Stop Measuring Your Flour Wrong. Here's The Correct Way To Do It

When you're measuring out the ingredients for baking, do you just scoop with the measuring cup? It does seem like the most expedient way to do it, and it works just fine for ingredients like sugar. Flour, however, is a different story since it's less dense, and scooping can compact it to the point where a cup of flour is more like a cup and a half. This means your baking may go horribly wrong, resulting in too-dry cake and crumbly cookies. If you do a lot of baking, the best way to measure flour is with a scale.

If you're scale-less or you're using recipes that don't spell things out in ounces, you can still use a cup to measure the flour, but not as a scoop. Before you start measuring, fluff the flour with a fork, scoop, or whisk. This step is necessary since the flour has already been compacted to some extent by sitting in the bag or canister. Once that's done, use a spoon or scoop to fill the cup with flour, a little at a time, then very gently level it off with the flat side of a knife. Don't tap or shake it since the idea is to keep the flour fluffy and avoid anything that packs it down.

If you've been baking for a long time or learned at your mom's or grandma's knee (or dad's or grandpa's, for that matter), you may be wondering, "What about sifting?" Back in the day, most recipes calling for flour would tell you to sift it, but the main reason why older recipes often call for this step is because flour grinding used to be a lot less efficient. This means your bag of flour might contain differently-sized particles, which would result in unevenly-textured baked goods. Going back even further to the days when flour came in burlap sacks, it could also contain who knows what kind of impurities. Using a sieve or sifter helped remove any larger grains or other unwanted bits.

These days, flour mills sift the product before bagging it, so home sifting is primarily done to aerate dry ingredients. In most cases, stirring with a fork will accomplish the same thing. Still, there are times when it does help to sift, such as when you're folding flour into egg whites to make an angel food cake. Sifted flour requires less stirring, which means the beaten eggs will be less prone to deflating. If the batter has a lot of liquid, it's also a good idea to sift since stirring flour with water forms gluten, and more stirring means tougher results. Finally, if you live in a humid climate and your flour becomes clumpy, fluffing the flour won't de-clump it nearly as well as a flour sifter can.