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Sifted vs. packed flour disagrees.
by bch 6y ago
Sifted 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.