MickinMD ★ Posted March 8, 2022 Share #1 Posted March 8, 2022 Here's a table of the densities (weight per cup) of various types of flours if you like it. I haven't used cake flour, but all the others have worked great for me making dough with an automatic bread machine's dough cycle. As a chemist who has developed lab and industrial reactor-sized synthetic chemical "recipes," I'm appalled in dough-making recipes when they give volumes instead of weights for the amount of flour, a critical measure. As the note from America's Test Kitchen at the bottom of this message shows, WEIGH your ingredients when possible. I used to make doughs that were a little dry or mushy and needed a little more water or flour when I began making homemade doughs about 20 years ago. I quickly realized that measuring by weight was the way I needed to go to get it right every time. Volume is especially tricky with flour, where a little packing can change the weight per volume and where the standard procedure for getting correct volume is to pour the flour into a measuring cup to a little higher than the top with no packing of the flour, then run a straight-edged spatula across the top to scrape off the excess. Screw that! Why not determine the weight you need of the flour and weigh it in a container with ample volume to easily hold it all? That's MUCH more accurate! But, if you look for weights of various flours per cup on the Internet, you get a ridiculously huge variation. For example, I needed 3 cups of Whole Wheat Flour to make dough for two 13" pizzas. Bob's Red Mill says it's 152 g per cup. I don't think that's right even for Bob's version. Another webpage said 120 g per cup. Some brands clearly don't carefully check their data. For example the store-brand Weis Supermarker Whole Wheat and Bread Flours both say 1/4 cup is 30 g, but Bread Flour is a couple grams heavier per quarter cup! So, back then I looked at many web pages, threw out the outliers like Bob's, and averaged the majority of pages with weights that were close together. I came up with Whole Wheat Flour weighing 128 g (4.50 oz.) per cup. So I weighed out 3 x 4.50 oz. = 13.5 oz. and the dough came out perfect. So here is the chart I keep on my refrigerator Weight per cup Measurements of Flours and Liquids Per Cup: Bread Flour: 135 g, 4.75 oz. Whole Wheat Flour: 128 g, 4.50 oz. All-Purpose Flour: 121 g, 4.25 oz. Rye Flour: 114 g, 4.00 oz. (102 g, 3 5/8 oz?) Cake Flour: 114 g, 4.00 oz. Water: 227 g, 8.00 oz. Milk: 236 g, 8.30 oz. Note: 1 oz. = 28.35 g, 1 lb = 453.6 g. According to http://www.recipesource.com/misc/hints/flour-weights01.html King Arthur says ALL flour types weigh 4 oz (113 grams) per cup. If I used the KA 4 oz., I'd have mud, not dough. And, in the case of a rye loaf, it would be much too dry. And America’s Test Kitchen is right about weighing flour, not measuring by volume, but it’s weight/cup numbers are WAY off: CooksEditor Posted: 4/2/2003 http://www.americastestkitchen.com/ibb/posts.aspx?postID=68 Different types of flour register weight differently. Bread flour, for example, weighs approximately 5.5 ounces / cup. All-purpose flour weighs slightly less at approximately 5 ounces / cup. The type of measuring device you are using, the type of storage device for your flour (i.e., plastic vs. paper, airtight vs. screw-top), or how heavy (or light) handed you are when scooping out flour are all factors that can effect the end weight. We investigated the measuring variances in the January/February issue in Kitchen Notes (Page 30). We concluded that the best way to ensure successful recipes is to use a kitchen scale to weigh ingredients. Best Regards, Cook's Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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