Kitchen Scales for Meal Prep
Scales are measurement devices that tell us the weight of our food. This is crucial for meal prep because it helps us ensure that we are adding an even amount of food to each dish. If our weekly meals are unevenly spread out then we risk not consuming enough calories on certain days.
Scales are also great for measuring ingredients while cooking as well, helping cooks dial in the perfect quantity needed for certain recipes. This is especially helpful when baking because ratios need to be exact.
One of the most common examples of scales in meal prep is how body builders use them to count calories and macros. Gym bros turning weight gain into a science can attest to the efficiency of scales for meal prep, helping cooks follow targeted diet plans.
Digital
Scales are typically digital, running on batteries and giving us accurate readings on LED type screens. Measurements are normally given in grams or kilograms. While the metric system might feel unfamiliar in the US, what cooks are looking for is to see if the meals are all equally weighted.
Additionally, what’s beneficial about digital scales is that you can set them to zero after placing items on top. This way you can place your dish onto the scale and remove its weight from the equation, giving meal preppers more accurate readings of their food.
Digital scales are designed for heavy loads too, so don’t be afraid to put larger bowls onto them. This is a common way for bakers to measure out flour and other powdered granular ingredients like sugar and yeast.
Mechanical
Mechanical scales tell a food’s weight on a radial dial above a suspended basket or bowl. They are often found at the butcher counter as a quick way to measure requested amounts of protein. For meal prepping at home, they are great if you want to avoid batteries or prefer a more old school look to your kitchen.
There’s a reason butchers use them so often too, it’s an easy and swift way to cleanly measure meat. Because meat is sold by the pound and because it shrinks as you cook it, it is easy to prepare meatier recipes with mechanical scales.
Some mechanical scales can also be hung, offering a unique advantage that other scales cannot – space. Vertical space can get easily taken for granted, so don’t be afraid to hang a scale next to your sink. It’s more convenient than you might think.
Mechanical
Smart
Smart scales can take your meal prep to the next level, connecting to the internet and apps to process data captured by your meal prep. Crunch the numbers and you’ll eventually find patterns in your eating habits that you can tweak for optimized results.
It’s important to be on the look out for missing nutrients in your weekly meal plans because if a single dish is lacking in a certain nutrient and you have to eat it for 5 days, then that’s an entire week that your body is being deprived of what it needs.
With smart technology and the Internet of Things, our ability to fine tune our diets is better than ever. Nutrition apps have refined into advanced nutritional checklists well beyond the generic grocery list shopping apps from the past.