Shopping For Foodies: Trey Popp’s Holiday Gift Guide, Part 2
Does the foodie on your gift list bake? Is she vexed by that one awesome but maddening cookbook that specifies some ingredients in ounces and others in grams? Has he fallen deep enough down the coffee-brewing rabbit hole that all he can talk about is optimizing the ratio of dissolved solids in his morning cup? Does he simply want to know whether an envelope will need one stamp or two?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, a kitchen scale is in order.
A cup of flour can weigh anywhere between 4 and 6 ounces—which is why most of the better baking recipes these days rely on weight as the primary measure. And there is simply no way for an average American to eyeball the difference between the 3 grams of Thai chilies a curry-paste recipe specifies and the 15 grams that will set your very scalp on fire. (Please, don’t run around the house thinking that you can figure it out if only you scrounge up enough paperclips.)
Kitchen scales used to be huge and unwieldy. The one my mom used when I was a kid was bigger than our dog.
But times have changed. This year I picked up this $17 Ozeri model, which is the size of an iPad mini, has a completely flat surface that cleans up with a two-second swipe of a paper towel, and is rock-solid reliable. Come to think of it, I haven’t even had to change the batteries yet, and I use it all the time. A cramped city kitchen only has space for tools that have multiple uses or take up almost no space, and this fits both bills.
Ozeri kitchen scale [Amazon]
