Scale
June 12, 2007
Any bread-baking book you look at emphasizes that weighing the flour is much more accurate than measuring it, and that, in bread-baking, accuracy matters.
So you need a scale. What the books don’t emphasize for the home baker is that scales can be off by 5% and that glass/plastic measuring cups are not so accurate, either.
Van Over’s bread uses 70% “hydration,” which for 500 g of flour means using 350 g of water. It took me a while to learn that my measuring cup did not match my scale: 350 ml of water in my measuring cup weighs 340 g on my scale, which makes a surprising difference in the bread. (I know, it probably means my scale is off, but it doesn’t matter; what matters is that there’s exactly twice as much flour by weight as water.)
Moral: Weigh your water in your measuring cup to see if it and the scale agree.
What kind of scale should you get? Not mine…
