Category Archives: reviews

What I (or others) think about places, products, books and more.

cooking, equipment, food, reviews

Keeping your knives sharp

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One of my greatest fears when someone asks me to cook with them is the prospect of blunt knives in their kitchen. I hate being asked to finely slice an onion or trim a piece of meat with a large dull-edged kitchen knife. Ugh. I believe I’ve once successfully nagged a friend into getting some decently sharp knives.

I grew up with my parents using regularly sharpened carbon steel knives. That’s a metal that rusts at the drop of a hat, but can be worked to a beautifully sharp edge. When I left home I bought some of the (at the time) popular Wiltshire Stay Sharp knives that had a scabbard in which you store the knife. As you removed the knife from the scabbard, a small sharpening groove would do a modest job of maintaining the edge of the knife. Nothing particularly impressive, but I wanted to believe my knives would be sharp.

Once you get to the point where you can own a few serious knives, the problem is how to keep them sharp. Few people really use the honing steel (that rod thing with a handle), and if they do, I think they generally believe it is truly sharpening their knife. The main purpose of a steel is to maintain the sharpness of a blade by evening out minor flaws in the edge that develop with use. A steel cannot rescue a blunt knife, or prevent the eventual blunting of a sharp knife.

After a while, any knife and becomes rough or just dull. Either way, this increases the risks of slipping when cutting and then injuring yourself. A knife needs to be sharp.

Sharpening can be done by hand on a whetstone, but is best left to the avid home-handymen cos it is, in my opinion, a total pain in the arse. There are handheld metal-bladed or ceramic-wheeled sharpeners which can do a moderately decent job if you faithfully sharpen the knives regularly.You could go the route of an electric sharpener, too, though these have had the reputation of stripping the metal off knives without a respectable result. And then there’s professional sharpening services, once provided by roaming “cutlers” and now usually available through cookware stores or culinary bookshops.

You’d think professional sharpening would be a sure bet, wouldn’t you? If you find a good service, stick to it! In my case the first choice I made, ten years ago, was London and American Stores in Melbourne, where my brand new knives were returned to me with radically changed bevels (blade angles) and coarse grinding marks. I like a fairly acute angle on my blades (because I prefer blades that smoothly thin into the cutting edge) and didn’t appreciate it being changed radically. (Note that I have no idea whether that store still uses the same sharpening service.) Understandably, I later used other services that did a much better job.

Professional knife sharpening costs money. I think the current price is typically $7-10 (please correct me if it has gone up) per knife. That quickly adds up if you are serious about maintaining your knives, even once a year!

I’ve been a bad boy about getting my knives sharpened during 2011 and when Kitchenware Direct kindly offered to let me review something, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to try out an oft-disparaged kitchen gadget. I had read some reviews online which were at least moderately enthusiastic about some models of electric knife sharpener, so I took the plunge.

I decided to take my least loved knife, a Füri utility knife, and submit it to the Machine, a Shun Kai Electric Knife Sharpener. Given that the knife had a very rough, hacked up blade, it was a pretty good choice. It took about 12 passes of the blade through the grinding wheels, but the outcome (unfortunately blurry picture below) was a respectably sharp, smooth edge, although with a modified bevel. Over the past few weeks I’ve gradually had the courage to sharpen the rest of my knives, finishing with my Global chef’s knife.

It would seem that using an electric sharpener is in some cases a viable compromise between the blunt-knived kitchen and the $$-draining regular professional sharpening. An important note is that blades that become thicker towards the handle, or have a handle that is the height of the blade, cannot be sharpened for their full length because the end closest to the handle can’t be pulled through the sharpening slot in the machine (see image below). This would cause longterm issues for usability of the knife, with the final 1-2cm becoming useless.

I’ve noticed that the knives don’t hold their edge for as long (that is, they feel less sharp more quickly), but this seems less of an issue if you have the tool to resharpen the knives waiting in your kitchen cupboard. I would guess it does mean that the knives will wear down more quickly, but I’m not sure how much of an issue that is in this short-term-perspective world. On the other hand, if you want your knives to last forty years, like my parents’ ones, then hand- or professional sharpening might be the better choice. Maybe I’ll get back to you in ten years’ time and tell you how my home-electric-sharpened knives are going.

This was a simple no-nonsense sharpener, but there are also fancier ones by some manufacturers, with multiple slots for different steps in the sharpening process (a bit like some of the handheld ceramic wheel models).

