How to weigh small quantities

Here’s a typical situation: you want a scraping of, say, low-fat cream cheese on your cracker. The carton tells you the cream cheese is 163 calories per 100g. But how do you know how many grammes are in your scraping-sized portion?

The answer is to use a scale with a Tare function. Most electronic scales do, these days: I use this AccuWeight scale, which has the advantage of a wipe-clean tempered glass surface that covers the whole scale, including the readout. It’s under £12 from Amazon.

1 Place your knife or spoon on the scales. It will show the weight – in this case, 74g.

Press the zero button at the bottom of the scale. The weight will be shown as 0.

2 When you lift the knife off the scales, it will now show a weight of -74g.

3 Load up your utensil with your chosen food, and place it back on the scales.

The weight is now shown as 6g, which is the weight of the cream cheese (in this case) without the knife.

You can now use your calculator to work out that 163/100 x 6 = 9.78 calories for your portion of cream cheese.