Chef Beth Gives Dan Another Brilliant Idea

There are two things I would be absolutely devastated if I were to lose them on a busy baking day!

A kitchen scale. By measuring your ingredients by weight instead of volume you will find you will have consistently better results! The weight is always the same, when a cup of flour may be a cup & an 1/8 or 7/8 of a cup. I suggest a digital scale that measures in 1/8 oz increments & has fluid ounces & grams measures as well. These aren't that expensive really. You can get one for about $20 to $35 dollars at any kitchen supply store or mass merchandiser. In fact I think it would be great in DVO.com offered them! hint hint They save a lot of heartache & waste by giving you precise measurements of ingredients every time!
A conversion chart. You will need this to convert your volume measurements into weight measurements. Some scales come with a basic one. If you type "cooking conversion charts" in the search bar of your browser you will find there are many of them online free for the printing!

I printed out all I could find & have them in a 3-ring binder at the ready for my non-professional cookbooks. I even write in my cookbooks, right next to the ingredients, the weight conversion I need for that recipe. I know some of you say never write in a text book... and usually I agree. This is the one exception!

Hope this helps!

Chef Beth

Brent, Dusty...I just had a brilliant idea! I was thinking. We should offer a kitchen scale for sale from DVO.com. I mean...think about it; measuring ingredients by weight is so much more accurate than measuring by volume! We could run a "scale sale!"

Then, I was thinking...what if we added a feature to Cook'n which would allow the user to easily convert from units of volume to weight and vice versa! After all, Cook'n already has the density information for each ingredient that is required to perform this conversion. We already do this conversion when we make a shopping list! What if we were to just make it easier for the user to make these conversions when and how they wanted!

I'm telling you guys, I don't know how I do it. I keep coming up with this great stuff! I was just sitting here at 11:30pm and these two ideas just came to me! I'm brilliant!!!

Dan