Next time I make pizza I’m going to sift together the dry ingredients. This will help the ingredients get fully moistened and should result in a fluffier crust. Also, sifting will prevent chunks of a dry ingredient from happening – like biting into the crust and finding a pocket of flour. If you do not have a sifter you can use a wire whisk to “sift” the flour.
Sifted flour weighs 4 oz to a cup while settled flour weighs about 5 oz – that is a 20% difference in volume!. Settling occurs during shipping to the store. Sifting aerates the flour back to its wanted state. When measuring flour it should always be done by weight, not by volume.
Doug
Tags: baking, sifting flour
Great tip. I kind of knew about sifting but not why and never considered measuring flour by weight.
As to the settling, I can just picture a forklift unloading pallets of flour, with the flour getting packed like cement, no wonder there’s a 20% difference. I wonder if the pressure on the flour (when its on the bottom of a pallet) creates a change in the core temperature of the flour and possibly pre-cooks it a little bit. . . .
Another thing is that flour absorbs moisture from the air – on humid days flour contains more water…another reason to weigh it.