Measure Your Flour Like Ina Garten For The Best Possible Bakes

Baking is a delicate process, which is why it's so important to be exact when crafting a flaky scone or spongy cake. Nobody knows this better than the pros, so when it comes to perfecting the art of baking, kitchen experts like Ina Garten are some of the best people to turn to. Garten has mastered baking over the course of her career and some of her desserts still reign as some of our all-time favorites. To her, one of the most important rules to follow during these processes is getting the measurements for your ingredients just right. 

If you don't start your recipe off right, you'll frankly be doomed from the start, as even a small miscalculation in ingredients can lead to a culinary disaster. So, for the best possible bakes, start your recipe off right by measuring your flour just like Ina Garten. Hint: she does this a little unconventionally.

While most bakers rely on a kitchen scale for the most accurate measurements, Garten swears by a slightly different method. She prefers using good old-fashioned measuring cups to scoop her flour. Still, that's not the end of it. Before she scoops, she aerates her flour by fluffing it first with the measuring cup, then she dips into soft white powder. Next, instead of packing it down, she simply levels off the flour with her finger (if you prefer to keep your hands out of it, you can also use the back of a knife instead).

While some may think this method is a bit odd or inaccurate, not many bakers know better than Garten, who has spent practically her whole life working in a kitchen. As she wrote in "Cook Like a Pro," Gartens says that "Working in a professional kitchen taught me that if you fluff the flour before dipping in your measuring cup and leveling it off the top, you will have exactly the same amount of flour each time."

While some might be used to packing as much flour as possible into their measuring cup, this can easily lead to an excess of the ingredient in your bowl and an overly-dry baked good. To avoid this lackluster final product, find some balance in your recipe by aerating your flour first like Garten does. This is especially important for relatively fragile baked goods like angel food cake or Garten's coffee-infused game-changing chocolate cake. 

For further ease of scooping, Garten likes to keep her flour in big two-gallon jars, which likely means your measuring cup can easily fit through the mouth of the container without having to worry about excess spills. 

As previously mentioned, most bakers prefer to weigh their flour instead of using measuring cups. This is because for most, adding ingredients to the bowl based on weight makes for more accurate measurements. Because of flour's uniquely fluffy composition, it can be hard to measure it exactly compared to other, more compact ingredients like sugar. Using a scale to measure flour easily prevents you from using too much, as you avoid packing a measuring cup too tightly and don't have to spend the time aerating it either. Plus, if you don't have plenty of prior kitchen experience like Garten, or are simply a perfectionist, using a scale may be the better choice.

Still, for those who don't have a kitchen scale or prefer to work more directly with their flour, Garten's method is potentially useful. If you do prefer her special flour measuring method, why not next try out the Champagne of butter that she uses to top her toast?