Читать книгу Bread Matters: The sorry state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own - Andrew Whitley - Страница 56

I recommend accurate measuring when you tackle a recipe for the first time; this makes it easier to see the effect of later adjustments. Once you have more of a feel for the relationship between ingredients and how dough looks and behaves, you can take a more relaxed approach – though it always pays to be careful with salt, spice and baker’s yeast.

I prefer to use metric measurements. In home baking, quite small quantities of ingredients are used. The Imperial system is unsuited to this because many of the most sensitive ingredients in baking, such as salt, yeast and spice, are required in tiny fractions of its basic unit, the ounce (28.35g). The result is chaos, with three unsatisfactory alternatives being deployed for the measurement of small quantities. For example, 5g is the amount of salt that I suggest for around a kilo of basic bread dough. This can be expressed as, very roughly:

 one-fifth of an ounce – but who has a one-fifth weight for their scales?

 ‘0.2oz’ – which mixes decimals with an essentially non-decimal system.

 one teaspoon – which abandons the Imperial system altogether and relies on your having a plastic measure of exactly the right size or taking your chances with whatever small spoon comes to hand.

The US system of measuring in cups, while handy for simple cake making, is completely unsuited to measuring small quantities of breadmaking ingredients. A recent serious American baking book for professionals and keen amateurs actually asks home bakers to measure amounts such as ‘3.2oz (7/8 cup)’. Need I say more?

The metric system avoids all this nonsense and has the added advantage that recipes can be scaled up or down with ease using basic mental arithmetic (or a calculator). A set of electronic scales accurate to 1 gram is a very useful tool.