Today, Your Country Needs You to Weigh In ― Get a Food Scale 🇺🇸

Weighing ingredients is the best, nay only way to make sure your cooking and baking are perfect.

AS A MAN WHO IS PLUMP or, as The One likes to call me, Rubenesque, I have a love-hate relationship with scales.

While losing weight, I bolt to the scale each morning, but not before stripping naked, peeing, digging out my belly button lint, clipping my nails, flossing my teeth, brushing my hair, and doffing my watch, rings, and hearing aids. (Thank you, Lyme disease) I exhale all the air in my lungs and gingerly step on the electronic beast. I’m usually dizzy from the loss of oxygen, so in order not to black out, I lean every so lightly on the windowsill. My antics guarantee at least a half-pound loss.

If I’m on the rebound and packing on the pounds, the scale mysteriously disappears. Weeks later, The One might stumble upon it plunged deep into the dirty laundry basket or under the weight machine, piled high with—what?—more dirty laundry.

The only scales I adore, worship, and rely on are those in my kitchen. Ever since being gently chided 25 years ago by the great Rose Levy Beranbaum, I’ve been weighing ingredients down to the gram.

Weighing food is nothing new to me. When I was a pudgy 10-year-old, Mama Leite gifted me with my own old-timey Weight Watchers scale (above). So after my come-to-Jesus moment with Rose, it wasn’t much of a leap to buy my first bonafide food scale that used—gasp!—metrics. I had held out long enough! I was going to embrace the measurement system that 195 countries use. (Did you know that the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar are the only countries NOT on the metric system?)

What I find baffling, though, is that since I started my website in 1999, the majority of readers have steadfastly refused to use a scale.

“Why?” I ask you. “Why?!”

Then, one day, I watched The One measuring flour for a cake I was developing, and my recipe was written in grams. Oh, the grousing! The bitching! The complaining!

“What’s the problem, Poppie?” I asked.

Military Model Enigma I, in use from 1930 (Wikipedia).

“This, this THING,” he said, pointing to the scale as if it were the original Enigma machine, “is finicky. It’s a pain in the ass!”

He went on to explain how he couldn’t get the right amount. I watched as he dumped flour directly from the canister into a bowl set on the scale, racking up an absurd amount. He then proceeded to fish out cup and cup until it was way under. Out of frustration, he took a fistful of flour and threw it back into the bowl.

“Do you know how much, say, 28 grams is?” I asked softly as if I were negotiating with someone on the ledge.

“How the hell would I know? I grew up in Baltimore, not London!”

“That’s one ounce. That’s it."

It made no difference. We even went on to create a video about weighing flour, and he still refuses to weigh his ingredients.

So, for all The Ones out there, I’d like to give you a bit of a nudge and tell you about the three scales I have and use regularly—the why, how, and when.