Beth: Weights & Measures

There is a reason that, though injured, I wanted to write this article. You see, here at A Year in Bread HQ, we have weighty discussions and a fundamental disagreement that seems destined to remain eternally unresolved. Fortunately for our friendship, we each know that we alone are correct and we are happy to let the other two believe what they want to believe. So we continue to be good friends even across this divide.

Fortunately for you, however, I get to give you my side of the argument first and with any luck, educate you on something that has been weighing heavily on my mind lately before Susan and Kevin arrive to tell you what they believe (which is wrong, remember, but we can humor them — they are so much easier to live with when they think they are right).

What is the great argument here? Only the one true weigh, I mean way to bread happiness!

The question is: How much does a cup of flour weigh? The answers:

· Beth 4.5 ounces (126gr)
· Kevin 5.2 ounces (145gr)
· Susan 5 ounces (140gr)

How is it possible that three experienced, passionate, and sometimes downright geeky bakers can fail to agree on such a basic number? More importantly, what does that mean for people who just want to reliably make good bread?

Sadly, I have no simple answers. The weight of a cup of flour depends on many variables: the exact type of flour, whether it is sifted (and when), how the flour gets from container to measuring cup (scooped or spooned), and (my favorite) the weather.

What I can offer you is a collection of our thoughts on how we deal with the inexactness of measuring flour in real life (and a few related matters) with the hope that you will find your own answer for how much your cup of flour weighs.

Kevin
"A pint is a pound the whole world 'round." This refers to the fact that a pint of water (or beer) weighs one pound. This means that one ounce of liquid also weighs one ounce and it's the only case where converting from weight to volume or vice versus is painless.

Did you know that a level tablespoon of table salt weighs more than a level tablespoon of kosher salt, and that a tablespoon of sea salt has yet another weight? These issues matter tremendously when working at commercial quantities and when scaling from a relatively small amount of something to a much bigger amount. That's why professional cooks (and bakers) prefer to use weight to measure things.

I prefer to use volume measurements when baking bread — cups, quarts, tablespoons, and so on. The reason for this preference is convenience and accuracy. I have a decent kitchen scale, but its accuracy is imprecise when measuring units below 1 ounce. So although my scale tells me that a tablespoon of yeast weighs 3/8 of an ounce it might actually weigh 5/16ths. However, a tablespoon is always a tablespoon and is always 15 milliliters. At the quantities a home baker works at that's close enough -- even when measuring salt.

The hardest measure, and least precise, is flour. Flour is hydrophilic — it absorbs water. In a precise formula where water is a key element, such as bread, it isn't simply the weight of the flour that matters, it's the weight of the flour in relation to water that is critical. If the flour contains more water you should add less and if it contains less water you should add more.

Creepy Crawlies
Nearly any flour or grain (oats, etc.) will have some kind of insect eggs in it. Even if you can't store your flours in the freezer, just putting them in there for 24 hours will kill any future creepy crawlies.

As a home baker this is getting far too complicated. What matters is the proportion of water to flour, and you can learn to feel and taste and smell that. And once you learn to do so, then the precise measurements become less important. Feel your dough, taste it, and smell it at every step.

Susan
Although I love my scale, which is great for weighing out dough when shaping loaves and rolls, when I make bread I usually use cups & measuring spoons because the amount of flour is almost never the same, so I don't need the precision of weights. What I do is always use the same amount of water and yeast, then add more or less flour to make the dough feel right.

That said, I've been converting all my recipes to weight, because when I start baking on a large scale for the wholesale bread bakery we're slowly building here on the farm, I will have to weigh all of my ingredients.

I tend to make the same recipes over and over so I can get a good feel for what "right" is. I've been using the same brand of flour for over 10 years so I'm familiar with it.

I buy 50-pound bags of Heartland Mill Organic Unbleached All-Purpose Flour and Heartland Mill Organic Strong Bread Flour (High Gluten). During the summer, if I have room I store the flour in a chest freezer; in the winter our pantry literally turns into a walk-in refrigerator so everything is fine in there.

I buy organic whole grain flours (white whole wheat, whole wheat, rye, etc.) in smaller amounts because they go rancid faster. These are best kept in the freezer if possible to keep them fresher.

I store my flour in the original 50-pound bags which I store in large plastic tubs. I fill 2-gallon size commercial plastic tubs with all-purpose and bread flour from the big bags. I just scoop the flour into the tubs with a 2-cup s/s measure. When I'm baking, I take a s/s measuring cup and scoop up enough flour so that the cup overfills in one scoop. Then I scrape off the extra flour with the lid of the tub.

Beth
For the longest time I only measured things by volume, using my long practiced kitchenMage sense (sort of like Spidey sense but without the precipitating radiation) to tweak doughs that looked a bit off somehow. One day, after measuring 7 cups of flour for my usual batch of baguettes again, I decided to give in and spend the 50 bucks for a shiny metal box that would magically tell me the correct amount of flour each and every time.

As they say in Minnesota, "Ya sure, you betcha."

I am not saying I stopped weighing things, actually I use the scale all the time. Weighing ingredients, especially flour, is convenient and, once you figure out the correct amounts for a recipe once, reasonably reliable. But you need to figure out what the person who wrote each recipe meant when they said "1 cup" because, as you can see with the three of us, it's probably not what you mean when you say 1 cup.

When I have to measure flour by volume, I shake the plastic container that I store it in, scoop a measuring cup full and level it with the lid — pretty much like Susan. But I seldom measure that way. I usually weigh flour, figuring 4.5 ounces per cup) and leave out about a cup when I am mixing the dough. That flour, and more if needed, gets added once the dough has been mixed a bit and I have a feel for what it needs. The actual amount of flour I use (by weight) gets written in the margin of the cookbook so that after I have made a recipe a few times I know how much flour I need to use.

Usually after I have done this with a few recipes in a given book, I can generalize the weight to the rest of the book. When I can't, it makes me wonder what sort of committee wrote the cookbook — I can deal with high variance from one person to the next but not from one recipe to another in the same darned book!

What does this all mean for you? Well, a couple of things.

First, if you bake something and it doesn't come out quite right — heck, even if it is a total failure — don't blame yourself. Measuring a cup of flour is dirt simple stuff, yet the experts can't even agree amongst themselves. Even beyond that, all books have typos, the rigor of recipe testing varies from book to book, and, as anyone who made meringue on a rainy day will tell you, even environmental factors matter.

More importantly, you need to find your own path through this uncertainty. Susan's approach is a solid one: a cup of water weighs the same amount almost everywhere (I just know someone from Denver will be here to say it's different there). My approach of determining what a given author means in their cookbook will help you a lot as you bake using a variety of recipes. That last bit of advice from Kevin is perhaps the most useful: feel your dough. Once you know what a stiff dough feels like compared to a soft one, you will gain confidence in your baking that goes far beyond certainty as to the weight of a cup of flour.

But I am still right: a cup of flour weighs 4.5 ounces and don't let those heretics tell you otherwise.

Further reading: Weighting to measure

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