What’s so Funny About Accuracy in the Kitchen?

Saucy, Is there anything I can get for my love, who loves to cook? Last minute shopper

A thermometer and if your love loves baking, he or she should own a good scale before owning anything like fancy silicon cupcake molds.

How do you know when something is done/When is it done? There are folksy answers to this question – For cakes it is when you can stick a skewer in it comes out clean, for puddings when only the center is jiggly, for chicken it is when the juices run clear or that a steak is medium rare when it is the same tension as the space between your thumb and finger when you make a fist. While all these answers are true enough, the single most accurate way of determining when something is done is by taking its temperature with a thermometer.

Thermometers come in all shapes and sizes from a nearly useless dial with the words “rare/well/poultry” on it costing around $10 to the more accurate instant read thermometer – about $15. There are candy thermometers that double for all your deep-frying needs, for $100 or so dollars there is a CSI like probe thermometer, chocolate and candy have their own measuring devices and one can still find mercury thermometers -used mostly to determine if wine is at the proper temp for serving.

For all the bells and whistles available, I like this relatively simple fella – a combo timer and thermometer. Soft ball candy - set the alarm to go off 235ºƒ. Making a roast - leave the probe in the meat and mount the display on the oven so you can keep an eye on when your dinner is ready, no guessing, no more repeatedly opening the oven door and letting the heat our and extending cooking times. All that accuracy for $24.95…it is a Christmas miracle.

The Fannie Farmer is famous for being the first cookbook to standardize measurements. A large cup? Farmer dictated that a cup of flour was a level measure from an 8oz measure. The problem is a cup of flour may fill an 8 oz cup but it is 4.25 oz by weight. Unless you really pack it in there then you can get 5 oz in that cup. Which means you could have 15% more flour than a recipe needs, this could explain why some cakes are so heavy.

Some cookbooks recommend you sift then measure for greater accuracy, Saucyman recommends avoiding painstaking work that doesn’t really solve problems. Get a scale. This is how you would measure if you were baking professionally and there is no reason why you shouldn’t prepare your baked goods with the same degree of precision at home. A set of measuring cups – fancy ones with ergonomic handles and stainless bodies cost between $15-20. A digital scale form a big box store is going to cost $50. Here is an important point to be made about buying kitchen tools for your sweetie – you get repaid 10 fold in food. So the question – Is $30 difference between the two items worth replacing the leaden, heavy, dense baked items with airy sweet goodness? I think yes.

Saucyman returns next week with a comparative lit thesis – Outliers in the kitchen and we will give a brief history of the single best Christmas Dessert – The Trifle.