Essentials of Measuring

There are three basic ways of ensuring you are  adding the correct amount of each ingredient. This assumes you are following a recipe. My grandfather, for whom I'm named, would make pancakes marvelously every time and he never measured a single ingredient. Or did he? He would use his hand. The thing is, he would do the same thing every time, so even though it looked like he wasn't measuring, he was.

The first approach which works very well for smaller amounts of servings is to measure by volume. A cup, or a quart, or even a tablespoon is a volume measurement. There are different approaches to measuring by volume such as packing the brown sugar but granulated sugar no packing is needed. Or measuring flower before sifting vs after sifting actually makes a difference. So, if you are measuring by volume, read your recipes carefully and be consistent. Exactly how to measure will be covered in the demonstration videos that will be added once my kitchen is built.

The second approach is much more precise and is better suited for ensuring consistency and in my humble opinion is better in general because it is easier to change the ingredients. There are two measurement systems to consider, the imperial system and the metric system. I recommend using the metric system even if you aren't familiar with it because once you use it a few times it's really quite easy to work with, especially if you have to change the amount of ingredients because you want six servings instead of the four that the recipe is written for. Look for the metric system video in the demonstration videos library, the link is below (when I get the video done).

The third way to measure is by count. We count things like eggs, bunches, packages, or... cloves. Still, measure by weight is more accurate. Eggs are an average weight for their size. Cloves vary in size. Packages change amounts and to use half of a package isn't very consistent. The recipes used in this resource are all by weight, even the ingredients that are usually counted (though both approaches will often be included in the recipes).