Recipes for kitchen scales

February 11, 2012 6:45 AM

I have a brand new kitchen scale. Where do I find recipes that are by weight instead of volume?

I got a kitchen scale for Christmas. Great! I thought, I always wanted one! All my recipes are by volume, but I'm sure the internet will provide. I'll just search for some combination of 'recipe' and 'weight' or maybe 'scale' and I'll be set!

(Yeah, I know, you're all shaking your heads in disbelief right now. I don't know what I was thinking. I promise I've lived in this world for longer than a week.)

As you can imagine searching for anything involving food and mass gets 50 bajillion dieting website and recipes for weight loss. Help?

I'd prefer websites, but will buy books (dead tree or e-)
(I'm in Canada).

posted by platypus of the universe to food & drink (27 answers total)

Ruhlman's Ratio. Anything by Ruhlman, really, including recipes on his website. He's a huge proponent of measuring by weight.
posted by supercres at 6:53 AM on February 11, 2012 [3 favorites]

When you say your existing recipes are by volume, do you mean cups?

Because if that is the case, and you want recipes where it'll say, for example, 250g of flour rather than 2 cups of flour, just search for recipes from the UK. All of our recipes are in grams.

Although saying that, maybe your scales are in ounces? I don't know whether you use metric in Canada? You could still get recipes in grams and convert to ounces. Quite a lot of British recipes will be in pounds and ounces too anyway, because we used to use Imperial.

Apologies if I have completely missed the point - I wasn't totally sure what you meant by volume.
posted by schmoo at 6:55 AM on February 11, 2012 [3 favorites]

Don't most recipe websites let you switch to metric? Alternatively, use UK recipes.
posted by cmonkey at 6:56 AM on February 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

I think if you look on British recipe sites, you'll get recipes with weight, not volume.

For baking, I just found a chart with ingredient weights, did the conversions, and wrote them in the margins of my favorite recipes. I pretty much mostly use my scale for baking anyway, so that works.
posted by craichead at 6:57 AM on February 11, 2012

Anything from the UK, like the pleasantly cakey Be-Ro cookbook.

(Note, though, that standard Canadian flour is a lot harder than UK flour, so some recipes will come out very dense.)
posted by scruss at 6:58 AM on February 11, 2012

Allrecipes.com has a button that will let you switch between US style (by volume) and metric style (by weight) for any recipe on their site.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 7:00 AM on February 11, 2012

Most French recipes are also by weight. And definitely most 'big' recipe websites have the conversion option (although may affect results, I would imagine.

Just find the recipe you want, then re-search that in google and more results will probably come up- ie the same recipe on an aggregate website that will allow for conversions. I think!
posted by bquarters at 7:09 AM on February 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

You can also convert each ingredient to weight and scribble that new number on your recipe. Google flour weight conversion ounces and it will bring up pages that tell you how much 1/4 cup, 1/2 cup, 3/4 cup, etc will weigh. Same for every other ingredient - sugar, water, rice, brown sugar.
posted by bilabial at 7:10 AM on February 11, 2012

Many recipes on King Arthur Flour are by weight. (For that matter, most recipes geared serious bakers are by weight.)
posted by mchorn at 7:11 AM on February 11, 2012 [2 favorites]

Deb of Smitten Kitchen sometimes provides weights in her recipes; searching the site for "grams" works pretty well. She also provides a conversion page.
posted by neushoorn at 7:25 AM on February 11, 2012

Rose Levy Berenstein's baking books all list weights - and cooking by weight is most important with baking I think.
posted by leslies at 7:27 AM on February 11, 2012

do the recipes have to be in english? Most european recipe sites use metric measurements.
posted by alchemist at 7:33 AM on February 11, 2012

The BBC have a big collection of recipes. Over here we don't even know what a measuring cup is so you can be sure all our recipes are done by weight.

Jamie Oliver has some recipes on his website.

So does Delia.
posted by emilyw at 7:35 AM on February 11, 2012

The Australian Weekly cookbooks are wonderful and are listed by weight. I've found them in Canada. They may be called Australian Women's Weekly. Beautiful photos. Uses Australian measuring cups and teaspoons. Ordering a set was easy.
posted by jennstra at 7:41 AM on February 11, 2012

Alton Brown's recipes, which you can find on foodnetwork.com, often use weights in addition to volume.
posted by maxim0512 at 7:58 AM on February 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

I'm an American (cups! teaspoons!) and I live in Europe (grams! scales!) and I mostly cook out of AllRecipes. The .co.uk and .com sites are interchangeable and you can tick a radio button to switch between imperial and metric on either site.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:04 AM on February 11, 2012

Warning: This is my blog and it's in it's infancy. But all of my baking recipes from school are by weight. I want to say a few of the culinary ones are as well but I'm not sure about that one.
posted by theichibun at 8:13 AM on February 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

A number of dessert recipe authors do this, such as Rose Levy Beranbaum. Also, Cook's Illustrated recipes often have weights.
posted by gudrun at 8:21 AM on February 11, 2012

The problem with some of the above suggestions is that the recipes were not developed using weight, and mass per given volume can vary slightly, and the recipes will almost certainly not scale properly because the proportions will get off as you double or halve the recipe.

So you want a cookbook that was developed with the recipes going by weight. Culinary Institute of America and Cordon Bleu do this for their professional cookbooks, but the recipes are unfortunately usually around 10 servings, too much unless you're having a dinner party, so you need to do the math to scale down. However, they will work 95% of the time scaled up or down as much as you want precisely because they were developed with weight measurements in the first place.
posted by slow graffiti at 9:16 AM on February 11, 2012 [3 favorites]

Everything by Rose Levy Beranbaum uses both types of measurements.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:47 AM on February 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

If you like baking, King Arthur Flour has many recipes that are listed by both weight and volume.
posted by LaurenIpsum at 10:00 AM on February 11, 2012

I agree with supercres that ratio is a great book for this kind of thing.
posted by annsunny at 1:06 PM on February 11, 2012

I just converted all my favorite recipes that would benefit from ounces to grams. Measured out the amounts by volume, weighed, and wrote it in the margin. It is unreal how much easier, faster, and more precise things like measuring out the dry ingredients for pancake mix are when you have a scale. Making an 8x batch of mix out of Joy of Cooking turns from a chore of measuring out 16 cups of flour into essentially a single dumping motion from a bag into the bowl.

For general recipes, I like French blogger Clotilde Dusolier's Chocolate and Zucchini site. Metric weights and English volumes for everything.
posted by wnissen at 1:35 PM on February 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

french macaron recipes are almost always by weight, since they're so fussy. i am making these as we speak (er...type).
posted by sabh at 9:00 PM on February 11, 2012

The Culinary Institute of America standard book of learning cooking is by weight, as are, I would imagine, any other authoritative texts put out by culinary schools.
posted by TheRedArmy at 3:28 PM on February 12, 2012

Taste has excellent recipes and is mostly done by weight. (I have linked to the truly splendiferous recipe for raspberry cheesecake brownies that I made last week without a scale as the battery was dead, which made things much more complicated) It's Australian, so there will probably be some ingredient issues (SR flour is plain flour with baking powder already mixed in) Just to add to the fun, our cups are 250mL, and our tablespoons are 20mL (15mL in the US), but I generally treat them as the same when I use US recipes.
posted by kjs4 at 7:32 PM on February 12, 2012

All British recipes are by weight. Some websites I use are:
Tesco Real Food
Sainsburys Recipes
I also 2nd the BBC & Delia websites.
posted by cantthinkofagoodname at 2:41 AM on February 25, 2012