Requiem: Electric Kettle and Kitchen Scale

Many years ago, I was at Ace Hardware spending a gift card from the Friends of The Emerson School. I was electric kettle curious and it was free money, so even though I didn’t love my choices, I grabbed one thinking, well, I can try this out, and if I like it, I will replace it when it dies. Cue a long montage of calendar flipping. I loved the electric kettle—no more screaming kettle when the water boiled, just a quiet click. But I didn’t love that it was plastic and at 1.7 liters, it was much more electric kettle than I needed. So I patiently waited and eventually it did die. Thank you electric kettle for your many years of heating water for tea and for overwhelming oily things with hot water before I hand washed them.

This is the replacement and I have to say, I’m more or less in the same boat. I got it home and decided I didn’t like it. I have to unplug and replug it to fill it with water. The click of the kettle turning off is quieter than my previous one, so I’m more likely to forget I have tea in process. It doesn’t pour well. However, it is stainless steel, so that’s an improvement. I’ll wait around for this one to die, and perhaps my next one will be the electric kettle ideal.

I know I bought this kitchen scale in the downtown Kitchen Kaboodle (since closed) and I think I might have bought it with tax return money in 2004. That spring was a time for a lot of baking as I had very few classes to take. My non-academic goal was to perfect baking a loaf of whole wheat bread. As all the baking books say, it’s best to have a kitchen scale for that process. I bought one and it changed the way I cook and bake.

This fella has served me well. It came with a spiral bound books that translate standard ingredients from cups to ounces or fluid ounces. That let me look up common ingredients and mark up all my recipes so I could pour things, rather than put things in measuring cups and then pour. The big downside to this scale was that it rounds grams to the 5s place, so it isn’t super precise. It was also starting to become less reliable. So when the electric kettle died, I figured I would replace both.

Thank you, my first scale for so many years of baking and cooking support. And for helping measure out the cats’ food every Saturday morning for years on end.

Here’s the new model. This one does not round the grams. It also has a unit of pounds and ounces. The old scale I had to do mental math if ingredients were more than a pound. It also will let you weigh something, press the hold button and the remove the thing to check the weight. That is handy for when what you are weighing is bigger than the scale.

I don’t love the lack of actual buttons. I’m having trouble getting it to tare because I haven’t quite figured out the amount of touch needed to press the not-button.

It sure is pretty though, isn’t it? I do enjoy that.