Most old-fashioned recipes call for sifting flour and other dry ingredients during baking, but many modern recipes skip this step. Do you really need to sift flour? Occasionally – but for the most part, not anymore.
What is sifting?
or strainer is a tool that stirs and pushes dry ingredients such as flour, cocoa powder, or confectioners' sugar through a mesh sieve, eliminating any clumps or lumps. The same effect can be achieved by pressing the compound through a fine mesh strainer.
Sifting flour was an essential first step for home cooks, as flours ground in small mills varied widely in quality and texture and sometimes included extraneous chaff, seeds or even insects. today commercially ground flour, however, are very finely milled, refined and well controlled (no defects here!). In other words, you don't need to sift them to guarantee successful baking.
Photography by Mark Weinberg; food styling by Liz Neily
The benefits of sifting flour
While sifting flour isn't as necessary today, there are a few situations where sifting can improve your baking:
- Along with eliminating lumps, the sieve also aerates the flour, making it easy to mix. If you store the flour in its bag and/or it has been sitting in the pantry for more than a month, it may be compacted and dense. Giving it a quick sift will get the air back into the flour.
- For baked products where the goal is a light structure, such as Angel food cake OR Genoese, sifting your flour before mixing it in will result in an incredibly light, fluffy and airy crumb. Sifted flour is easier to incorporate into whipped egg whites or other mixtures where you don't want to remove too much air, requiring less mixing and therefore forming less gluten. It also prevents the flour from clumping in the dough.
- Accurate flour measurement is essential to success. When recipes call for flour, they generally call for aerated flour, not pressed. If you're measuring by volume, a cup of densely packed flour will yield much more than aerated flour, which can throw off the balance of dry and wet ingredients in your dough or batter. This is why we recommend a “Rest, spray and scrape” technique when measuring flour by volume; Sieve before measuring is another way to ensure the same result. (Though, of course, the most accurate way to measure each ingredient while baking is with a kitchen scale!)
Food photography and styling by Liz Neily
How to sift flour without a sieve
If you don't have a strainer or strainer, you can approximate the sifting using a whisk. Add your flour to a large bowl or other container, then use a balloon whisk to mix well until light and fluffy. This will achieve the same goals of breaking up any lumps and aerating the flour, although the results will not be as good as with a sifter or fine mesh sieve.
or Scoop & Sift Sifter it's handy for any sifting in your next bake, like if you're making this Lemon Chiffon Cake.
