Is it important to measure your ingredients?
I have written about how I like to use butter in recipes. It enhances
the flavor and texture of recipes in a way that few other ingredients can.
Most of the time you don't need much, just a bit works wonders. A chef
friend once commented that he believed it was easy for chefs to hide their
sins by simply adding more fat and salt to a recipe. He would say, "You
can make bad food taste better with more butter or salt, but it's better
to just make great food with the right amount of ingredients." I believe
that he's right and that measuring is key to great food.
So when I cook, I measure. This is also one of the simplest tips for reducing calories and eating healthy.
The example of butter is a good one, but all fats have a lot of calories. The rule of thumb is that a teaspoon of oil or butter contains about 45 calories and 5 grams of fat. Sometimes it's a fat that's is better for you, but it's still fat and still calories.
Television chefs randomly pour oil into pans without thinking about the added calories. That extra oil doesn't add much to the flavor or texture of their recipes, however, and this is a practice you should not adopt.
Salt is the ingredient that I am the most careful with. It's really easy
to add more sodium to a dish than you need and most recipes are much too
salty to begin with. It's easy to cut back on your sodium intake by measuring
carefully. A teaspoon of salt has about 2,300 milligrams of sodium. 1/8th
teaspoon of salt per portion works to make most dishes just salty enough:
this is about 300 mg of added sodium. When I am designing recipes I use
this as my starting point, and I reduce or add salt depending on if there's
an ingredient that contains more sodium, such as parmesan cheese or soy
sauce.
I like using my salt grinder. I have measured and know that my salt mill dispenses 1/8 teaspoon with ten cranks of the grinder, so that's 1/16th tsp. with 5 turns. You'll need to experiment a bit with your own grinder to know just how much yours puts out, but it's great for salting fish or meat before cooking, for example. The same applies to my pepper mill.
Baking is an exacting science that requires careful measurement to make
sure that everything turns out OK. I believe that this is the case with
cooking as well, and use measuring cups and spoons for all ingredients,
such as milk, chicken stock, flour, rice, oatmeal and the like. There is
some research that shows rounding the top of a measuring cup instead of
leveling it off can add up to 30% more calories. Measuring keeps excess
calories from creeping into your diet.
Professional bakers use scales to measure their ingredients and this is another lesson we can learn from them. If you are going to purchase only one piece of equipment for your kitchen, make it a scale. Weigh your chicken, beef, potatoes, pasta and the like. Most recipes are written using measuring cups and spoons, but learning to weigh foods helps you to understand what a proper portion size is. You'll quickly get a feel for just how much 4 ounces of chicken or fish is, for instance. This will not only keep you on track with your calories at home, but you will come to realize just how many extra calories there are in restaurant food because you will know what a normal portion size is.