Whatever you do, remember that only sharp knives are good knives.

cooking, eating, equipment, food, hl, recipes, reviews

Mint ice-cream, and ice-cream machines

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Have you ever met one of those people who looks ascance at you when you suggest having an ice-cream in winter? “But it’s 8 degrees and raining!” they exclaim. So bloody what? Ice-cream is can be the stuff that dreams are made of, so of courrrrrrrrrrse you should eat it all year round.

When I first visited Germany it was mid-winter and verrrrrrry blllloody ccccolllld. Didn’t stop me buying a Cornetto, but! (The shop owner almost did, as I learned abruptly that customers d o  n o t get to open the ice-cream cabinet for themselves.)

So here we are at the winter solstice (in the southern hemisphere). As I haven’t tried enough recipes from the ice-cream book I reviewed a few months back (Ice Creams, Sorbets and Gelati: The Definitive Guide), and because KitchenwareDirect were nice enough to send me a new ice-cream maker to try out when they saw that I’d lost the paddle for my old one, I decided to do a flavour that straddles ideas of cold and wishes for warmer weather: mint.

Mint in any dessert can range from sophisticated and warming to sickeningly sweet and cloying. Anybody who pairs milk chocolate with mint, for instance, probably deserves very painful punishment, especially if the mint is communicated through little flavoured pieces of candy in the chocolate. Blurk. Ick. Pfahhg.

A dark chocolate is the way to go, but I don’t think you need to prefer the darkest on the spectrum – a good dark chocolate in the 50-70% range is appropriate for most applications. If you use fresh or dried mint, things get especially interesting and complex. One of the most surprising macaron flavours I did last year for Café Liaison used dried peppermint in a dark chocolate ganache. In the ice-cream here, I used fresh common mint straight from the garden.

The machine I’m now using (on the left) is a Cuisinart Ice Cream, Yoghurt & Sorbet Maker, 2-litre capacity. It’s stylish stainless steel looks aren’t quite matched by performance, as I found a full 2-litre batch didn’t freeze well enough on a warm autumn day, but it did well for a 1-litre batch in winter. (And let’s face it, probably all ice-cream maker ice-cream still kicks store-bought ice-cream out of the water!)

The mint ice-cream from the abovementioned book combines a fairly standard French-style egg custard with some sprigs of mint. The mint steeps in the cooling custard for an extended period, after which the mint is squeezed and the custard strained, the cream added, and the mixture churned. The authors’ recipe for 800ml of ice-cream used four 10cm sprigs. I upped that to five and it could possibly have been taken further.

The Cuisinart uses a rotating frozen bowl with a fixed paddle, rather than a rotating paddle inserted in a frozen bowl (as in my older Krups model, also pictured). The Cuisinart design – now quite common in ice-cream machines – seems to make for a noisier experience. I wouldn’t have wanted to be stuck in the kitchen while it churned a full mixture! Alas, the quite clever paddle (you can see it directing the flow in, out and up) is an absolute bugger when it’s time to decant the ice-cream into a container – too much surface area picking up the fresh ice-cream as you withdraw the paddle from the container, and many angled and bumpy surfaces to try to get that ice-cream off. I also found that it didn’t scrape the sides and base effectively enough while churning, leaving a 2mm layer of hard-frozen butterfat and custard (and no hard spatula is supplied to scrape it off).


The outcome was a smooth, wonderfully delicate mint ice-cream, lacking any giveaway green tinge. I had intended serving it with a chocolate sauce, but it would have been overpowering. A dusting of powdered cocoa might have done the job instead!

The next mint escapade will be with peppermint (once I’ve grown some!).

Notes about choosing an ice-cream maker: how well a machine performs is impossible to tell just by looking at it. I strongly recommend reading reviews or asking among your friends – even fancy, expensive models with their own compressor aren’t always reliable. As long as you don’t expect to make ice-cream without forethought, the common and fairly affordable machines with bowls that need to be frozen for 24 hours before making the ice-cream are a good way to go, but I do recommend making less-than-maximum sized batches in order to reduce unhappy sloppies. It’s also advisable to chill the mixture in the fridge for many hours beforehand.

In the case of the Cuisinart, the customer reviews at KitchenwareDirect are strongly positive (aside from the machine noise), but I am less positive – it does the job, but could be better. Both my now-paddleless Krups model (GVS2: highly rated on Amazon Germany) and my Mum’s 1985 Phillip’s machine (still going strong) are more effective at cleaning the sides and slightly quieter, but as Krups appliances are no longer readily available in Australia… Sniff.

