If you’re learning to cook, buy yourself a good set of chef’s knives and a reliable cookware set. When you’re ready to turn yourself into a great cook or baker, invest in a food scale.
A food scale is essential during food prep to measure ingredients accurately for consistent results. If you aren’t perfectly packing flour or baking soda into a measuring cup, being off by an ounce can affect the taste and appearance of cakes, muffins, and cookies. But the numbers on a scale usually don’t lie—if your lemon cake calls for 285 grams of flour, that’s the exact number your scale should read. And even if you aren’t a baker, imagine a world in which a recipe calls for 4 ounces of chicken, and you can measure 4 ounces of chicken on your scale instead of eyeballing the portion size and taking an educated guess.
