After years of answering reader calls about recipes, one thing is certain: How you measure flour is the single biggest booby trap to your success in baking.
For all-purpose flour, the instructions on the bag—fine print of course—direct you to spoon the flour into a dry measure cup (flat top) and sweep off the excess with a straight edge. If you drag your cup measure through the bag to scoop up the flour, you’re actually packing more into it than what’s intended for the recipe. The result is a baked good that’s bound to be heavy and dense.
You’d expect cake flour to be measured the same way, right? Wrong! Read the package instructions and you’ll see that manufacturers recommend sifting cake flour before measuring it.
Curious to see just how different sifted and unsifted can be, I experimented with a scale, which is the most precise way to measure and is also the method the majority of the world uses. I weighed two cups of spooned-in cake flour versus two cups of sifted cake flour. The 1¼-ounce disparity amounted to almost six tablespoons! An inconsistency that big could easily be the clincher between moist and tender versus dry and crumbly. And further experiments proved that this number can also vary, sometimes being as large as nine tablespoons! Has this happened to you? How do you measure your flour?
To read about my adventures with a red velvet cake—which required a lot of sifting— download the free Gourmet Live app, then head over to Epicurious to get the recipe for my Fourth of July Glorious Red White and Blue Cake.
I weigh, precisely as a result of this problem! But if I do happen to use cups I spoon into the cup and level with a knife. I’ve always found it awkward to dip the cup into the canister, unless I’m only using the 1/4 cup measure.
I do sift cake flour because it is always lumpy.
Alexis, you’re so right. Cake flour looks lumpy compared to all-purpose.
Wouldn’t this all be moot if recipes were written by weight, not volume? I recognize that requires much re-education (that folks like Ruhlman and others are attempting) but content creators have to play along if they are ever going to move consumers forward. For example, the recipes on King Arthur flour’s website can be viewed by volume or weight. Could Conde Nast do the same across its food and lifestyle publications? If too difficult in print, how about in its online platforms (e.g., Epicurious, Gourmet Live)? Perhaps they’ve already consumer tested this idea and found it fails with their target audience…
I am well aware of this problem, because as everyone here in old Europe weighs flour… we are always relying on conversion tools or pages and you wouldn’t believe the differences. I sincerely do hope, that the New World will turm to weighing in recipes, because this would make instant reproduction of delicious sounding recipes much easier!!!
Thanks for sharing this valuable information!!!
David, you make a good point about giving both volume and weight in the online platforms. I’m going to bring this up in the next editorial meeting. We talked about it at the old Gourmet magazine, but all the extra numbers would have cluttered up recipes that were already squeezed onto the page.
On another tangent, I’ve often thought that American kids would have a much easier time with math if we were on the metric system like everyone else!