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I wasn’t interested in owning the best kitchen scale—or any kitchen scale for that matter. I’m a pro at getting by with what I already have, which is why I wrapped your birthday present in paper grocery bags. I rewash resealable plastic bags and hang them to dry. I tear paper towels in half. I’m cheap as hell. Why would I want to fill my house with unnecessary kitchen tools?
But all that changed when I decided to try my hand at bread baking, which calls for the utmost precision. Apparently, you need to measure with extreme accuracy to achieve perfect dough hydration, yada, yada, yada. After intense deliberation with my bread guidance counselor Claire Saffitz, I ordered the test kitchen’s favorite digital kitchen scale, the Escali Primo.
Why is the Escali our top pick for home cooks?
BA food director Chris Morocco loves the Escali scale for a few reasons: “It comes in a ton of fun colors, it’s virtually indestructible, and it costs around $25.” That’s music to my cheap-as-hell ears. Made of molded plastic, it features just two buttons for ease of use—a power/tare button that fires the thing up and resets the scale back to zero when needed, and another button to switch between units of measurement. The Escali offers measurements in pounds, grams, and ounces, which means you don’t have to do any quick conversions mid-bake, and couldn’t we all stand to do less math in life? It’s compact, lightweight, and has a maximum capacity of 11 pounds—about standard for your average kitchen scale. It runs on two AAs and has a four-minute auto-shutoff function to save battery.
Just because the Escali is the scale for me doesn’t mean it’s the scale for you.
The Escali is our best budget pick, but there are other, spendier options for bakers who need a higher weight capacity, additional units of measurement, or prefer a different design.
Take the Oxo Good Grips Scale, which requires four AAA batteries and comes with a backlit display. Like the Escali, it also has an 11-pound weight limit, but the square stainless-steel platform is bigger than the Escali’s plastic round one, making it easier for weighing potatoes and apples directly on the surface. One issue with the Esacali is that if you’re using a huge mixing bowl, it can be difficult to read the display. But the Oxo Good Grips model comes with a pull-out display so you can clearly see measurements regardless of how big your container is.
While an 11-pound capacity is plenty for most cakes and cookies, the My Weigh Bakers Scale has a hefty 17-pound capacity for those making big batches of bread. Like the Oxo, it also provides accurate measurements in pounds, ounces, kilograms, and grams.
Plus, avid breadheads will really appreciate its high degree of precision and ability to weigh in baker’s percentages, which indicate each ingredient’s proportion to the amount of flour. (If you know, you know.) Measuring by increments and ratios makes it easy to scale recipes up or down so that breads, cakes, and muffins come out perfect every time. The My Weigh also features a removable stainless-steel weighing platform as well as covers to protect the LCD screen and buttons for easy cleanup. It functions using three AA batteries, or you can use a power adapter instead—a great feature if you’ve ever had to raid the remote control for batteries in order to weigh your morning coffee.
The My Weigh is more expensive than the trusty Escali and not nearly as compact. But for those looking for a high-capacity, professional-grade kitchen scale, it’s our pick for best bread scale.
Sleek, minimalist, and equipped with a discreet digital display, the Zwilling Enfinigy Scale has a whopping 22-pound weight capacity and looks like a gadget designed by Apple. Unlike more common plastic or stainless-steel food scales, the Zwilling Enfinigy has a large, shiny glass surface that is super easy to wipe clean—no nooks or crannies to trap flour or coffee grounds. Plus, it features a built-in rechargeable battery, so you never have to worry about battery life. Its footprint is about the same as the Escali, but since the display is incorporated into the face of the weighing platform, there’s more room for your bowl or Chemex. Both black and white colorways are attractive enough to leave on your countertop full-time.
But do I really need a kitchen scale?
My Escali kitchen scale arrived the next day, but as it turns out, bread-baking mastery is not something I can buy on Amazon Prime. But while I work on becoming a Loaf Queen, I’ve discovered a ton of other uses for my trusty kitchen scale. If you think you don’t need one because you don’t cook that much, will definitely never bake bread, or only make pancakes once a month, stay with me. You want this little electronic wonder in your life (and it is, of course, a great gift for bakers), and here are all the glorious ways you can put it to use.
