The Best Food Scale

Buying a food scale can seem at once to be a simple and complicated prospect, but it is not nearly as complicated as it may seem. This is a shame, as it can lead some people to pass up purchasing what may very well be one of the most useful tools in the kitchen. There are a variety of types of scales available, potentially dozens of manufacturers, and a wide array of features that you may not even be aware of at first. With all this variety, it can be difficult to know where to start looking. That is where we come in.

The purpose of this guide is to clear away any confusion that you may be feeling and guide you toward choosing the perfect food scale for your kitchen, whether it is a home kitchen, a restaurant kitchen, or something in between.

Professional or Home Food Scale?

When you are looking at various food scales, you are going to run into a few terms. Several models are going to be listed as "professional" scales or food service scales. What exactly is it that sets these particular scales apart from less expensive scales, other than the label?

Professional food scales must be NSF certified. NSF certification is usually required for all tools that are used in a restaurant or professional kitchen. It means that the product has been evaluated by an independent organization and has been found to be entirely safe for use in a food service setting, meaning that the device is unable to harbor bacteria and can be very easily and thoroughly cleaned or sanitized.

A professional food scale also tends to have additional features that are unnecessary in the home kitchen. These can include a higher weight capacity beyond the eleven to fifteen pounds that are common to home-use scales, as well as a built in calculator in case the retailer charges a particular amount per pound of product. In many cases, they will also feature a much larger platform on which the products to be weighed are placed.

The Benefits of an Electronic Food Scale

Modern kitchen scales will come in three primary varieties: balance scales, spring scales, and digital electronic scales. Between the three of these, the clear winner in most situations is going to be the electronic scale. There are several reasons why this particular type of scale is going to be much better for the average kitchen than the others.

Accuracy - The single most important factor that comes into choosing a food scale is how accurate that scale is. After all, if a scale does not consistently display the correct weight, it is of no use to you. Balance scales can be difficult for some people to use properly, and spring scales become less and less accurate as time goes by and the internal spring that determines the weight wears out. Electronic food scales, on the other hand, do not have either of these concerns.

Easy to Read - The problem with balance and spring scales that many people have is that they can be kind of tricky to read, as both of them need a degree of finessing in order to display the weight correctly. Even then, the reading will vary a bit as the balance moves back and forth or the spring moves up and down. A digital food scale, on the other hand, simply displays a numeric value. It is very simple and straightforward.

Tare Button - The tare button may very well be one of the most useful advantages that an electronic kitchen scale has to offer. When you weigh something, such as a bowl of flour, you want to know the weight of the flour but not the weight of the bowl. While you could certainly weigh the bowl on its own and subtract its weight from the finished product, there is an easier way.

All you have to do is place the bowl on the scale and hit the tare button. It will cancel out the weight of the bowl, leaving you free to measure the contents without having to worry about doing any math while you are cooling.

Features You Need In A Kitchen Food Scale

With the wide array of features available, you may be wondering exactly what you need in order to do all the jobs that you need to do and avoid spending more money than you have to on features that you will never use. The following features are necessary for any kitchen scale in order to be as useful as possible.

Easy to Clean Surface Tare Button Ability to Switch Between Metric and Imperial Measurements Low Profile So That It Fits Easily In A Drawer

Unless you are looking for a professional or retail food scale and have use for the additional features that these scales can provide, such as the ability to weigh more than eleven pounds of a built-in calculator, these features do little but add to the price you are going to pay.

How Much To Spend

How much you should be expecting to spend will vary somewhat depending on exactly what kind of scale you are planning to buy. Most digital home kitchen scales that have a reasonable array of features, but nothing overly fancy will cost you between $20 and $40 for a quality model.

A professional food scale that is NSF compliant, on the other hand, can cost up to $500, with about $200 being the average. With every additional feature that is added to the scale, such as a retail price calculator, higher weight capacity, stainless steel food bin, and otherwise will cause the price to rise further.