Weigh it. Cups are lying to you

A cup of flour is not a quantity. It is a range, and the range is wide enough to ruin bread.

Scoop a cup of flour straight from the bag and you will get somewhere near 150 grams. Spoon it in gently and level it off and you will get about 120. That is a quarter of the flour in the recipe, gone or added, depending on how you happened to hold the cup.

For a stew it does not matter. For anything where flour and liquid have to balance each other, it is the whole game. Bread that will not come together, pastry that cracks, a cake that comes out tight and dry: most of the time nothing went wrong in the oven at all. The mixture was wrong before it went in.

A digital scale costs less than two takeaways and removes the problem completely. You put the bowl on, press tare, and add flour until the number says what the recipe says. No packing, no levelling, no judgement.

It is also faster and it dirties less. Tare between each ingredient and a whole batch of dough happens in one bowl with one measurement, instead of a sink full of cups and spoons.

Where a recipe here gives both, the weight is the one that was tested. The cups are a translation, and something is always lost in translation.

Photograph: Daderot — CC0, via Wikimedia Commons