I am not a coffee snob. I don’t kiss each individual bean before I toss it in the grinder or chant affirmations while making pour-over; I dump beans into a drip coffee maker and press go. But it turns out, by not measuring my beans with a kitchen scale, I’ve been depriving myself of maximum caffeine because, depending on the grind of the coffee (coarse coffee pebbles vs. fine coffee dust), you might be off by, like, 80 grams. I don’t like the idea of not getting the amount of caffeine I deserve. Whether you’re using whole beans or preground, measuring out the coffee in ounces or grams on your shiny new scale guarantees that you make a perfect cup. And for espresso, it’s a must.
You like meat? You ever notice how recipes will ask for a pound, or 11 ounces, or these specific numbers that don’t match the numbers on the package you got at the grocery store? Usually I assume I’m a half pound off and then blame the recipe when dinner sucks. With my kitchen scale, I have no excuse! Actually measuring my meat means that my burger patties are perfectly uniform, so no one at the cookout can grumble about getting the runt of the litter. I make meatballs so consistent I could balance my checkbook on them. I even, on occasion, eat a doctor-recommended serving size of meat instead of an amount that induces meat sweats.
Recipes always call for produce in pounds, but I absolutely never use the analog bucket scales in the grocery store produce department. Those things are not designed for short people. It’s humiliating. Instead, I buy too many sweet potatoes, go home, and hold my cat in one hand and the potatoes in the other until I’ve decided I’m not measuring anything tonight. When the kitchen scale came into my life, I did weigh my cat on it (he’s 4084.74 grams), but now I can also easily measure potatoes and other lumpy produce items that come in annoyingly random sizes.
I have a stash of 15.5-oz. cans of chickpeas and 13.4-oz. boxes of beans stacked in my pantry because when things go on sale, I’ll buy 11 of them. Whenever a recipe calls for a specific amount of chickpeas or beans, I want to make do with whatever I already have in the house, and my kitchen scale is here for this. It turns out measurements in recipes are specific for a reason, so follow them.
Did you know a portion of pasta is 100 grams? Now you do.
Have you ever found an incredible-sounding recipe, but all of the precise measurements were metric so you spent half an hour googling conversions to cups of flour and sugar—and it still turned out terrible? With a kitchen scale, what was once an annoying math equation is now a better scone or biscuit or almond cake. For me, this mostly applies to pancakes. Make Smitten Kitchen’s fluffiest pancakes by measuring in grams and you’ll thank me later.
Sometimes a recipe calls chopped dates, chocolate, shredded cheese, peanuts, or other irregularly shaped things in both fractions of a cup and gram measurements, and you’ll get a more accurate amount if you weigh them instead of smashing all of the dates into a measuring cup, where there might be pockets of air. You might be able to squeeze 30 cashews into a cup one afternoon, but only 20 the next because of their crazy comma shapes. Don’t you want accuracy in your life? Don’t you want order?
This is a scenario when accuracy matters. There are consequences beyond getting a little too much chocolate in a cookie. To control the dosage of THC in your Special Brownies, you must weigh the important ingredients out. Please.
Brad Leone weighs everything he’s fermenting because it is science. But even if you’re not doing elaborate kimchi projects, all salt brines—like the one you’ll use for your Thanksgiving turkey, which might be 11 pounds one year and double that the next—are a lot easier to scale by measuring the salt by weight and water in liquid volume.
Speaking of those pancakes—and any cooking where you mix a ton of stuff in a large bowl—a kitchen scale saves you from the stack of 14 different dirty measuring cups and spoons. Once you toss the flour on the scale, use the tare function (i.e., reset it to zero) and keep adding ingredients. Measure, zero out. Measure, zero out. I thought it wouldn’t detect an angel’s eyelash of baking soda, but it did. Technology is amazing.
More Best Baking Tools 2022
- The Best Oven Thermometer Will De-Fraud Your Oven
- Every Cook Needs a Silicone Spatula. Specifically, This Game Changing One
- The Best Stand Mixer for Every Type of Baker
- You Deserve a Culinary Torch Even If You Don’t “Need” One
- The Best Whisk For Egg Whites, Whipped Cream, and Vinaigrettes
This article was originally published in 2018 and was updated by Tiffany Hopkins in 2022.