The $45 digital food scale that humbled my bread making

I bought one of those fancy digital scales to finally get my sourdough right, figured it would fix all my guesswork. First loaf using it, I followed the recipe to the gram, but I forgot to zero it out after putting the bowl on, so I added flour until it read 500g total instead of 500g of flour. That loaf came out like a hockey puck, dense and heavy, and my wife asked if I was trying to bake a doorstop. Has anyone else had a measuring tool mess them up worse than just eyeballing it?

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blair_martin27d ago

Man that is brutal, and honestly I feel for you because I did almost the exact same thing with my instant read thermometer. I was so proud of myself for finally being precise, then I stuck it in the bread and checked the temp like five times, all reading around 180, but I was measuring the air pocket next to the crust the whole time. Pulled it out thinking it was perfect, cut into it, and the middle was basically raw dough glue. I told my buddy about it and he laughed so hard he said I should have just used the old toothpick trick, which I hadn't done since I was a kid. It's funny how we trust the gadget more than our own eyes, and then we end up with something worse than when we just winged it. Your doorstop comment really got me though, because my wife called mine a bread brick and said at least it could hold papers down.