You Need a Kitchen Scale

You need a kitchen scale, a digital one. Don’t spend a lot of money.

This is a short post because all you need to know is that everyone needs a scale. There are two reasons I love my scale, three if you count a game I play.

The first is for cooking better meals. Liquids, such as cooking oil, can be measured easily with measuring cups and spoons. Dry ingredients can be difficult without a scale. I don’t bake, but you will get different results depending on how you scoop flour, brown sugar, and other ingredients that can be packed down. It doesn’t really matter with ingredients like chopped onions, because most people don’t care whether they get a little more or less in their hash browns.

Measuring cheese and vegetables without a scale is difficult. Not enough cheese can ruin a casserole, and three cups of arugula will weigh vastly different amounts depending on how much you pack the measuring cup. It can also be a problem with nuts, broccoli, cauliflower, and other ingredients that vary in volume depending on how they are chopped. The best cooking sites I know, Serious Eats and America’s Test Kitchen, use weights for such ingredients. I’m not the best cook, but it is much easier to deal with weights. Then, if my chopping skills aren’t very good, it doesn’t matter as much.

Another reason to have a scale is to know how much you eat. Imagine if you are trying to save money for the down payment on a car. How would you do that if you didn’t know how much money you make or how much money you spend? If you want to lose weight and have no understanding of what you eat, it’s impossible. The nutrition label of a package of boneless chicken breasts says they are 110 calories per serving. That doesn’t sound like many calories. The serving size is listed as four ounces. You may assume that’s one breast. It’s not. I just weighed two chicken breasts that I’m making for dinner tonight. The two breasts weigh 19 ounces. So, each is 9.5 ounces. If I didn’t have a scale, I would have eaten more than double what I estimated.

If you want to lose weight, I recommend The Three Rules to Lose Weight and Keep It Off Forever. You don’t need to weigh anything to lose weight. Still, I like having a scale because I want to make sure I get enough protein and not too much. I talk about protein in The Six Rules for a Longer, Healthier Life. Inadequate dietary protein leads to muscle loss and frailty. These studies are difficult, and there are some studies with inconclusive results, but suffice it to say that you need adequate protein to stay healthy.

Without a scale, there is no way to track calories, carbohydrates, protein, or salt in your diet. A serving of shrimp usually has at least 300mg of sodium. A package I saw today at Fresh Thyme has 600 mg of sodium per serving. (They add salt when they freeze shrimp and other seafood.) You don’t know how many servings you’re eating if you don’t weigh it. A serving size of shrimp is 4 ounces. That is a small amount of shrimp for most Americans. In a restaurant, you get at least 8 ounces. Measuring food is important. You don’t need a scale, but people don’t measure the alcohol they put in an alcoholic drink. They may say they have one drink a day, but there may be 2-3 standard servings of alcohol in that one drink.

The first step in defining what you are doing is to quantify it. You need a watch to measure how much time your kid practices piano or reads. To measure the food you eat, you need a scale. So, which one should you get? America’s Test Kitchen recommends the OXO scale. I like OXO products, but I bought this scale from Amazon Basics. It costs much less than the OXO. I’ve used it daily for over a year and have never had a problem. If you bake, maybe you need the most precise, accurate scale ever made, but for under fifteen dollars, this scale suits me.

You need a kitchen scale for cooking and to know what you eat. I also like it for accurately dividing meals. I first try to divide it equally without the scale. Then I weigh it and see how close I was. My wife says it’s obsessive or compulsive to do that, but it’s fun.