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It doesn't matter, since the material is singular and specified. A cup of flour (typical in the US) or 120g flour (everywhere else) is the same amount of flour.
by robotresearcher 6y ago
It doesn't matter, since the material is singular and specified. A cup of flour (typical in the US) or 120g flour (everywhere else) is the same amount of flour.
edit: It's the case that in the US recipes are commonly specified by volume, with default packing conditions assumed or specified. Here's the top hit for 'cake recipe' on Google for me, where every ingredient but eggs is specified in volume:
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/17481/simple-white-cake/ https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/17481/simple-white-cake/
edit 2: There are multiple assumptions baked into conventional references. A cup of flour does not mean a cup of sifted flour unless it says so. Similarly, 120g of flour means under one Earth gravity at sea level and not on the surface of a neutron star unless it says so.
- bch 6y agoSifted vs. packed flour disagrees.
- robotresearcher 6y agoAgreed, so recipes call for a cup of sifted flour or to sift a cup of (unsifted) flour, i.e. specifying the approximate packing property.
- jameshart 6y agoOr you could just weigh out 120g?
- robotresearcher 6y agoYou could. Many or most places do that. But US recipes typically don't, and work out fine. So I guess volumetric measurements that assume default packing conditions often work out OK in practice, though @lostlogin above reports a corner case that doesn't work.
- IncRnd 6y agoMost people don't sift out the chaff or rocks today, but sifting performs important functions of making flour lighter for certain "light & airy" recipes that cannot be properly performed only by weighing.
- jameshart 6y agoAnd... then you can weigh out 120g of it, right?
- IncRnd 6y agoYour prior point was that you don't need to sift flour but only weigh it. That is false, as sifting flour changes the properties of the final baked product. You now changed that to, in essence, say that weighing tells you the weight of flour. Yes, weighing tells you the weight of what is being weighed.
- jameshart 6y agoMy point was that ‘120g of sifted flour’ is a declarative statement. It describes a quantity of an ingredient. ‘Sift one cup of flour’ or ‘measure 1 cup of sifted flour’ are procedural statements. They describe a process to acquire a quantity of an ingredient. And that, in general, the declarative form is better.
- IncRnd 6y agoIn this case, the forms of the statement are identical. "One cup of sifted flour" is semantically identical with "sift one cup of flour." The difference is the method of measurement, whether by volume or by weight. Then, it is important to either understand the rules of recipe specification, especially with baking, or to have the recipe specify as to whether there are implicit steps.
- jimktrains2 6y agoDepends on how well sifted or otherwise packed the flour is and how precisely the cup was filled.
- robotresearcher 6y agoAnd yet recipes are usually specified in volume in the US. This means packing properties are assumed to be in some default range so that can be neglected: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/17481/simple-white-cake/ https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/17481/simple-white-cake/
- jimktrains2 6y agoI use volumetric measures for dry goods all the time. I'm not saying it doesn't work, I'm just saying that it's not as precise as a weight would be. Whether or not that matters is a different story. I would say "not really".
- lostlogin 6y agoI bake with whole meal, high grade, tipo 00, zentrofan flour and straight gluten flour. If I do it by volume it gets all messed up. Zentrofan and gluten are very fine and seem to pack down much tighter.
- jedberg 6y agoIf I scooped 8 cups of flour I'll bet I would get 8 different weights. They'd probably all be within some margin of error, but not all the same.
- _ph_ 6y agoI need surprisingly different sized containers to store the same weight of wheat and rye flour. That shows how off volumetric measurement is.