My thanks to Brad at KitchenwareDirect for providing me with a new ice-cream machine.

degustation, eating, food, hl, reviews, supermarkets

Duncan’s Degustations – Dr Oetker frozen pizzas

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Like a gift from the heavens, a PR person offered me frozen pizzas to sample. I’m really not the ideal candidate, but with my Duncan’s Degustations series underway, how could I resist the opportunity to add to my spectrum of likely-ick experiences?

Offered a sample from the range of four flavours of Dr Oetker Pizza Ristorante pizzas, I asked for one. To my dismay, I was sent eight (8, acht!) of Herr Doktor Oetker’s frozen creations. It was already a hard ask for me to contemplate one, let alone multiple frozen pizzas.

I can’t recall when I last (pre-Oetker) ate a frozen dough disc with topping. I mean, I don’t even buy takeaway pizza. I make my own pizza. Often. Bottom to top. Sometimes it even has pineapple on it.

Dr Oetker, well established German ingredient company (nowadays prominent in preprepared foods, basic cookbooks including one classic translated into English, plus shipping and finance), has for some reason decided to expand into the Australian market with, of all things, imported pizzas. That’s right. Your supermarket freezer cabinet contains pizzas imported from Europe. How’s that for pointless food-miles? At least the origin isn’t fudged (in fact, the packaging is distinctly international), unlike the bread and pastries at Woolworths which are no longer clearly marked.

Back to the food-tasting side of this. You remove the very flat pizza from its shrink-wrap plastic cover (tasty touch that) and pop it in the oven at 220C for 11-13mins. And out comes…

Having eight of these buggers, I had to share them around. My parents were more than a little resistant, but bravely agreed to try Mozzarella. My nice neighbours are more open to preprepared foods, so I thought they might offer a different perspective on all flavours. And Mittens and I ate the Spinaci and the Funghi. (Curiously, perhaps for quarantine reasons, there are no meat pizzas (except tuna) being imported into Australia, despite the German range being about 50% meaty.)

Surprisingly, the tasters’ opinions were very similar:

  • Assertive but not stale herb/garlic aromas.
  • A fairly pleasant but bland taste for all varieties tested.
  • A thin, crumbly pastry base (parcooked) with an unpleasant, pasty-doughy mouthfeel.

The underside before baking (parcooked base).

This is one of those rare food products which is entirely edible, but left the tasters cold. In an emergency, I would willingly eat these pizzas. Given a choice, I’d choose a chunk of cheese or an apple or a slice of toast with Vegemite instead. Surely any food should evoke a stronger preference than this, whether positive or negative? What a strange achievement by Dr Oetker’s food technologists.

cooking, equipment, food, hl, reviews

Kitchen scales redux

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My kitchen scales battle showed no signs of a Duncan-win following my first article bemoaning the crappiness of many scales and the deterioration of my favourite model. The latter, my once-trusty IKEA model, now resets itself if I plonk anything onto it even moderately hard. Sigh.

In a sign that some companies are being a little more careful in how they approach bloggers, it was more than a relief to receive a commercial email that wasn’t trying to get me to PR-pimp pears or the latest bloody Vegemite to my “interested readers”. Instead, Brad at KitchenwareDirect (one of a number of online discounters in Australia) offered me the opportunity to try out a set of scales from Soehnle, a brand mentioned a few times by my readers. As he was also polite enough to make clear that he wasn’t suggesting a reviewing angle and accepted that I rarely mince my words about products, I accepted the offer of some scales to test.

To recap and update my kitchen scales testing criteria:

  • measure up to at least 3 kg, preferably more
  • measure as little as 2 gm
  • measure in increments of no larger than 1 gm
  • be zeroed/tared easily
  • measure reliably, without the figure creeping up or down, or the baseline changing
  • have no immovable/fixed lip or button at the same level as the weighing surface (too easy to rest a bowl on it and end up with a misleading reading)
  • have an easily readable display
  • have easily replaceable batteries
  • have no grooves for collection of dust/food
  • perhaps measure lb/oz as well

The scales I tested were the Soehnle Cuisina, with a raised weighing platform and a plastic bowl which fits on top. It officially weighs to 5000 gm / 11 lb 6 oz (tick) in 1 gm increments (tick), with a minimum weight of 1 gm (tick). Reality comes close to this (see below). The battery is a single 3V lithium button, which means it’ll last a long time, but if it suddenly dies you probably won’t have a spare ready to hand – hopefully the low-battery icon starts to show with enough warning.

