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Tip No: 4

Measure flour carefully

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By Joanne Chang

Published 2010

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I stayed up nights thinking about the flour measurements for this book. See Tip No. 3 about weighing all your ingredients, and if you follow my advice there, you can skip this tip and never worry again about whether you are using the correct amount of flour. But if you don’t have a scale, you need to know how the baker who wrote the recipe you are following measured the flour. Here’s why: All of the recipes in this book assume that 1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour weighs 140 grams. I measured flour for this book by first stirring it up, then dipping my measuring cup into the canister, and finally sweeping the top level with the back of a knife. If I don’t aerate the flour first, however, and I just dip and sweep, then 1 cup weighs 155 grams. Or, if I spoon the flour into the cup and level it off, 1 cup weighs 125 grams. The difference between the dip-and-sweep method and the spoon-and-sweep method is 30 grams, which is almost ¼ cup flour. If the recipe you are using calls for 2 cups flour, depending on how you choose to measure, you could end up putting in an extra ½ cup or shorting the recipe by ½ cup. No wonder your cake is dry or your cookie dough is soupy!

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