Bread flour Brands have different weights
During the recent Coronavirus times it’s been very hard to buy our favorite brand of flour. So now we are lucky to find any brand of bread flour. I normally use King Arthur flour. I always use a scale when baking. If the recipe is in measuring cups I will convert it to grams. On the side of the King Arthur bread flour bag says 1/4 cup is 30 grams. Bobs red mill bread flour says 1/4 cup is 36 grams. Its a pretty big difference. 120g vs 144g per cup. Do I adjust the amount of flour with the different brands? Thank you for your help with this.
Comments
Hi Mildred - If you are making recipes that call for flour by weight (which we highly recommend!), you can just use the weight called for in the recipe. When we did testing to determine our standard weight for 1 cup of a variety of flours we didn't find a huge difference among bread flour brands. For Milk Street recipes, we consider 1 cup of bread flour equal to 137 grams. But, we always call for weights in our recipes anyway. For recipes that call for a volume measurement it's a little bit trickier since the weight of flour is determined by how it's measured. Some people measure using the dip-and-sweep method, others use the spooning method. These methods and how heavy-handed each person is affects the weight of the flour. To determine our standard weights we had dozens of people measure flour and took an average of those measurements. Since weighing methods and standards vary by recipe author, you can't really transfer the weights from one recipe to another. Hope that helps! Best, Lynn C.
Thank you so much for posting this!!! I’ve been struggling with this question for months but am still wondering what you do when you’re working off a recipe that’s using “free measurements” cups etc. but that you prefer to weigh out? Do you use a whatever the manufacturer says the weight per cup is for that recipe and alter per manufacturer or do you just give yourself a standard weight to always work with? Thank you so much for your time and assistance 😀
Hi Katherine - It's really hard to know the recipe author's intention with respect to weight if they are using volume measurements exclusively. I would take a look at some reputable sources, gauge an average, and go with that. At Milk Street we consider 1 cup of all-purpose flour equal to 130 grams. By contrast, King Arthur considers it to be 120 grams and Bon Appetit uses 125 grams. Cooks Illustrated is quite an outlier at around 142 grams. The average of these would be around 130 grams. Good news, because that's exactly what we say. :-) Try a recipe you are really familiar with that calls for volume measurements using 130 grams of all-purpose flour and compare the texture to what you typically see. You may need to tinker by recipe, especially for very delicate cakes like angel food or genoise, but I would say it shouldn't be too far off. Good luck! Best, Lynn C.
I am interested to read that Milk Street considers 1 cup of flour to be equal to 130 grams. I have always used a cup as 5 ounces, which is 140 grams. This seems like a significant different, especially in recipes with several cups of flour. Since most digital scales make it easy to switch from ounces to grams, will it improve my baking if I switch to measuring by grams?
Hi Linda -
Generally speaking, yes. Grams are a smaller measurement and, therefore, are more precise. Grams are so tiny that there are never fractions (unless you are in a chemistry lab!) to round up or down. Wouldn’t it be easier to read and weigh out "130 grams" on a scale than "4.58562 ounces?" Most home kitchen scales don't even measure finite decimal amounts of ounces - they only go to 10ths - so we are usually rounding up or down when we convert our gram measurements to ounces. Hope that helps!
Best,
The Milk Street Team