Benefits of Weighing Sourdough Ingredients: Why Not To Use Cups When Baking Sourdough

The benefits of weighing sourdough ingredients cannot be ignored. It's always better to weigh your sourdough ingredients, rather than use volume measures like cups and spoons, which are not accurate or exact.

A digital scale provides accuracy, consistency and eliminates variables in your sourdough baking.

So many people ask why I insist on using a food scale, or they ask for a cup/spoon conversion of my simple sourdough recipe. So I want to share the benefits of using a digital kitchen scale when baking sourdough bread and help you increase your sourdough success through accurately measuring your ingredients by weight.

Cups & Spoons Are Not Universal Measures

Measuring cups and spoons vary around the world. A cup and teaspoon in Australia for example is different to a cup and teaspoon in the US.

Cups measure by volume - this means that the cup of flour I measure will be different to the cup of flour you measure.

Why? Because your cup may be bigger or smaller than mine. You might not level it off at the same spot. Your flour will be different to mine. You might also not pack it as tightly as I do or fill your cup right up to the top. There are just too many variables.

Grams are a universal measure. A gram of flour in Australia will be the same as a gram of flour in the US. Digital kitchen scales provide you with precise measurements every single time.

I did a little experiment using two different one cup measures. I wanted to find out exactly how accurate cups are. The results might actually surprise you!

The photo above shows the amount of flour and water held in each measuring cup in grams. There's a noticeable difference between them all. In updating this post, I also carried out this experiment on 2 other sets of 1 cup measuring cups and found even more inconsistencies!

That could definitely cause issues when making sourdough - too much water or too much flour will have detrimental effects to the dough and change the desired outcomes.

You can see the blue and grey cups in the photo. Just by looking at them, you can see that they are different sizes, even though they are both marked as being "1 CUP" and 250mls!

First I measured water (as well as against a liquid jug) and then I measured flour.

You can see from these results that the cups are very different. Imagine if you were using the blue cup, while I had written my recipe using the grey cup. Can you see how inconsistent that would be?

2 different measuring cups showing 2 different amounts of flour in grams. This photo serves to demonstrate the inaccuracy of volume measurements as opposed to measuring by weight.

Benefits of Weighing Sourdough Ingredients

Here is a list of benefits to using a scale when preparing your sourdough bread, rather than volume measures like cups and spoons.

You can dump all your ingredients in one bowl, without having lots of cups and spoons to wash up afterwards. It's much quicker to throw your ingredients in a bowl, as oppose to having to add them to a cup, level them off and then place them in a bowl. Not to mention having to wash out your cups if you're using them for multiple ingredients. All you need to do is use the "tare" function to keep bringing your scale back to zero before you add each ingredient.
It's the same every single time, hello consistency!
It makes scaling a recipe up or down super easy. You cannot do this accurately with cups and spoons. Baker's Math makes it simple to increase a recipe by 10%, 30% etc. It would be too difficult and inaccurate to do this using cups and spoons.
Did I mention, it's the same every time - meaning you achieve consistent results? And at the end of the day, we all want consistently good sourdough, right? This is especially true when you're busy and want things to work the first time, every time. I know that even when the kids are causing chaos around me, my sourdough recipe will be weighed out exactly the same, taking the stress out of the process.
You can also use a scale to weigh dough when shaping. This is handy if you are making sourdough bread rolls or dividing larger batches of dough into smaller loaves. You weigh the dough so each portion is exactly the same. This means that bread rolls all cook evenly and look uniform. It's also helpful if you're making multiple loaves of sourdough at the same time and want to divide the dough before shaping.

Best Digital Scales for Sourdough Baking

If you are looking to invest in a good set of scales for your sourdough baking endeavours, these are the two that I recommend.

KD-8000 Kitchen Scale - I love this scale and it's the one I use in my own kitchen. It can be used with batteries or mains power so is really versatile. It also has a backlight and easy to wipe clean buttons (so important when you spill flour all the time, right?).

OXO Good Grips Pull Out Display Scale - this scale features accurate 1g increments and has a handy pull out display meaning you can see it, even with a large bowl sitting on the scales. It's also much smaller than the scale above, so suits smaller kitchens with limited space or being stored in a draw when not in use.