingers and throws it in... Taste.. Repeat as necessary.

When I bake? Electronic scale comes out that is accurate to three significant digits. EVERYTHING is weighed using it.

Anyone that doesn't bake from a box knows this.