The bowl is a convenient size and shape and sits well on the weighing surface. It comfortably holds at least 2.5 litres. Most of the time I would be using my own bowls, but for simple projects the included bowl is perfectly adequate.

The fact that the clear glass weighing disk sits well above the display is very good (tick), and although the display isn’t illuminated, it was much easier to read than my IKEA scales. The display turns off automatically after 3 mins (tick) or by pressing the button again (tick). If the registered weight is above zero, pressing the button tares the unit. The button had a clean click response. The grooves around the button, as on most similar scales, are a dust/food collector, so I’ll be taping some clingwrap over the display and button. The weighing disk can be removed for cleaning. It’s also handy as a grip for picking the scales up (so maybe I won’t drop them as often as other scales;) ).

Weighing was quick and consistent (tick) across the full range (1 gm – 5000 gm), with additions of large or small amounts giving the expected reading (i.e. putting, say, 5 gm, 500 gm or 5000 gm on the scales and then adding another item of a known weight always gave the expected result). Consistency is good, but that doesn’t say anything about accuracy. Weighing large numbers of Australian coins (which have standard weights), I discovered that the Soehnle Cuisina scales were mismeasuring the weight by about +1.4 gm per actual 1000 gm of material. This is unlikely to be disastrous, except at the pointy end of avant garde cuisine. The IKEA scales remain the ones I’ve tested that are most accurate.

On most occasions, the display settled on the final weight promptly (tick) and it didn’t change thereafter (tick). This was tested by (1) putting a range of different final weights on the scales, and (2) by rapid or gradual addition of material (e.g. pouring liquid into a bowl slowly).

But now for something annoying: The scales don’t register very gradual addition of material when starting from zero. This can be a problem for sprinkling powder, grains, or a gentle flow of liquid.

I measured out 10 gm of rice, removed it, and then very slowly sprinkled the rice back into the bowl. The display steadfastly showed “0”. To test if this problem only occurred around the zero point, I measured out 10 gm of rice, then gradually sprinkled in an extra 5 gm of rice. This worked fine.

The scales will not register (at zero) the addition of less than 1 gm, or multiple additions of less than 1 gm. My advice: never start by adding small amounts to the scales. Make sure you’ve added a larger amount of material quickly (to get it to a value above zero reliably) before adding any small amounts. Thankfully the problem only exists at zero, while some other scales I’ve tried had the problem no matter what had already been weighed. In tiny print on the guarantee sheet, I found the text: “This scale has an intelligent [sic!] zero setting. This may in some cases when bulk ingredients are poured very slowly cause the display to remain at zero.” Correct.

The scales can display metric or Imperial weights (tick), but unlike many scales this isn’t possible by simply pressing a button. The manufacturers decided that users will only operate in one system (and as long as you’re not an English speaker, that’s probably true), so they stuck a teencytiny switch under the cover for the battery compartment. Grr. If you do like Imperial, however, the weight is displayed to a decimal fraction of an ounce (tick; I won’t comment about the silliness of doing decimals of an anachronistic base-16/8/14/whatever measurement system).

All up, the Soehnle Cuisina scales are good to use and responsive, but – as is common to most domestic digital scales in my experience – a little inaccurate. In this particular case, the innaccuracy is small enough that you need not feel discouraged from trying the Soehnle Cuisina.

My sincere thanks to KitchenwareDirect for providing these scales for review.

(As a side note, I recommend against the increasingly common type of very flat glass scales (like those I rejected in my first article) in all brands. Careful reading of reviews of these on various US, UK and German sites indicates that they all have problems with changes in readings and sensitivity to where items are places on the weighing surface. Stylish looks, poor performance.)

cooking, food, media, reviews, society

My Kitchen Rules: I can see burnt bits

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When I was a kid there were crackers called Fish Shapes (I think they were among the early Arnott’s Shapes). They were foul. But if you were at a party you just had to have some, finding it hard to stop at the first handful. Despite their revoltingness, they were compulsive eating.

In a similar vein, My Kitchen Rules 2011 is compulsive viewing. I sat on the train home last night wishing I wasn’t going to be home in time for another dose of this distasteful, mediocre circus of the nice, naïve, ‘noying and nasty. Alas, Metro trains were running on time.

A columnist for Crikey.com asked on Monday “Why does this program remind me of Big Brother and all its negativity?” Nicely put.

