11 Comments

Kitchen scales are the best!

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I use mine nearly everyday. Do you ever use a coffee scale for super precise stuff like spices? I ask because there are times when I reach for it over my regular scale. I wondered how anomalous I am.

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No, but I will now!

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Sep 26Liked by Andrea Nguyen

Looking forward to that spicy tomato tofu recipe (but then you knew I would...)

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Heheheh -- I think you would and will!

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Sep 27Liked by Andrea Nguyen

I bought my first kitchen scale when I started baking gluten free and was mixing starches and flours together. After using it a bit, I refuse to go back to volume measurements again. Measuring out flour was always a nightmare. Did I fluff this flour enough?

Canning recipes are the worse! A bushel of xyz, really? Or this, 20 large tomatoes, exactly what is a large tomato? Weigh the darned vegetables and be done with it!

Sorry, I get a bit emotional about volume vs weight.

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A scale is so great for many things. I use it weigh for postage!

hahahah about canning recipes! Bushels have always gotten me too. For years, editors told me that "1 tomato" is one medium tomato. And I was like -- Do you ever go grocery shopping? And, we expect cooks to be experts in produce averages? I battle with this issue and after 20 years, think I may have a handle on it for recipe writing. So, I'm emotional with you!

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I often skip over baking recipes without weight measurements! In my opinion, a scale is essential for sourdough bread baking. It's so much easier to scale a recipe up or down with weight measurements than volume measurements. For cooking, I'll use the scale to check the weight of a produce ingredient if a recipe calls for a specific weight.

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A scale is great for all kinds of dishes. And when a recipe includes a weight, I tend to measure with that to know I'm hitting the mark. Vegetables can be toughies but I tell readers in Ever-Green Vietnamese that if you're slightly off, you'll be ok. ;-)

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I don’t eat a lot of frozen food, so the pumpkin samosas are my Can’t Deal With Anything snack/light meal. I have them with either the sweet chili sauce or Greek yogurt w/herbs mixed in, and sliced cucumbers to round it out. That cilantro mint chutney looks divine! I like how the recipe has a measurement for garlic too, because cloves vary greatly in size. 👍🏼

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Frozen food has its pluses and minuses. TJ always has interesting snacks to explore. Like you, it’s a splurge sort of thing. Great to know that you eat the samosas with the chile sauce and raita of sorts. The mango chutney is alright! Garlic cloves… another tricky ingredient to measure so I always have my benchmark info in the front of my cookbooks. But now it’s time to apply it to recipes too!

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