Dairy Dilemmas, Solved
Kitchen Counts
Many baked goods rely on dairy for richness, structure and texture. But some dairy products can be tricky to measure by volume; yogurt and sour cream love to cling to the sides of measuring cups. The best way to measure them is by weight. But this presents challenges, too. For one thing, recipes often fail to specify dairy weights. And consulting a package may not be much help, either. We’ve found discrepancies between containers’ purported weights by volume and actual weights. So we weighed 14 common dairy ingredients. Some are liquids, some are semisolids, and a few are solids. In the table below, we’ve listed these items’ weights for 1/2 cup (8 tablespoons) in grams, as we prefer the precision of metric weights when baking.
Dairy by Weight
½ Cup Of...Equals (In Grams)Butter113Buttermilk, low fat118Cottage cheese, whole milk140Crème fraîche132Heavy cream115Mascarpone126Mexican crema130Milk, low fat115Milk, whole115Ricotta135Sour cream135Yogurt, Greek120Yogurt, low-fat120Yogurt, whole milk120
