Why does flour have to be sifted

Each product we feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team. If you make a purchase using the links included, we may earn commission. Save FB Tweet More. All rights reserved. Close Sign in. Woman sifting powdered sugar over waffles. Credit: Courtesy of Macy's. Comments Add Comment. Back to story Comment on this project. Tell us what you think Thanks for adding your feedback. All rights reserved.

Close Sign in. Old-school models can be fun, whether they're of the hand-crank or spring-loaded variety. A sieve, or fine-mesh strainer , can do the job just as well though—even if they may require a bit more patience on your part.

View Story. Classic Yellow Cake with Chocolate Frosting. Kitchen Mysteries is a weekly exploration of oddities surrounding cooking and food. Well, two major things are supposed to happen, but only one really does.

The first thing is that all of the flour gets spaced out and away from each other, so it takes up a lot more volume than it used to. That definitely happens with sifting.

So: gluten formation. This is not the first time that regular readers will have noticed me writing about gluten, because it is vital to most baked goods. Gluten is the web of molecules that form when glutenin and gliadin, proteins found in wheat flour, mix with water. They lend structure to all manner of doughs, sauces, and similarly thickened materials. With cake, you want enough gluten to provide structure so that the cake rises, but not enough structure to impede chewing at all.

A sifter spreads out flour admirably. If you put flour through a sifter, you can virtually see in-between every particle of flour as it falls out of the sifter.

You want to mix the dry ingredients well because the the dry ingredients will generally be structural, provide flavor, or provide lift. If you have clumps of undistributed flavor or leavener hidden in caches around your cake, then someone will have an unhappy surprise when they bite into it. With a sifter, you have a mechanism on one end that spreads out the powder as it drops it. When you add ingredients, you tend to do a scoop here and a scoop there, so having something at one end spreading out nearby powders will only mix ingredients that are already pretty well blended.

Particles spread out, different powders mix together, and you get a nice cake without fussing with a big piece of equipment like the sifter.