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IMO anything sold by weight should be measured by weight in a recipe.
I could have an exception for things under 20g, which scales seem to get wrong a lot. I can do spoons, but not cups.
Also: Metric only. A tablespoon is anywhere from 13g to 20g depending on who you're talking to. A gram is always a gram.
My kitchen scale won’t measure below one gram, and a lot of things (spices and flavorings, mostly) are used in amounts below one gram.
So I can either dirty up some spoons, or go buy a second scale that only gets used for the small stuff…
In general I agree, of course, but there definitely is a use case for volumetric measuring spoons.
In the civilized world, they are. Except for liquids, but that's a given.
This stupid "How many grams is a f-ing cup of again?" is a pain in the a...
The book "flour water salt yeast" is awesome for a lot of reasons, one of them is that all of the recipes are in grams, us volumes, and bakers percentages. I primarily use the grams measurements, but the bakers percentages makes it much easier to scale recipes up or down
This is not unpopular. At least acc. to my experience.
Yeah, what has this community come to?
Definitely not an unpopular opinion. Anybody that bakes more than once a year ends up wishing it was by weight. And I agree fully with your opinion.
Mind you, it doesn't actually matter with all baking, and even then it matters less what the actual measures are as long as the person using the recipe is consistent in how they measure.
What measuring by weight achieves is consistency more than ideal results, though consistency leads directly to ideal results. So, if you measure by volume, and you measure out each cup the same every time, you'll get the same results every time, within the degree of variability in things that can't be standardized like humidity, water content of flour, precise gluten amounts, etc.
Where volume measurements in baking fail is when you hand the recipe to the next person, which is what your post is really about. But, even that has limited impact on results since there are factors in end results that can't be standardized. The difference between a densely packed cup and a loosely packed one matters for sure, but it also won't make a cake recipe fail entirely in most cases.
For things like quick breads, you don't worry as much about measurements at all, since you're going to be adjusting liquid amounts no matter what the measures are. The only part that matters there is the ratio of leaveners to flour, and there's more leeway in that than there is in cakes.
But, even with cakes, you'll have as much or more difference in results from the type of flour as the measures. If your recipe is built on using AP flour, me using cake flour is going to end up different, even measured by weight. Noticeably different even to a non baker. But it'll still be yummy no matter what the measures are.
Bread baking is where you see weight measures used the majority of the time, and there's still a ton of variability between loaves because the environment plays such a big role. A five degree difference in room temp during proofing has more effect on the end results than those caused by measures.
The key is that you can actually control the measures, which is why I agree fully with your opinion. If you're enough of a baker to be publishing recipes (as opposed to just sharing them with people that ask), and you aren't giving the recipes in weights, you're a prat lol.
As a baker where the outdoor temperature can vary as much as -40 to 40C (-40 to 104F) and the humidity can range from very low to complete saturation at any part of that range, I really appreciate weighted measurements (and baker's percentages). It makes adjusting the hydration much simpler!
If I kept up with journaling I'd have it mapped out now but try keeping your journal handy with 3 young ones running around.... Good thing they will eat nearly anything.
All dry ingredients should for sure and they are where I am from. I still measure them in a special cup in the end that converts different ingredients from grams into volume but I wouldn't know what to do with a "cup of flour" in the instructions either.