Lots of folks still are using volume measurement for bread dough formulas, judging from the vast number of volumetric recipes using cups available on the Internet. Since the years I first learned of baker’s percentages and weighing ingredients instead, first from Bread Baker’s Apprentice, I don’t think I’d ever go back to the older way of measuring by volume. One of the critical sets of tools used are balances or digital scales. When I got my first digital scale, I had no idea I’d be collecting a set of them for accurate weight measures.

I’ve actually had a few more than just those pictured, a few of them broke, a couple I keep around as spares should one of those pictured do the same. In that photo, for home baking, I’ve found the 5000 g x 1 g (capacity x digits resolution) scale probably the most used one, but it doesn’t weigh as accurately with weights below 100 g, below that weight, the potential error increases. The 500 g x 0.01 scale is a fairly new one, but so far seems to work well, I use it for weights as low as 1 gram, with only 1% error. For weighing ingredients below one gram, I use the 20 g x 0.001 g scale, it doesn’t have a large capacity, but seems excellent for measuring very small weights such as dry yeast.  For dry yeast, I always measure with this scale even if it’s over 1 g, as I can predict sponge fermentation times to an accuracy of < 10 minutes, something I’m not able to do when measuring with the 0.01 g accuracy scale.

As the accuracy of these inexpensive consumer scales increase, their capacity decreases.