My measuring spoons aren't accurate !

[Darienne]

And your better ones are....

Sorry, had to go look. They're Cuisipro. Got on the recommendation of other people here a few years back.

Thanks, PR.

[Mjx]

Sorry, had to go look. They're Cuisipro. Got on the recommendation of other people here a few years back.

Where did you get them? I hunted all over NYC for a set of these, and couldn't find them (although quite a few places had the supplementary set with 1.5 T, and so on).

[dougal]

... What are you doing that requires such precise measurements? In most cases, being off by 10% in regular cooking does not make a big difference.

Vitamin C crystals. And the one spoon was off by about 1/4 I would say.

Honestly, a scale and a recipe/prescription giving weights would make a lot of sense.

Take a look on eBay for a "pocket scale".

About the size of a bar of chocolate.

To weigh 200g maximum with a 0.01g sensitivity is a useful specification.

Your accuracy should be well within a tenth of a gram.

And costing about US$12 to 15 (delivered, even to Canada, but there's a chance you might be asked for import duty I suppose).

Such a thing is brilliant for accurately measuring tiny quantities of curing salts, yeast, vitamin c, modernist/molecular additives, even stuff like Mycryo for chocolate ...

Absent a scale, if you were to be using it in solution, you can get cunning with a "standard solution".

Lets say you wanted 250mg (0.25g). That's not very much.

But use any convenient smallish measure. Perhaps a 1/4 cup. Its accuracy doesn't matter for this!

Put 4 measures of water in a bowl.

Mix in 1000mg (1g) of Vitamin C - that's a standard tablet here, so no measuring, just dissolve it.

Now, use the same measure to stir the solution and take out one full measure.

It contains in solution, pretty damn accurately, 1/4 of what was in the original tablet, and thus 250mg (0.25g) of Vit C. Without needing to 'measure' anything accurately!

Of course you can apply a similar method to get fractions other than 1/4.

And by doing the dilution in several stages, you can get really tiny quantities super-accurately. (One scoop of that first solution plus four more of water gets you 50mg in a scoop from the second solution. Repeat the 1+4 dilution and you'd have 10mg in a scoop from the third solution...)

ADDED - but of course Vitamin C isn't harmful (or usually detrimental) in slight excess, so precision isn't terribly important. However, you need to be a bit more careful with saltpetre ... !

Edited May 3, 2011 by dougal (log)

[Darienne]

Honestly, a scale and a recipe/prescription giving weights would make a lot of sense.

Take a look on eBay for a "pocket scale".

About the size of a bar of chocolate.

To weigh 200g maximum with a 0.01g sensitivity is a useful specification.

Your accuracy should be well within a tenth of a gram.

And costing about US$12 to 15 (delivered, even to Canada, but there's a chance you might be asked for import duty I suppose).

Such a thing is brilliant for accurately measuring tiny quantities of curing salts, yeast, vitamin c, modernist/molecular additives, even stuff like Mycryo for chocolate ...

Absent a scale, if you were to be using it in solution, you can get cunning with a "standard solution".

Lets say you wanted 250mg (0.25g). That's not very much.

But use any convenient smallish measure. Perhaps a 1/4 cup. Its accuracy doesn't matter for this!

Put 4 measures of water in a bowl.

Mix in 1000mg (1g) of Vitamin C - that's a standard tablet here, so no measuring, just dissolve it.

Now, use the same measure to stir the solution and take out one full measure.

It contains in solution, pretty damn accurately, 1/4 of what was in the original tablet, and thus 250mg (0.25g) of Vit C. Without needing to 'measure' anything accurately!

Of course you can apply a similar method to get fractions other than 1/4.

And by doing the dilution in several stages, you can get really tiny quantities super-accurately. (One scoop of that first solution plus four more of water gets you 50mg in a scoop from the second solution. Repeat the 1+4 dilution and you'd have 10mg in a scoop from the third solution...)

ADDED - but of course Vitamin C isn't harmful (or usually detrimental) in slight excess, so precision isn't terribly important. However, you need to be a bit more careful with saltpetre ... !

Thanks for all the information. I do have a Salton scale and inexpensive as it was, it appears to be accurate. Two American nickels weighed 10 grams on it yesterday.

And I am working up to larger amounts of vitamin C, not a 1/4 of a teaspoon only. 1/4 teaspoon is the amount listed on the container. And powdered C costs a fraction of the tablets or capsules. And I have a huge bottle of it purchased for a dog who is no longer with us. So none of this is critical...I was just shocked at my discovery, which obviously, the rest of you knew all about.

