Food Scales

Any recommendations on digital food scales for home use? Brands? Prices? TIA.

Alton Brown suggests these two:
Salter Chrome Elite Digital Kitchen Scale $50
http://www.chefsresource.com/sal3001.html

Soehnle 11-Pound Cyber Scale $99
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00004R92N/104-0492502-2475963?n=284507



Cooks Illustrated Digital Scale Rating:
http://www.cooksillustrated.com/images/document/testing/Kitchenscaleschart2.pdf

They also chose the Soehnle as the best. Said its metric conversion system was very hard to use.

The cheapest place in the world to buy scales seems to be EBAY.

Think postal scales, not kitchen scales - you kinda need them to be a serious ebay seller, so they're a big item (and competitively priced).

Mine happens to be Escali brand (got it quite a few years ago and that's what was hot then, but that brand seems more pricey now).

Just make sure it has tare, 0.1oz/1g increments. You are not looking for a very high top weight, it's better to have smaller increments.

I have a pizza dough recipe I weigh and use the same amount of stuff (flour, water, oil, salt, yeast) all year round and it always works. Only thing is I have to measure the salt and yeast by spoon because those small granules don't make much impact on my scale.

But if a scale meets postal standards, it's gonna work well in your kitchen too. Don't get pulled in by fancy things to hold the food. You can always tare out your plate or bowl.

Nancy

Jay,

I do a lot of baking at home and broke down one day and picked up the Salter Chrome model at one of the housewares strores with a 20% off coupon, for about $36-38. Best money I ever spent.

I love the fact that I can zero out the scale after placing a bowl on it, and add ingredients, zeroing out after each addition. For example, I've even measured out the pre- starter for brioche, right in the workbowl of the kitchenaid mixer. Can't get much more efficient than that. The shift between standard and metric measurement is just the press of a button.

My only frustration with it is when, after completing one phase of a recipe, when I go to begin mearuring again for the next phase, it has already automatically shut off, and as a result, I have to "restart" the scale, losing precious seconds.

Nancy Sexton wrote:
Just make sure it has tare, 0.1oz/1g increments. You are not looking for a very high top weight, it's better to have smaller increments.

Only thing is I have to measure the salt and yeast by spoon because those small granules don't make much impact on my scale.

Because I use baker's % in all my bread recipes, I do need to weigh out the salt, yeast, etc. After a fairly exhaustive search, I reluctantly ended up with 2 scales, one for small increments and smaller capacity, and another for larger increments and larger capacity. There are scales with fine accuracy and large capacity, but these can be very expensive. Still, it can be a pain to use two scales for one recipe.

Bill/SFNM

This happens to be a topic I have done some obsessing over.

Cook's Illustrated recently did an update on their kitchen scale ratings. Their top-rated Soehnle product has been renamed as the Soehnle Futura and can be found here for signifcantly less than they quote in those rarings from 2000.

However, those folks who inhabit the Cook's Illustrated bulletin boards (linking prevented by difficult website) and Cooking for Engineers have another favorite - the My Weigh scales. Both of these purport to have easy gram/oz/lb-oz conversions and a setting to disable auto-shutoff. They also advertise 1 gram increments.

The preferred models tended to be KD7000 or the I5000, both available here.

Afer poking around about My Weigh I ran into this product which pretty much needs to be seen to be believed.

I have the $50 Salter model that was posted in the URL farther up the page. I got it at Williams-Somona a year or two ago. It's a really nice scale and has been pretty sturdy (it's still kicking after a slight tumble off the table edge onto the chair) and from what I can tell accurate as well.

Does anyone know of a scale that will have multiple memory tare presets? That is, it will remember the tare weights for 2-3 different containers. I've only seen this feature in higher end postal scales costing $200+.

When I saw your post I broke up - thinking of my list of weights on the side of the fridge.

First it was only bowls or pots, now food weights have gone on also.

Of course, had to glue magnets onto a calculator and stuck that by the list so I could subtract the weights.

Somehow though, I think if that feature was offered, it could get pretty pricey.

Most of the time I can just tare before going and it's OK. Pots were more useful for figuring how many servings I could get out of a braise or something.

Nancy