Kitchen scale?

If you had to buy a kitchen scale, which one would you choose? I was thinking of a Polaner? postal scale like I have at the office. It weighs up to 5 lbs in metric or avoirdupois units.

I have two - a Salter and a Tanita. Both digital, the smaller one weighs in 1g increments to 3kg, the larger one in 2g increments to 5kg. Both can switch between metric and imperial, and the Tanita one was really cheap - $30. Couldn't survive without them. I'm concerned 5lb would be too low, as I often weigh all my bread doughs on the scale continuously - eg. put bowl on, zero off, add flour, zero off, add liquids etc and sometimes the total weight can exceed what my smaller scale can hold.

If you had to buy a kitchen scale, which one would you choose? I was thinking of a Polaner? postal scale like I have at the office. It weighs up to 5 lbs in metric or avoirdupois units.

It depends on how you cook but I'd echo what Celia said about the total weight, especially if you bake. One of the handiest things when cooking by weight rather than by volume is to use the scales "tare" function as Celia described to zero out what's gone before and then adding the next ingredient. It turns out not to be that uncommon for bowl plus flour plus water (and so forth) to cause me to bump up against my scale's limit, which is 2 kg/4.4 lbs. Of course you can work around that and I wouldn't spend a ton of extra money to get a higher limit but other things being equal, that would be a nice-to-have.

I have a Salter and love it. It makes a big difference when baking at altitude and with variable humidity, compared to just measuring ingredients.

Waddaya think of an American Weigh Scale AMW-13 digital scale? Up to 13 lbs. About $30. 10-yr warranty.

I have a Salter. Like Celia, mine is digital and I use it for measuring baking ingredients and wine ingredients. I consider it indispensable.

You could use one of these. (relax - it's flour)

So *that's* how you can afford to fly back and forth to New York for pizza all the time, John.

Back when I was eBay-ing a few years ago, I purchased a 30-lb capacity postal scale for around $30 (got it on eBay, naturally). I use that in a pinch when Gail's WW scale isn't big enough.

You could use one of these. (relax - it's flour)

I have one of those. I also have an analytical balance FWIW.

Waddaya think of an American Weigh Scale AMW-13 digital scale? Up to 13 lbs. About $30. 10-yr warranty.

Looks great to me, Larry. Even my 2 kg limit doesn't come into play that often and at 6 kg, you'd never have to worry about it. The only limitation is the 10 g minimum but there you're talking about 2 teaspoons of water. When quantities get that small, you're usually going to default to volume measurements anyway.

We've had a Soehnle for years. It weighs in 2 g. increments and has a switch to go from g. to lbs on its underside. Just got my wife an Oxo one that weighs in 1 g. increments and has the g/lb switch on the top pad. The pad that shows the weight and has the switches on it pulls away from the rest of the scale so that you can see what you're doing even if there's a large bowl sitting on the thing. Don't know if we'll use that function much or not, but she's been wanting a 1 g. scale for a long time.

I've been using an old, not too accurate Polder for years and was in a Linens and Things recently. Under a stack of baking sheets I found a Salter Model 3003 priced at $12, so I got it. It measures in 2g increments to 5kg (1/8 oz to 11lb) with the tare feature. It also has a function to measure in fl oz/ml which I haven't used yet. I like it a lot.