 Hey I'm Hannah and this is Is It Bad, the show where we answer your most burning cookware questions. Today we have a great question that came from a commenter. Is it bad to use liquid measuring cups for dry ingredients and vice versa? To see if you really need two different kinds of measuring cups, we had 18 people measure out a cup of flour with a liquid measuring cup and a cup of liquid with a dry measuring cup. Then we weighed their results to see how accurate they were. Turns out they were way off. When measuring the flour in the liquid measuring cup, testers were off by up to 26%. This is because there's no good way to level it off at the one cup mark. With the liquid in the dry cup, testers were off by up to 23%. Here over filling was the problem because the surface tension of the liquid allows it to sit up over the rim which adds to your volume. So using the wrong cup can make you up to 25% off of your target amount, which can really impact your results, specifically if you're baking. Check out this cake right here. We use 25% more liquid than the recipe calls for. This cake follows the recipe to a tea. You can really see what a difference accuracy makes. For this reason, we recommend sticking with the right measuring cups for your ingredients, but how you measure also really affects accuracy. We always scoop up dry ingredients for the dry measuring cup and then we level off the top with a flat utensil like a butter knife. We call this the dip and sweep. This prevents your contents from being too fluffy or too compacted, which will mess up your accuracy. So that's what you want to put the liquid measuring cup on the counter and then bend down so the markings are at eye level and then pour in your liquid. Another thing to keep in mind, liquids tend to curve on their surface. This curve is called a meniscus. To make sure we measure our liquids as accurately as possible, we always measure from the center of the meniscus. Alright, so we've covered how to measure dry and liquid ingredients, but what about those sticky in between things like peanut butter or mayonnaise? Should they go in a dry or a liquid measuring cup? Our testing has shown that a dry measuring cup is best for thicker or sticky things because you can level off the top with a butter knife for more accurate measurement. But if you really hate measuring sticky things like this, there's actually a dedicated tool that's pretty awesome. It's called an adjustable measuring cup like our winner here from KitchenArt. It has a clear cylinder with volume markings and a plunger insert. You withdraw the plunger to the desired measurement, fill it, level it off, and then plunge it empty. This design makes it easy to level off the top for a really accurate measurement. The plunger pushes out every last bit of the ingredient, which makes the whole thing a lot tidier. But there's a measuring tool we want to stress above all others, a kitchen scale. A good one like our winner here from Oxo takes all the guesswork out of measuring. You can portion your ingredients down to the gram. It can be much easier to use because you can just put your mixing bowl right on the scale and measure right into it. Just zero out the weight every time you add a new ingredient. We weigh our ingredients whenever possible in the test kitchen. So is it bad to use a liquid measuring cup for dry ingredients and vice versa? The answer is yes, it actually can be bad, especially if you're baking where precision really matters. We recommend sticking with the right cup and using a scale whenever possible for the most accurate measurements. Alright, thank you so much for watching. Make sure to ask us your own, is it bad questions in the comments? Check out the links to our favorite measuring tools in the video description below and make sure to hit that subscribe button.