The Most Useless Scale In The World

I am the proud owner, and avid user, of the best and most useless kitchen scale.

This is me, measuring out coffee for the French Press. I weigh out the beans before I grind them to keep it consistent. Normally, I do this in grams – at the left, my Ikea kitchen scale shows the 45 grams. At the right, I’ve switched it over to pounds, which happens to be 0.1 pounds.

Yes. My kitchen scale weighs in pounds to three decimal places.

Sadly, this does not lend itself at all to many recipes, since there are sixteen ounces in a pound, not ten. I end up doing a lot of simplifying fractions and converting to decimal in my head, and more than once, hands full of onions, dough or something or other, I’ve had to call for my son and his calculator.

To solve this once and for all, I wrote down the table you see here to keep track of the conversions. (Doesn’t everybody keep a notebook in the kitchen to chronicle their cooking experiences?) From one ounce to fifteen, all the conversions to three decimal places. At the left are common conversions between grams and ounces. I find I’m using grams more and more because it’s just easier when working with the scale. Finally, a note that a large egg weighs about two ounces – need to find similar rules of thumb for the yolks and whites, so I can figure out about how many egg whites I have in the freezer right now.