Escali Primo Digital Food Scale
This little scale is an absolute must-have in my kitchen. It reads to the gram, holds up to 11 pounds, and tares with one button. If you're baking bread and still using measuring cups, buy this before you buy anything else on this list.
Buy NowWhy it earns its place
For years I avoided using a digital food scale because I thought measuring by weight would be complicated. I was completely wrong. Measuring cups and teaspoons are the real pain — messy, inaccurate, and always scattered through three different drawers. Now I barely touch them.
A cup of flour isn't a fixed amount and never was. Scoop it, spoon it, or shake the bag first and you get three different weights, which is exactly why two people following the same recipe end up with two different doughs. Weighing takes that variable off the table entirely.
I can't believe I was ever intimidated by a kitchen scale. The Escali Primo is now one of my most-used tools and a true best friend for every sourdough bake.
How I actually use it
Here's how I use it: set a bowl on the Escali Primo, hit tare, weigh the first ingredient, hit tare again, and keep going. It's faster, cleaner, and far more accurate than scooping and leveling. Once you get used to it, you'll start hunting for recipes written only in grams — just like I did.
On feeding day it does the whole job in one place. Set a clean Ball wide-mouth quart jar on it, tare, 100 grams of starter, tare, 100 grams of King Arthur all-purpose flour, tare, 100 grams of water. One jar, one button, and nothing to wash afterward but the spoon.
Leave it out on the counter. A scale that lives in a drawer is a scale you talk yourself out of using, and this one is an inch and a quarter thick, so it slides under a cabinet or behind the flour bin and stays in reach.
Specs
- Brand
- Escali
- Model
- P115
- Capacity
- 11 lb / 5,000 g
- Increment
- 1 g / 0.1 oz
- Units
- Grams, ounces
- Tare function
- Yes
- Power
- 2 x AA batteries (included)
What to know before you buy
It cuts out after four minutes, so if you wander off mid-mix you come back to a blank display and a tare you have to set all over again. Weigh everything in one pass and you'll never notice it.
It reads in whole grams, which is right for bread. If you're dosing 2 grams of instant yeast, weighing espresso, or working in tenths for any reason, you want a scale with finer resolution.
The platform is 8 by 6 inches, so a wide mixing bowl sits out over the display and you end up reading the numbers at an angle or shifting the bowl to see them. Set it somewhere you can lean over rather than somewhere you have to reach across.
What else I considered
The 0.1-gram jeweller-style scales are more precise and worse at this job — most cap out around 500 grams, which won't hold a bowl of flour, let alone a 1,000-gram dough. For bread, capacity beats resolution every single time.
