Many culinary recipes require precision when measuring ingredients. Liquid or bulk products can be measured with a spoon or measuring cup. But what about hard foods like cheese?
Compare with the reference
When you are faced with the need to measure a certain amount of food, and the kitchen scale is not at hand, you have to go for tricks. How, for example, can you measure 100 grams of cheese?
A standard package of processed cheese (for example, "Druzhba") weighs about 100 grams. Remember such a cheese, mentally hold it in your hands, feel its weight and volume. Do you remember? Now try to cut the same piece of cheese. Processed cheese and hard cheese are roughly the same gravity, so if you can cut a piece of cheese the size of a package of processed cheese, you’ll end up with about a hundred grams.
The task is simplified if you know approximately how much a large piece weighs, from which you have to cut 100 grams. Everything is elementary: you need to separate a quarter from a piece weighing 400 grams, a third from a 300 gram piece, a little less than a third from a 250 gram piece.
If these methods do not suit you, try to find an object at home, the weight of which you know for sure. All manufactured products must contain weight information on their packaging. Please note that net weight refers to the weight of the product itself without packaging, and gross weight refers to the total weight of the product and packaging. These values can vary significantly if the packaging is heavy. Now that you have a 100-gram reference sample, you can measure out a piece of cheese by targeting it.
Also, remember that 1 milliliter of water weighs 1 gram. You can use a measuring cup to measure out 100 grams and then cut off the desired piece of cheese based on the weight of the water. If you do not have a measuring cup, take a regular glass: its standard volume is 200 milliliters.
DIY scales
If you are often faced with the need to measure the weight of food, but do not want to spend money on a kitchen scale, use the old-fashioned method and make a 100-gram piece that will always be at hand. Sew a bag made of thick cloth and pour 100 grams of table salt, some kind of cereal or any other substance into it. The main thing is that this filler is not perishable.
Naturally, you can make several bags of different weights - for example, 50, 100, 200 and 500 grams. You can determine the approximate weight of food by lifting these pouches. And you can make the measurement process even more accurate. To do this, take an ordinary hanger, hook a bag of the required mass to one end, and hang the bag at the other end and put the product to be weighed into it. When both ends of the improvised weights are balanced, you have reached the goal and cut off a piece of the desired weight.
