Switching to metric
[cowbell] Come on, baby. Don't fear the meter! Baby, take my hand. Don't fear the meter! We'll be able to fly. Don't fear the meter!

A couple years ago, I finally made the switch to using metric measurements in my baking and cooking. I'm going to try to lure you over, for selfish reasons. I want all of the recipes to have metric measurements. Come, join us in Metricland.
If you don't want to read 2,000 words on switching to metric, I don't blame you. Read these four instead: "Buy a kitchen scale."
In this article, I'll cover the difference between ways we can measure, the benefits of weighing using metric units, the equipment you'll need, and how to get started making the shift.
Two different ways to measure
There are typically two ways a recipe can specify the quantity of its ingredients:
- Weight (with a scale) is its mass, literally the amount of physical matter. We're counting the atoms!
- Volume (with a measuring cup) is indirectly measuring how much there is by instead looking at how much space that matter takes up.
In both cases, we're actually measuring the ingredient along with the air that's in between the granules of our ingredient. The air has mass, but because it's a gas it doesn't exert directional pressure on the scale, which was calibrated in an environment with standard air pressure, making the air "invisible" in our weighing. But air can have plenty of volume—that's kinda air's whole deal—so it's a factor when we're measuring with cups, making volume a less accurate measure for our purposes.

Baking recipes hinge on specific proportions of ingredients. When using measuring cups, you could have a cup of flour that's densely packed (not much air) or a cup of flour that's more loose and fluffy (lots of air). Even though they both fit the bill for "a cup of flour," they'll give you different results, because they actually contain quite different amounts of flour. This is why many recipes call for an extra step of sifting the flour, to try to counteract this effect.
The Imperial system we use for volume units in recipes gets to be a bit of a tangle. There are 3 teaspoons to a tablespoon, 4 tablespoons to a quarter cup, 16 tablespoons to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, 4 cups to a quart. What if 7/8 of a cup is actually better for the recipe? You're busting out spoons now, friend! And have fun figuring out a half batch! Prepare to wash every damn cup and spoon you've got! So recipes probably tend to get rounded to the closest easy-to-use amount, rather than the best amount, and I suspect we wind up with recipes that aren't what they could be.
Now, volume does generally work just fine. After all, my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, etc. all used volume. I wouldn't dare to tell you your grandmother was doing anything wrong. Heck no! Your grandmother was perfect and she smelled like Shalimar.
So I'm going to give you an even better reason to make the switch: laziness!
Benefits of using metric measurements
When you measure your ingredients by weight, you don't get any measuring cups dirty. You can often measure right into the mixing bowl! That makes it a lot faster, too. No more sifting the flour. No more awkwardly scraping the top of the measuring cup to get it level, and then accidentally over-scraping it and having to start over, and then on the way to the bowl some of it spills over the edge of the filled-to-the-brim cup onto your counter, and, and, and.... (This is turning into one of those infomercials with an impossibly inept person doing clown-school buffoonery in a kitchen. Apologies.) Point is, you'll find it's faster and cleaner.
Scaling recipes becomes trivial when you're working with metric amounts. Your cupcake recipe makes 12, but you want 18? Multiplying all of your amounts by 1.5 is a breeze when you're working in metric.
But wait, there's more! The easy precision of metric means that when you're divvying your cake batter into two pans for a layer cake, you don't have to eyeball it, you can weigh it! That way both layers are the same size, and they bake evenly. When you're baking cookies, you can weigh your balls of cookie dough, so they bake evenly. When you're making rolls, you can divide your dough exactly, so they bake evenly. Baking evenly, it's the new sensation!
In a future post, I'll even tell you how you can use the metric weight of your cookie dough to figure out the optimal number/size of cookies, using the nerdy magic of prime factorization. It's ridiculous, it's unnecessary, but dang it, it's fun.
I will concede one loss when switching to metric that took me a little bit to get over: the satisfying puck of carefully packed brown sugar that schloomps out of the cup into your mixing bowl. I kept doing brown sugar in a measuring cup for a while because I wasn't ready to say goodbye to that puck. But now I even weigh my brown sugar, because it's so much cleaner and faster.

Equipment
You can start with just one piece of equipment: a scale. I like the simple black plastic OXO 5 lb. scale. It costs about $30, and it's all you need. It's small, lightweight, easy to read, and the display can pull out if your bowl is covering it. It's what I reach for most often. It's battery powered, and the battery lasts just about forever.
I also have the stainless steel OXO 11 lb. scale. It costs about $55. I reach for it less often because it's heavier, but sometimes I want to weigh large amounts in a big, heavy bowl. I wouldn't bother with the bigger scale unless you're pretty sure you'll be weighing things over 5 lbs.
For teeny amounts, I have a cute little scale that is super-precise. It costs about $17. It measures to .01 gram (a typical paperclip weighs about a gram), and goes up to 300g (about 2/3 of a pound). It's not a name brand, but I tested it with gram weights from my daughter's science kit and it was accurate. It's not necessary to have. It's less common for recipes to give metric amounts for quantities that get measured with spoons, except in bread recipes. I use it for measuring yeast and salt, mostly.
Sometimes I want to measure into a small bowl, and then dump it into my mixing bowl. I'm always reaching for my colorful little melamine bowls by French Bull; I have them in the small and mini sizes. You probably already have plenty of suitable little bowls, but you might find you want to invest in a nice stack of easy-to-grab little bowls to keep in reach on the counter. They're great for general mise en place.

How to get started
Ideally, you can start with a recipe that already has metric weights listed. If you're using a recipe from a website or app, sometimes there's a metric on/off switch near the top of the recipe.
If you want to use a recipe that has no metric amounts given, you'll be converting the amounts. There are tons of conversion calculators out there that have cups-to-grams conversions for just about every ingredient you can think of; I don't have a specific one to recommend. It's not a calculator, but this conversion chart from King Arthur Baking is extensive and trustworthy.
For baking, the two things you'll be weighing most often are flour and granulated sugar. A cup of flour is 120 grams, a cup of sugar is 200 grams. Tada! You're halfway there.
Write the conversions right on the recipe, or on a post-it note if you don't want to mark up the page. That way you won't have to calculate it again next time. (I rarely work with recipes on a screen, and this is part of the reason. I'm always marking recipes up with notes, so I prefer to work from printed recipes.)
To use your kitchen scale, put a bowl on the scale and tare it. That's fancy scale-speak for zeroing it out, there will be a button for this on your scale. Now the weight of the bowl is ignored and you're only measuring what you'll put in the bowl.
At first, you won't know how much to put into the bowl, so you may want to start with a small mise bowl instead of your mixing bowl. That way if you put in too much of what you're measuring, you can take it out without it getting mixed up with your other ingredients.
Let's say you're all done mixing your batter or dough, and you'd like to divvy it up equally, say between two cake pans. All you need to do is weigh the bowl with the batter in it, subtract the weight of the empty bowl, and tada! That's how much batter you have. Divide that number by two, and that's how much batter to put in each pan.
But if you're like me, you'll only realize that you want to know the total weight of your batter after it's in the bowl, which is very much not empty. Crap. So—right now—go weigh your most commonly used mixing bowls while they're empty. Write it on a post-it note and stick it somewhere easy to find. Future you will thank you. I have mine in the front of my recipe binder.
I hope this introductory tour of the world of metric baking measurements has made it all feel a little bit more doable. And maybe, just maybe, we'll see more and more recipes with metric measurements.

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