[eutropia]

Yes but the packing density of flour varies cup to cup, within the same measuring cup, resulting in different amounts of flour.

> J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, the managing editor of the blog Serious Eats, once asked 10 people to measure a cup of all-purpose flour into a bowl. When the cooks were done, Mr. Lopez-Alt weighed each bowl. “Depending on how strong you are or your scooping method, I found that a 'cup of flour’ could be anywhere from 4 to 6 ounces,” he said. That’s a significant difference: one cook might be making a cake with one-and-a-half times as much flour as another.

So you have to carefully scoop precisely the same way every time to even be close to accurate??

[Swizec]

> So you have to carefully scoop precisely the same way every time to even be close to accurate??

Technically you’re supposed to sift your flour before measuring. This removes clumps and also helps you get consistent packing. I think in ye olden days it also got rid of any leftover wheat husks that made it through.

My point wasn’t that you get the same amount of flour every time. You get the same ratio of ingredients today.

Ime people way overthink home baking. If you’re not trying to make 500 perfectly identical units, you really don’t have to sweat the measurements so much. Make the dough or batter then adjust until it feels right. Having good pictures (or experience) for different stages of a recipe is way more important than detailed measurements.

[D-Machine]

Sifting, IMO from experience, does not solve the mass-to-volume ratio problem enough compared to just going by mass.

As a quick sanity test, if it did, serious baking resources would just always specify to use sifted flour (as this is easier and requires less equipment than a scale), but since they don't (e.g. Modernist Bread/Pizza, if you really demand a citation), you can infer that sifting is not effective in making reproducible results. Also, note e.g. chemistry is not done using sifted volumes (peruse quickly the amount of articles trying to assess the bulk vs "tapped density" of various powders: https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22ta...). This should cause some skepticism about claims that sifting your flour is going to make baking results particularly consistent.

Sifting definitely helps remove variance (especially if you always buy the same flour and use the same sifting method into the same bowl, and then put un-needed sifted powder back into the jar), but IMO is far inferior to just weighing.

You're still right everyone overthinks home baking. Precision only matters if you are aiming for perfection, and even a horribly misspecified recipe made at home, but consumed fresh, is still generally going to be good, and definitely better than anything you buy at a supermarket. (And this is precisely why using a slide rule for precision is massively missing the point). As you said, there are many indicators that are more important to pay attention to.

[throw0101c]

> My point wasn’t that you get the same amount of flour every time. You get the same ratio of ingredients today.

And hope that if you share your recipe, or get one from someone else, that everyone is using the same tool.

[t-3]

You'll know if you need to add more flour when it comes time to knead. There's no such thing as accuracy in cooking, and especially not baking.

[D-Machine]

Baking--along with fermentation, curing, and certain brines or other solutions--is the subset of cooking where accuracy of the masses of ingredients matters more than most others.

And yet still you are right you must often adjust significantly in baking for other factors (temperature + yeast activity, humidity, flour grind and composition, and general feel on kneading).