On 2020-04-07 11:22 a.m., graham wrote:

> The other day I made a couple of kg of bread dough from a newly opened
> bag of flour.
> I used a 250ml measuring cup as a handy scoop to put the flour into a
> bowl on the scale and was astounded when it weighed 175g. A lot of US
> recipes use a 4oz/114g equivalence for a US 236ml cup but as many
> devotees of weighing will attest, it all depends on how you fill the cup.
> That 175g measure equates to 168g for a 236ml US cup.
> I then used a whisk to stir up the flour in the bag and spooned the
> flour to fill the cup. That weighed 134g (126g US).
> No wonder my elderly neighbour complained that she couldn't make decent
> pastry as she used volume measure.


I usually make pretty good pastry. I always measure the ingredients
going into the mixing bowl by volume. What doesn't get measured is the
flour I throw on the pastry cloth, the roller and on top of the bowl of
dough that is getting rolled. I don't think bread makers measure their
bench flour either. That's why I wonder why the concern about the exact
weight of flour that goes into the batch when there is the variable
amount used later.