Aspiring Bakers Should Embrace ‘the Goldilocks’ of Kitchen Scales

All pastry chefs worth their salt know the importance of a good kitchen scale for precisely measuring out flour, sugar, baking soda, and other dessert essentials. When Umber Ahmad, the founder of one of New York’s most popular cookie and cake destinations, Mah-Ze-Dahr Bakery, started her business in 2013, she obsessively read reviews of various kitchen scales.

“I didn’t want a tiny scale, but I didn’t want go the really large route,” she says, “and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money.” Then she found the Oxo Good Grips 11-Pound Food Scale. “It was the Goldilocks scale,” she says. “It wasn’t too big, or too small, or too expensive, or too cheap.”

Aside from the size and the price, the scale meets all of her technical needs. The metal square at the top comes off, so it is easy to clean. “If you can’t take something apart, you will inevitably get it dirty and you will have to throw it away eventually,” she says. It also has a pop-out display, so that even when she places big bowls atop, she doesn’t have to crane her neck to get a reading. And the scale takes triple-A batteries, not some obscure ones that would require hunting around electronics stores to find. Ahmad says there are at least ten of the same scale in the bakery, because everyone on staff loves them so much.

OXO

Another perk of the scale that often gets overlooked in kitchen (or really any) purchases? “Oxo has really great customer service,” Ahmad says. “They are great about replacing scales, which is really important because we rely on them so much. There are certain things you can fix with a prayer and a Band-Aid, but a scale is not one of them.”