If you’ve ever watched any of my baking videos, you know how much I love my scale.
It’s the only reliable way to measure flour. Flour is a powder, it’s compressible, that’s
why cups don’t work. Blah, blah, blah, you know my spiel. Which often results in comments
like these. These are from my pasta video.
First stresses the importance of weighing your ingredients, then immediately goes to
teaspoons of kosher salt....however much that is..... why can't you stick to your own advice
and weigh the damn salt, lady?!
This a fantastic video but why are your salt measurements by volume? This is mildly infuriating
as you have used Americanised salt (kosher salt isn't common in the UK), and I personally
don't keep table salt on hand, and I would guess that table salt might not be the same
density across the world. I'm just going to hope that 1tsp of table salt is 5g of any
other salt.
Sure, the first guy is just being an asshole and the second guy is being, how should I
put it… “mildly infuriating”? But they do raise an interesting question. If we are
weighing everything else, why aren’t we weighing salt. If salt is weighed, the type
of salt doesn’t matter. 1g of one salt provides exactly the same amount of salinity as 1g
of any other salt. The reason that the volume is different is that different salts have
different crystal shape, size, and density. In that pasta video, it would be so easy for
me to say that you need 5.7g of salt. Instead I say this “2 tsp of Diamond Crystal Kosher
Salt or 1 tsp of Table salt. Please note that not all Kosher salts are the same. Morton’s
Kosher is saltier than Diamond Crystal Kosher.”
Why do I give such “infuriating” salt measurements? Because normal kitchen scales
are insanely misleading when measuring small quantities. Here. Watch this. Let’s weigh
5 grams of salt on a scale designed for small quantities. These are usually called tea,
medicine or jewelry scales and they are accurate to one hundredth of a gram. Now, let’s put
this amount of salt onto a normal kitchen scale. If we dump it all in, we’ll get
4 grams. Not perfect, but close. Unfortunately, that’s not how people work with salt. You
probably won’t dump all of the salt in at once because you don’t know how much salt
you’ll need. What you’ll do is sprinkle it in nice and slow.
And guess what.
If you sprinkle 5 grams of salt slowly onto a regular kitchen scale, you get a nice fat
0. If you add an ingredient in very small increments, your scale won’t register it
at all. You think my scale is broken? I tried it on 2 more scales from different manufacturers.
If I dumped the salt in all at once, the scales read 5 grams, but if I sprinkled it in slowly,
they couldn’t register it at all.
If your batch is pretty big and you need lots of salt, weighing it is perfectly fine, but
for most of the batches that home cooks work with, weighing your salt can be completely
unreliable unless you have a scale made for small quantities. I surely wish everyone had
this kind of scale. They are cheap, they barely take up any space, and they would solve all
our salt measurement problems. But I doubt even 1% of my viewers have one. If you are
that 1%, let me know in the comments. If you want to get one, I’ll link to mine in the
description below.
I know that these days people want a recipe to be global. But unfortunately, there is
no such thing. I started my channel to help the students who take my classes. In Boston,
Diamond Crystal Kosher salt is the go-to salt for all professional cooks. It’s available
in all stores except for Whole Foods. In some cities it’s very easy to find and in some
it’s not. That’s why I give you the table salt measurement. That’s the one salt you
can get in absolutely every single supermarket in America. Is table salt different in other
countries? Possibly. What do you do about it? You keep notes. Try something and adjust
next time. You can also buy a scale accurate to one hundredth of a gram and ask me for
the gram measurement. If you have a way to measure it, I’d be more than happy to give
it to you in grams. The reason I hesitate to give it in the recipe is that most people
will weigh it on a regular scale and get a completely wrong amount of salt.
And now I have a mistake to admit. I recently made a cabbage salad video where I give you
salt by weight in the hopes of eliminating guesswork for people who are not confident
with seasoning to taste. I thought 7 grams would be big enough to weigh on a regular
scale, but I was wrong. It’s big enough if you dump it in all at once, the way I did
in the video because I knew how much salt I wanted to use. I was recently retesting
that recipe and added salt gradually, the way someone might do if they didn’t know
how much salt they needed. And guess what? My scale kept reading 0 after most of my salt
was in. Sorry about that guys. I hope I didn’t ruin anyone’s salad. Well, live and learn,
right?
Stay curious. Ask questions, just do it nicely.
Here are more thought provoking culinary videos for you to check out and if you are ever in
the Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.