- How does a cook know who to trust in an instance like this? Should you apply the standards of one source (say, the L.A. Times) to all the others? In this case, no, you should adhere to the weights called for within each publication’s recipes because not all brands measure flour the same. But therein lies the dilemma.
- King Arthur Flour 120 grams
- Bake From Scratch 125 grams
- Washington Post 126 grams
- The New York Times 128 grams
- Bon Appétit 130 grams
- AllRecipes.com 136 grams
- Cook’s Illustrated 142 grams
- The weight of a cup of flour depends on how it is measured. Depending on the method used (dip-and-sweep or spooning flour directly into the cup) along with the heavy- or light-handedness of the baker, different amounts of air will be incorporated into the flour causing a variance in weight that can ruin a recipe.
- Doreen Greenspan: There are two schools of dry measuring. School one is the spoon-and-sweep method. That's where you use a spoon to take out the flour and put it into the measuring cup. You lightly spoon it into the measuring cup until it's overflowing, and then you sweep it.
Then there's the scoop-and-sweep school. That was Julia's school, and that's the school that I belong to. I have a big bin of flour and I aerate it -- I stir it around with a knife or a whisk before I start measuring. Then I scoop my measuring cup into the flour bin, get it until it's overflowing and then sweep it.
There is a difference. It's not the difference between 3 ounces and 6 ounces, but it can be about a quarter of an ounce difference between spoon-and-sweep and scoop-and-sweep. I always advise people, if they're following a recipe in a cookbook, to read the cookbook. The author will normally tell you how he or she measured the flour when he or she was testing.
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