Of course, it’s not just the producers’ deliberate choice of some distinctly unsympathetic personalities that keeps viewers simultaneously horrified and fascinated, but also the stunningly awful abilities of many of the contestants to (a) organise themselves, (b) work as a team, (c) cook.

I gather that the contestants submitted a number of menus for their dinner parties and were only told on the day which menu they would cook. Wouldn’t you, in their position, have practised most of the menu items? Perhaps have worked out how to tea-smoke duck? Checked whether deep-fried chocolate-risotto-encased ice-cream balls was a tasty idea? Googled “blue fin tuna” to work out whether ecological shame should be on the menu?

I know a few very competent cooking bloggers who wouldn’t have wanted to attempt many of those menus in a mere three hours, but hey, maybe that’s why we didn’t audition for the show!

I can’t see why My Kitchen Rules is such a ratings winner for Channel Seven. Last year’s run was novelty and horror. This year’s is the same, but with extra tiresome bitchiness and incompetence. And hosts Manu Feildel and Pete Evans, as charming as they are, are now so scripted, re-shot and dramatically paused that their presence is just wooden.

So I’m thinking… if one of the contestants could just go beserk with the kitchen implements, the show could end happily (for viewers) and prematurely. What an elimination!

Does anyone even remember who was in it – or won – last year? Didn’t think so.

Postscript: I wrote the above just after the episode finished. Alas that meant the telly was still on when Conviction Kitchen started. I didn’t see the first episode, but my first impressions were of a distasteful, exploitative piece of reality TV. Other shows manage shameless prejudiced overtones (the xenophobic Border Security) or manipulative tempting and shaming (Biggest Loser), but do we need to combine prejudice, tempt-n-shame and a lottery-for-freedom for Conviction Kitchen’s participants? That makes a mockery of the transformative intentions of the learn-to-cook exercise.

Isn’t it morally reprehensible to pour a drink for people subject to a no-alcohol restriction and then see if they’ll drink? Is it mere coincidence that a camera happens to be focused on a participant who suddenly admits to a legal problem to the chef, while another camera just happens to be trained on the chef’s face? Why do the promos and pre-advertisement previews emphasise drama and failures? It wins the voyeurs’ votes. At least chef Ian Curley seems to have had the best intentions with the participants and series.

NOTE: This is not the place for discussion of rehabilitation/crime/etc, so comments along those lines won’t be published.

cooking, degustation, food, hl, reviews

Duncan’s Degustations – Betty Crocker Super Moist Devil’s Food Cake

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ATTN: Ms Betty Crocker, c/- General Mills
SUBJECT: Betty Crocker Super Moist Devil’s Food Cake vs me, Mittens and Mum

Dear Betty,

I’ve long been in awe of your ability to sell buckets of ready-to-use frosting to the masses. I can remember how Australians called it icing, too, before you (or cupcakes) arrived.

The idea of tubs of icing fascinated me. It seemed naughty, perverse, and maybe a bit like dipping into a pot of yumminess. But I never tried it.

I’m writing to you, Ms Crocker, as part of the opening episode of a new occasional article series on Syrup & Tang, called Duncan’s Dégustations. As a public service (or personal torment) I’ll be exposing myself to foods I would normally be sceptical about for one reason or another, just to see if my prejudices are unfounded. I’ve chosen one of your products as my first subject.

I haven’t made a packet cake since, oh, about 1986, and even back then I could tell that my Mum and White Wings had rather different concepts of “cake”. For one thing, there was that signature artificial taste and smell, slightly metallic, and a little reminiscent of some plastics. There’s been seemingly no decline in the popularity of packet cake mixes, and the daredevil in me decided I just had to try one in 2011. Surely, surely, the intervening years would have seen such a rise in food technology skill and knowledge that a packet cake could, in fact, achieve some deliciousness, Betty?

Now, I noticed you have three types of chocolate cake: Super Moist Chocolate Fudge Cake, Super Moist Devil’s Food Cake, and Decadent Chocolate Mud. I can’t say that your boxes were at all informative about the difference between these, and the ingredients lists were so similar (apart from chocolate chips in the mud cake, if I recall correctly) that any product differentiation seemed to lie largely in the names. I chose the Devil’s Food Cake.

