I’m in the process of creating a notebook where yeast conversions are printed out for easy reference. I use a scale rather than than trying to deal with volume, and my handy calculator has made it easy to convert recipes into percentages, which – for me- makes recipes simpler to understand. Everyone has their own unique skills and preferences and I’m happy to be discovering tricks that work for me. Thanks for a great article!

It’s amazing how much confusion/ignorance there is out there on this fact – I recently attended a local hospital sponsored Cardio-Rehab training where one session on correcting diet issues was led by the hospital dietitian – during her discussion on reducing salt in our diet, I mentioned the density issue, and used kosher vs table salt as an example. The dietitian’s response was to look quizzically at me, and say that I needed to check my facts.

When I later sent her the proof she had suggested I obtain, I never heard back from her. Proves education and station are not guarantees of knowledge. Also proves why we should weigh our ingredients.

I introduced all of my students at Culinard to the metric system by using only grams in my formulas. While I guess a few of them had some misgivings about that initially, the fact that I was teaching them “baker’s math” simultaneously probably made the advantages of metric more apparent. Baker’s math (as you know) really just involves simple addition, multiplication and division — it’s not advanced math — but you have a much harder time doing math with a pounds-and-ounces system based on units of 16 than you do with a system based on units of 10. After just a couple of days of working with grams, not one student ever came to me with problems using them as a unit of measure. Metric measurements are unfamiliar to most Americans, but when they actually use them exclusively for a couple of days, they usually realize that they’re simpler.

Also, the urgency of using a scale instead of cups and spoons became more obvious when making larger batches of dough than people might make at home. Making dozens of loaves and getting them through proofing and baking cycles simultaneously can be a little like herding cats if you don’t have precise control of the process. Using weight instead of volume measurements in dough, and using smaller, base-10 units like grams made the dough more obedient.

That shouldn’t suggest to anyone that bread can’t be made successfully when using volume measurements, or that the metric system will turn a home baker into a pro. Also, the urgency of getting precise control over your dough is a bit less when there’s one or two loaves instead of 3 or 4 dozen.

I’ve thought sometimes (and maybe I just think too much) that making bread dough is a sort of like gambling. I think most people who go to Vegas are recreational gamblers who just enjoy the gaming and are willing to put some limited amount of money on the line for the sake of that enjoyment. If they play long enough, they’ll win some, lose some, and that’s all just fine. They had a great time, and that was the point of going there.

Professional gamblers also win some and lose some, but they do so in a much more calculated way, so that they end up on the winning side much more often than a casual gambler. They can only remain pro gamblers because they end up in the money often enough to counter the effect of any losses. And, they end up in the money more often because they leave less to chance. They are expert at calculating odds of a winning bet, and they take notice of every little thing that goes on at a gaming table and how that affects their odds — because they MUST.

So a lot of whether you do or don’t adopt precise measurements is determined, I think, by how much you need to get complete, precise control of your dough’s behavior. Some baker’s don’t mind sharing the driving with Lady Luck, while others might want to leave less to chance. I don’t think that home bakers using volume measurements are wrong to do so if they are happy with the process and happy with their results. If they feel dumbfounded, though, about why a dough doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, then they inevitably should look at more precise ways of controlling the process.

I’ve got a conversions page on my blog so people can refer back to it but I still get emails from folks who want me to convert the recipe for them