Cooking Tips: Measuring Ingredients

Being able to measure accurately is considered as the most important skill in cooking. Housewives, cooking enthusiasts and chefs who are in training allot many hours to testing recipes with varying measurements through the tolerance testing process. The goal is for the recipe to still taste good even though the amount of ingredients are varied; if a particular recipe fails this test, it is not published or released for mass consumption. However, even if the recipes you would find in cookbooks and websites are able to tolerate variations in the measuring of ingredients, the cook will still have to follow the basic rules of measuring.

Make sure you have actual commercial measuring utensils. For dry ingredients, use graduated or nested measuring cups and measuring spoons. For liquid ingredients, a clear glass or plastic cup with a pouring spout is most ideal. Here are some tips for measuring common ingredients:

· Flour, Baking Power or Baking Soda. Use a large spoon to lightly spoon flour from its container into the measuring cup. Refrain from shaking the cup and packing the flour. With the use of the back of a knife or flat blade spatula, level the flour with the top edge of the measuring cup. Do not use the measuring cup itself to scoop the flour out of the container as you may end up with way, way more of the correct measurement.
· Sugar. Use a cup or measuring spoon to scoop it out of the container or bag until it is overflowing. Then, level this off with the back of a knife.