You’ve got a counter full of ingredients when you’re baking your favorite cake or bread and you’re eyeing that bag of flour. How important is it really to sift it or can you skip that time-consuming step?
It really depends on the recipe.
Sifting flour is usually a good idea, says Penny Stankiewicz, chef-instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education. “It lightens the flour and aerates it, making it easier to mix into any emulsion. It also can remove any debris or lumps that might be in the flour, which may leave your baked goods with an unrefined texture,” she says. “No one wants to eat that lump of flour that gets encased in eggs and butter, and never breaks down into the emulsion.”
How to Measure Sifted Flour
Sifting flour adds air, which gives the flour more volume. That’s why it’s important to follow the directions when measuring.
First off, you should be using a scale to measure your ingredients, says Stankiewicz. But often a recipe is written not by weight but with cups and teaspoons. If it tells you to sift and then measure, you won’t have the right amount if you don’t follow the instructions.
“When sifted, the flour is lighter and spooning sifted flour into a measuring cup will take up more volume, and weigh less than scooping it from the container without sifting,” she says. “So if the instructions tell you to measure ‘sifted flour,’ it may be a smaller amount of flour than if you just scooped unsifted flour into a cup.”
When Sifting Matters
Some cakes absolutely require sifting, says Stankiewicz. For example, cakes that use a lot of whipped egg foam—like angel food—require a lighter flour that needs to be gently folded into the batter.
“For these kinds of cakes, I like to sift the flour directly on top of the egg foam, in small batches,” she says. “This disperses it all over the top of the batter, making it easier to fold in, with less strokes.”
Stankiewicz also says it’s a good idea to sift whenever you use cake flour as an ingredient in a recipe. That’s because cake flour has a finer texture, which makes it more likely to form lumps.
Cocoa powder is also more likely to lump. If you have a recipe that calls for cocoa powder and flour, sift them together, along with any other dry ingredients so they combine more easily in the final mix.
Stankiewicz says she usually sifts flour directly into and on top of the batter. If she’s not doing that, she sifts with a sieve over a large piece of parchment paper so she can pick it up and gently add it to her recipe.
When Sifting Isn’t Critical
Sifting flour was suggested as far back as 1896, says James Cooper, author of Food Myths Debunked: Why Our Food Is Safe. That’s when culinary expert Fanny Merritt Farmer suggested sifting flour in her Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. This was the first cookbook to use standardized measurements.
“Flour in 1896 was probably much lumpier than today, and she said to sift all ingredients before measuring them,” writes Cooper. “Nowadays, flour isn’t usually very lumpy and we usually use it right out of the bag.”
Today, sifting flour isn’t all that important in some recipes like bread, muffins, and some butter-based cakes.“Even then, I do mix all dry ingredients together, and then whisk them by hand,” Stankiewicz says. “This also slightly aerates the flour, breaks up small lumps, but it also combines and disperses all the dry ingredients, so you don’t end up with lumps of baking powder in any one place.”
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