A New Kitchen Scale

Tonight I am the proud owner of a new kitchen scale. It's the second one I've owned. The first was an extremely cheap spring-loaded scale that would weigh up to a pound with unknown accuracy on a platform that reminded me of a bobble head figure's head. Who knows or cares where that scale went to? The scale I bought today is very nice, and I thought I'd describe it since I'll be using it for some of my experiments.

The attached photo shows my new kitchen pride and joy, just out of the box. I'm sure it will never look as nice again, but that's how it goes. It's a Cuisinart Weighmate(TM) Kitchen Scale, model KS-55. It cost me $40 plus tax at Bed, Bath & Beyond. As you can see, it's digital. It weighs to the nearest eighth-ounce or the nearest gram, depending on what mode you've put it in, and the maximum capacity is eleven pounds or five kilograms. It's the most I've spent on a kitchen device in a long time, and I think it happens to be the most expensive kitchen scale I saw at three different stores. However, it's the only one I saw that does just about what I'd like it to. When I consider that the prices of the scales I used to use regularly in chemistry labs were anywhere from $200 to $2000, probably more now, it's quite a bargain. It's not nearly as precise as a laboratory scale, of course. I'd like one that's more precise, but with the price difference I will be more than happy to make do with this scale for my cookie experiments. For simple cooking, when the scale is needed I think it will be fantastic. I'm sure there is a huge variety of kitchen scales with some even more expensive, but this was for sale here and I think it's right for me at this point. Of course, most Americans don't use a kitchen scale for cooking at all because recipes rarely mention weights except for things like meat and packaged goods which tell you the weight right on the package. The odd cookbook published in other countries will list quantities of ingredients in weights instead of volumes, though, and dieters sometimes want to weigh foods for purposes of portion control. I will be needing it specifically for my cookie experiments.

The scale has two buttons. The on/off button does the obvious. The other button doubles to switch the display between ounces and grams, and also zeros the scale to subtract a tare weight.

While I was looking around I saw another scale that weighed to the gram, but the KS-55 looks nicer and more importantly has a tare function. I didn't see the other one mention a tare function on the box.

What the heck is a tare function? Well, I only know from chemistry - otherwise tare is just not one of those everyday sorts of words. Not even an every decade sort of word. If you have something in a container and want to weigh it, the logical thing to do is take it out of the container and put it on the scale. But sometimes that doesn't work very well. First of all, you may leave some of it behind in the container, so you won't get the weight of the whole amount that was in the container. That's probably not a problem in cooking like it would be in a chemistry lab, however. But sometimes it's just not convenient to weigh it without the container. For example, if you want to weigh a cup of flour, you don't want to dump the flour on the scale and then have to clean up the scale afterward. A logical approach is to weigh the container by itself, then weigh the material while it is in the container, i.e. weigh the material plus the container, and finally subtract the weight of the container from the summed weights. The difference is just the weight of the material that was in the container. The weight of the container is referred to as the tare or the tare weight. Apparently "tare" is also the name for a group of plants of a particular sort, but aside from that the word is used only in the context of a weight which you are going to subtract from a summed weight to get the weight of the other item that is summed.

There's your chemistry lesson of the day. :-)

Good modern digital scales do or should have a tare function. That means you can place a container on the scale and adjust the scale reading so it reports a weight of zero even though the container is on the scale. Then you add some material or an item to the container and the weight the scale reports is only the weight of what you've put into the container. In a chemistry lab the "container" would usually be a piece of paper or a plastic tray or some such. In the kitchen, it's usually a some sort of dish or jar. The tare function of an electronic scale is very convenient, because you don't have to manually subtract the tare weight from the summed weight to get the weight of the item. Who wants to mess around with a paper and pencil or a calculator while they are cooking? The scale itself essentially does the arithmetic for you. Now there's real progress!

The tare feature is especially nice because the scale "remembers' the tare weight even after you take everything off the scale. In other words, I can set an empty one cup measure on the scale, zero the reading with the tare function, and then remove the cup from the scale, go scoop up some flour or whatever, and place the full cup back on the scale. Because the scale remembers the tare, the value I then see is only the weight of the flour. If the scale didn't remember the tare weight, I'd have to minimally set the cup on the scale empty and add the flour to it while it was still on the scale if I wanted the scale to automatically subtract the tare. That would be dreadfully inconvenient.

A couple of small observations about the scale. First, it appears that it doesn't weigh to the nearest gram or eighth-ounce. Instead, it seems to always round down; that is, it truncates decimals to the next lower even increment. That's not much of an issue unless you are trying to weigh something that is pretty light, such as a clove of garlic or a quarter teaspoon of flour. If you start to talk about how far off one of the weight measurements might be, you have to conclude that when the weight is simply truncated instead of rounded to the nearest increment you get a result that can be basically one full increment off, while it would be at most only half an increment off if the weights were rounded to the nearest increment. If the scale is used strictly for normal cooking I don't see that being an issue. Unfortunately it won't be great for my cookie experiments, but I'll deal with it. It could be worse in many weighs. Oh, excuse me, I mean many ways.

Second, the scale works on two AAA batteries, which are supplied in the box. You have to turn the scale on to use it, but it automatically turns off after one minute of disuse, so I won't have to remember to turn it off or else run the batteries down. I think that's a very helpful convenience. Otherwise I'd be replacing the batteries way too often. The only drawback is that the memory of the tare lasts at most only one minute, then, because the scale will automatically zero itself when you turn it back on. It would be nice if there was a way it would remember the tare weight if you tell it to, or you could adjust how long it will stay on before it automatically shuts off, but you can't.

Of course, the scale can be turned off manually. One slight improvement to the design would be to have the on/off button turn it off when it is simply pressed. Instead, a simple quick press will turn the scale on, but to turn it off you have to depress the same button and hold it down for two seconds. That's not intuitive. If a person doesn't read the directions they probably aren't going to figure out how to turn it off. I didn't, anyway. However, since it turns off automatically after a minute and hopefully we're all able to read directions, it's not a big deal.

As I said, the scale displays in increments of either grams or eighth-ounces. I'll be using weights in grams for my experiments. The reason is that an increment of one gram is a finer gradation than an increment of an eighth-ounce, which means that I can obtain more precise weights if I measure in grams.

Well, next time I think I'll write about something where I have to use the scale. I can hardly wait!