One of my most-cooked recipes of all time is a supremely tasty granola. I make it frequently enough that when I got into cooking by weight, instead of using a small army of measuring cups and spoons, I went through and converted the whole recipe to weight measure.
I've got it down pat. I preheat the oven, set a small saucepan on my scale, set it to zero (or "tare it") then pour in oil, honey and maple syrup, taring between each so I know exactly how much I'm adding. I warm the pan on the stove while I weigh out my dry goods in a mixing bowl. Oats. Tare. Coconut. Tare. Walnuts. Tare. Whatever else I feel like throwing in there. Tare. Tare. Tare. The warmed oil is stirred into the oat mixture, and, if I've brought my A-game, I'll have it spread out on a pair of half-sheet pans before the oven's come up to temp. I put exactly one dirty pot and one dirty bowl in the dishwasher and the kitchen looks like exactly nothing ever happened.
Enter Drop, a $100 kitchen scale that connects to your iPad and offers step-by-step on-screen instructions for cooking a variety of dishes. The attendant iOS app tells you when to add each ingredient, which you pour into your own bowl that you place on top. The app weighs the ingredients as you go and tells you when you've poured in enough. Drop's app contains about 300 recipes—from madeleines and lemon tarts to kale chips, olive tapenade, and olive oil cake—each of which has been converted to weight measure. If the idea of switching from cooking using measuring cups and spoons (known as "U.S. measure") to cooking by weight has ever been a temptation, this is the place to start.
The first thing to know about Drop is that the most important part of the package is not the sleek little red countertop scale. It's the app. Fire up your iPad, (it has to be a model* new enough to support Bluetooth LE), tap the recipe you'd like to make, and start cooking.
In my time with it, I made meatballs (I never make meatballs!), hash browns and even tried Drop's granola. Every recipe tells you how much time it's going to take, provides a list of tools you'll need, and follows with an ingredient list. Tap "Start Recipe," and it walks you through the steps, each one taking up the whole screen as you work on it.
Within the recipes is where the ingenuity lies. If you have more or less of a particular ingredient than the recipe needs, the app can scale the recipe up or down for you. I had more ground beef than the meatball recipe called for, so I tapped the "Ground Beef" icon, followed by the "Scale Recipe" button, put the beef on the scale, and the app upped the quantities of all of the other ingredients before I started.
When you're ready to roll, place a bowl on the scale and the app tares it out. Make granola like I did and you can pour most of your ingredients straight from their storage jar or package directly into the mixing bowl. As you add each ingredient, the screen shows you graphically how much you still need pour in, and when you've added enough, it skips to the next step and tares the scale again, something you'll appreciate even more if your hands are a mess.
Where it's most impressive is with the tasks where you can pour ingredients straight from the box or bag. Bake something with a bunch of pantry ingredients in a row and without all the cups and spoons, and it feels like you're flying.
It's a pretty amazing thing. By turning the scale into a smart scale and favoring weight measure over U.S. measure, Drop has the liberty to rethink the way a recipe can be presented.