The ingredients list: Sugar, wheat flour, cocoa (8%), vegetable oil, raising agents (500, 341 [a sodium carbonate and a calcium phosphate]), dextrose, thickeners (1422, 466 [acetylated distarch adipate and carboxymethyl cellulose]), emulsifier (471 [glyceryl mono-/di-stearate]), wheat starch, whey powder, salt, flavour, antioxidants (306, 320 [tocopherols and butylated hydroxyanisole]). And the consumer must add water, oil and eggs. None of the additives are problematic, to my knowledge.

Now, Betty, I know you’re a figment of someone’s imagination, and your real-life minions at General Mills aren’t likely to be letter-readers, so permit me to cut to the chase. My co-eater Mittens and I made your cake. It was, indeed, very pleasantly “moist” in the mouth (though to be technical, moist relates to moisture, not the soft, oily nature of your cake).

I tried it out on my Mum, without telling her that it was cake mix cake. She was very polite about the texture. That’s all. Then she asked me if it was a packet cake.

Ms Crocker, we found your cake bitter, undersweet, not particularly chocolatey, and a touch metallic. In fact, in most regards it was very much the same as the packet cake I made in 1986. What’s more, the stingy portion of frosting you included (that sachet doesn’t stretch very far now, does it!) did nothing to make things better. It’s disappointing enough that the frosting only stretched to the thinnest of coatings, but why did it have to taste salty and (again) a touch metallic? Is this the foul substance people buy in those tubs, for reasons that now entirely escape me?

Mittens wonders what differentiates your cakes from the likes of, say, this:

I would be ashamed to serve this sorry excuse for cake. Your website says its “Made in Australia from the best quality ingredients we can find in Australia and around the world to deliver a superior product”. Try harder, Betty.

cooking, food, hl, reviews

Where are the good kitchen scales?

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How hard is it to make a set of consumer digital kitchen scales that are reliable? Too hard, it seems.

Exhibit A, below, is the most reliable, moderately priced (A$40) set I’ve found in recent years. The IKEA Ordning kitchen scale is simple, reasonably robust, and fairly reliable. I’ve had two in the last six years. The first broke because I have a habit of knocking things onto the floor. My parents inherited it because my father is nifty with drills and glue and stuff;) The second Ordning scale isn’t quite as good. No design changes, but the displayed weight seems to creep up or down a little sometimes. A pity, because the first one was really, really reliable.

Exhibit B, below, was a piece of junk I bought at BigW. I liked the idea of a solid flat glass surface, and bright display. Junk. It wasn’t enough that weighing something at different spots on the surface yielded different outcomes, but watching the display settle on a weight, then slowly tick upwards gram by gram over a period of about 30 seconds, then (if lucky) slowly tick downwards to (approximately) the original weight, was excruciatingly frustrating.

The design was clean and the display was bright, but that couldn’t compensate for the flaws. This device is sold under many brands both here in Australia and overseas. I don’t know if the one I bought was a one-off faulty unit. There are other scales that are of the same basic design but have a slightly different base or display, and these might behave differently.

Exhibit C (which I’m not exhibiting) was another type of scale (raised glass disc over a plastic housing) at a similar price point. It refused to register the addition of any amount under about three grams, so if you had 100gm of something already on the scales and slowly sprinkled on small amounts of extra ingredient, it wouldn’t notice. Dumb.

What’s a gram or two between friends?

If baking is your thing, and especially if you spend quite some time developing recipes, every gram can matter. For general use, it’s not so big a drama unless you’re adding small quantities of very potent ingredients (e.g. certain flavours, chemicals in avantgarde cooking, leavening agents, etc), or making a very small batch of something where the balance of ingredients is crucial (e.g. a ganache).

I began to wonder if the expensive digital scales sold in most cookware shops and department stores were, in fact, justifiably pricey. A quick look at the reviews on various Amazons left me sceptical, and the fact that the typical consumer probably trusts their scales without testing them for accuracy/reliablity certainly distorts the reviews.

So I wonder what my readers use and have found to be truly reliable?

A decent set of scales should, in my opinion, manage at least to:

  • measure up to at least 3 kg, preferably more
  • measure as little as 2 gm
  • measure in increments of no larger than 1 gm (there are cheap scales out there that only measure in 2 gm or 5 gm increments)
  • be zeroed/tared
  • measure reliably, without the figure creeping up or down, or the baseline changing
  • (added later:) perhaps measure lb/oz as well.

Reliability of scales is difficult to assess if you don’t have access to more than one set of scales. However, smallish weights can be checked by using multiple coins, as the weights of coins are meant to be reliable (e.g. an Australian 50c coin should weigh 15.55 gm; Wikipedia has useful reference lists for many different currencies).