Not to forget that taking an unaccustomed large dose of Vitamin C can cause a very significant problem, one which I, when still an ignorant lass, suffered many years ago and which I will NEVER forget. If I could ever get my hands on the health store employee who gave me the advice...

[dougal]

... I do have a Salton scale and inexpensive as it was, it appears to be accurate. Two American nickels weighed 10 grams on it yesterday.

And I am working up to larger amounts of vitamin C, not a 1/4 of a teaspoon only. 1/4 teaspoon is the amount listed on the container. ...

A couple of inter-related points.

You'd need to be weighing a SMALL quantity, perhaps about 1 gram (see later), with an accuracy of better than the ±25% variation between your different spoons.

An ordinary kitchen scale (reading in 1 gram 'clicks') simply cannot do that.

At best its precision is ± half a gram.

So even if it were absolutely accurate, its limited precision (displayed sensitivity) means that there is a ±50% uncertainty in the measurement.

In case I've lost you, I'll put it another way -- your scale should show "1g" all the way from 0.5g to 1.5g - you could be anywhere in that range, a 'by 1g' scale cannot do better -- and so such a scale is not suitable for weighing a "one gram" quantity accurately.

Its fine for accurately weighing out 400g of flour for baking a loaf, and massively better than a measuring jug for the 260g of water to make the dough, but its not very good for the 8g of salt for the same loaf, and the "4g" of instant mix yeast can only be hoped to be between 3.5 and 4.5 grams --- the limited precision limits the overall accuracy possible for small quantities. I wouldn't dream of trying to use my kitchen scale to measure the quarter gram of Vitamin C that I would add to the example loaf.

And then there's the question of sensitivity -- how factors like friction in the scale limit whether or not the scale can "see" a small change in the load. Yes, this most affects real % accuracy with small loads ...

So a scale that only reads in whole grams is not suitable for measuring one gram quantities.

Where does this 1g quantity come from?

Well, first of all that is how much Vitamin C there is in a typical "One a day" high dose tablet.

You only need about 4/100ths of a gram per day to prevent scurvy.

The RDA is about 8/100ths of a gram.

The US FDA seem to think that 2g per day is the "tolerable upper limit".

Doses of up to 6g per day are likely to produce 'digestive upsets'. (My jar label has a warning of this possibility beyond 1g/day.)

I weighed a "2.5ml" (half teaspoonful) measure of my own Vitamin C crystals at very close to 2.5 grams. So a quarter teaspoonful is about 1.25 grams. (CMA digression: Volume measures for solids are rubbish. If your crystal size is different, YMMV, and then there's the true size of my spoon...)

So, two things from that: a quarter teaspoon is already a pretty big dose, and the quantity to be measured is no more than one and a quarter grams.

For precision measurements of quantities of rather less than 10g (for the uses listed previously), I have found a cheap "pocket scale" to be both useful and affordable as a supplement to my kitchen scale. (But they are not rugged ...)

Edited May 3, 2011 by dougal (log)

[OliverB]

this just makes me wonder, is there a scale that measures in cups? Would be easy to program and I think kind of neat to have.

I usually eyeball things, I don't bake much and nothing else really needs the accuracy - modernist cooking aside.

I did recently use a scale to make Swedish Meatballs from a recipe my boy found in a story book, since we made twice the amount I figured I'll let him do the math for practice

Personally I'd have just gone by sight. (like that big onion over there is probably two cups of chopped onion)

[paulraphael]

You'd need to be weighing a SMALL quantity, perhaps about 1 gram (see later), with an accuracy of better than the ±25% variation between your different spoons.

An ordinary kitchen scale (reading in 1 gram 'clicks') simply cannot do that.

At best its precision is ± half a gram.

I lucked into a deal on a scale that reads to 0.1g, so for most things it's plenty accurate. Ordinarilly, the most cost effective approach is to have a scale that reads to 1g from general purposes, and a pocket scale with a low capacity that reads to .01g or so for things like leavening, hydrocolloids, or vitamin concoctions.

[paulraphael]

this just makes me wonder, is there a scale that measures in cups? W

How would it know what you're measuring? And if you're measuring something like flour that can be compressed, how would it know how you scoop / pack your cup?

[Lisa Shock]

this just makes me wonder, is there a scale that measures in cups? W

How would it know what you're measuring? And if you're measuring something like flour that can be compressed, how would it know how you scoop / pack your cup?

-Not to mention the fact that various commodities have very different weights. A cup of molasses weighs a lot more than the average cup of dry oregano.