Tuesday Tips-Weigh Your Flour

This is the first of a series of Tuesday's Tip of the Week.  Today's tip is weigh your flour.  When baking, getting the right amount of flour in a recipe can be tricky.  Usually, you add the minimum amount of flour a recipe calls for and then add more, a little at a time, in order to get the right texture. 

Remember in Home Ec in school, your teacher would have you sift the flour before adding it to the recipe.   For me, it was way more effort that it was worth because I thought it was a texture thing.  Turns out that it is a volume thing. The more packed a cup of flour, the more flour you get per cup.  So, when using volume to measure, you can get widely varying amounts of flour in a recipe.  Sifting the flour first gives you a more consistent volume of measure.  However, I think there is yet a better and easier way.

A few years ago, we purchased a kitchen scale, and I started weighing our flour.  Turns out that weight is a far more consistent way to measure flour.  The conversion factor for flour should be:

1 cup flour = 4.92 ounces

Not all recipes are created equal, and you may have to play around a bit with the recipe to get the correct weight of flour, but the conversion factor is a great place to start.  Once I figure out the correct weight of the flour for a recipe, it takes out all the guess work.  I just add the correct weight of flour and the recipe turns out every time.  I don't need to tweak anything.  It is definitely a time saver, and my recipes turn out more consistently each time.