My first real blog post

I want to start off by talking about weight- no, not yours or mine- that's a topic for another blog.  I mean the importance of learning to weigh ingredients on a scale instead of dry or wet measuring, especially for baking purposes.  I got in the habit of weighing ingredients only after we opened the bakery and started baking in a professional way, but now I'm so hooked that I can't imagine baking without my scale.  As the saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words":

Now watch what happens when I try to measure "a cup of flour". How do you do it? Do you "dip and sweep"? Is the flour in your container a freshly opened bag of presifted flour, or has the container been banged around a bit so the flour is densely settled? Do you level off the cup with your fingers, or with a knife?  Do you tap the filled cup a few times on the side of the container to level it off?  That's what I did here with this measuring cup.

 Then I tipped the flour onto the scale to weigh it.

 Lo and behold, my cup of flour, which should weigh 140 grams (standard weight), weighed in at a hefty 161 grams. If you're using this flour to bread schnitzel, no damage done; but it  would make quite a difference in your delicate, time-invested pecan torte.

There are so many good and reasonably priced kitchen scales available today that there's almost no reason not to get one and learn to get in the habit of using it.  Make sure you get one that has a "tare" setting, which means after every item you weigh or utensil you put on the scale, you can hit "tare" and it goes back to zero, so you can keep adding ingredients and weighing each one easily and quickly.
update- We are in the home stretch of our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to self-publish our first memoir/cookbook, Secrets From Lori Rapp's Kitchen, Tales and Recipes From Jerusalem's Popular La Cuisine. 
Thank you so much for all your generous support, please don't stop yet!! We have only one more week to raise enough  funds to help market and distribute our book overseas... please pass on the good word with this link just once more- http://bit.ly/K1ycam .



Lori Rapp