Wednesday, March 12, 2008
flour 101: accurate measurements
I hope you’re sitting down for this. Depending on how you measure a cup of flour, you might end up with as little as 4 oz and as much as 7 oz, a terrifying thought when using a recipe that demands accuracy. The generally accepted measuring method–and the one you should use for the funny reason that it is the one that the person who wrote your recipe used–is to lightly fluff a canister of flour with a spoon, then scoop the flour into your cup until it is over the top and level it with something flat, trying your very best not to compress it in any way. The most accurate way to measure flour, however, is to weigh it, so if you have a recipe that includes a weight, consider it a plus.
Weighing my flour has been a real life saver. No matter how hard I try, I just don’t have it in me to scoop and sweep, so I ALWAYS over-measure unless I weigh it out.
In that spirit, can we hope to see more SK recipes with flour weights? :)
I know Alton Brown always professes the need for measuring flour by weight. So how much should a cup of flour weigh? I suppose if one is going for consistency, going with weighted measurments would be much more accurate from batch to batch. Someday someone can give me a digital scale for Christmas or my birthday, and then watch out! ; )
I think my last comment might be in moderation, but just in case it got lost - being from the UK, I panic if I can’t weigh out my ingredients, so for baking I always convert cup measurements to grams and weigh everything out, using a conversion chart like this one.