On May 1, 2012, at 5:08 PM, Alexander Schreiber wrote:
It can get
pretty confusing. Some measurements are volumentric (e.g.
a cup of flour) where the other party uses measurement by mass (e.g.
grams). How much does a cup of flour weigh? (Sifted, unsifted,
whole wheat, rice flour....?).
Yeah, I never understood why one would want to measure, of all things,
flour by _volume_. You can do that with water for the obvious reason,
but the density of flour can vary quite a bit (see above).
The simple answer is because it's cheaper to have a volume measurement
than a weight measurement. Lots of cooks over here don't have food
scales (setting aside the fact that most people can't cook here unless
it can be dumped out of a can or a box and microwaved).
Obviously, this leads to wild variation in consistency. One solution
is to specify sifted flour, which a lot of old recipes did, because
that gets you a lot closer to a similar mass. People stopped sifting
much here a long time ago because they thought it was primarily to
get rid of leftover chaff in the flour (which we don't have anymore),
but it got rid of the ancillary benefits, too. Either way, it's not
specified in cookbooks anymore, but when my wife or I cook from Euro
recipes, we break out the food scale.
- Dave