I Own Four Clean Sieves and I Still Won’t Sift

I know how this sounds. I own four sieves. All four of them are clean. I have not sifted a cup of flour in longer than I care to calculate.

It isn’t neglect, exactly. There’s a version of me who has this handled beautifully. She washes a sieve on a Sunday, days before she needs it. She lets it air dry all the way through. She inspects the mesh. Then she wraps it in cling film, snug as a gift, so nothing in that cabinet can get near it. She has done this four separate times, because she is thorough. (One from Target, one from Crate & Barrel, two that arrived from Amazon during a period I’d rather not discuss.)

I love her. I have been her. But then I bake something, use one, leave it on the drying rack, and three weeks later I go looking mid-recipe and find it sitting out in the open having a lovely dusty time. Which means washing it. Which means stopping everything. Which means I don’t sift.

Here is what that costs me. Every so often I hand the cake knife to Dear Mother and watch her lower it into a loaf cake I spent all afternoon on, and I am not thinking about the crumb. I am not thinking about the frosting. I am praying that slice comes out clean and not studded with a little white pocket of unmixed flour. Not for my sake. For hers. There is no recovering from watching your mother chew thoughtfully.

Now, in my defense (and it is a real defense), I bake almost exclusively with King Arthur’s gluten-free flour, which comes finely milled and behaves itself. I trust that flour. I have earned the right to trust that flour.

But trust does nothing for powdered sugar. Have you ever tried to whisk a lump out of a finished buttercream? Yeah. Doesn’t go. You cannot talk your way into a glossy cream cheese frosting. The sugar is smooth or it isn’t, and mine isn’t, because my sieve is somewhere collecting dust and I am somewhere pretending not to know that.

Photo by Brimly.

Gluten-Free Vanilla Loaf Cake

See the recipe.

There are solutions, obviously. There are those little one-handed sifter cups you squeeze, which go in a Ziploc, live in a drawer, stay clean, and eliminate every single step I am currently failing at. I have looked at them roughly one hundred times. There is also, I have learned, a KitchenAid attachment that sifts flour into the bowl while the mixer runs, which is less a gadget than a personality transplant.

I have purchased neither. I’m telling you so that one of us is keeping track.

Now. The rule I would not break for money.

I crack my eggs into a separate clear bowl. Always, every time, no exceptions, including when I’m just frying one for myself at 11 p.m.

I picked this up years ago from one of those Epicurious “4 Levels” episodes. Cake, maybe? Ice cream? I honestly couldn’t tell you, and there are a lot of those episodes. But I remember exactly what happened: the home cook cracked straight into the mixing bowl the way most of us do, and the professional, at the other end of the counter, cracked into a little dish first and checked it. That was the whole difference. A dish and four seconds.

I’ve been unable to unsee it since. Every time I watch someone tap an egg on the rim of the batter bowl I feel something in my chest go tight. One bad tap and there’s shell in the cake. Shell in the casserole. Shell in a thing you are about to hand to another human being.

I should mention that I don’t even like eggs. I bake with them because I’ve already cut gluten, soy, and gums out of my life, and a woman has to stop somewhere. Eggs bind. Eggs stabilize. Eggs stay.

But I handle them like someone who has been personally wronged, because I have been. Years ago I bit into a piece of shell in a fried egg, and the sound arrived in my skull before the taste did.

Never recovered. Not once, not a little.

So the eggs go into a clear bowl and I lift that bowl up toward whatever light is nearest and look at it from underneath, because shell sinks and the bottom is where it hides. Four seconds. Maybe five. Word to the wise: if you don’t own a small clear bowl, a clear measuring cup does it just as well, and it’s worth keeping one around for this alone.

Is it sanitary? Sure. But mostly it’s manners. Nobody should ever have to tell you they found shell in your baking.

To everyone already cracking into a second bowl: may your cakes rise level, may your frosting never split, may you never once bite down on a shell.

Photo by Brimly.

Brimly’s Gluten-Free Good Bread

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And then there’s the rule I ignored for years and am, slowly, coming around to.

I was a measuring cup woman. Deeply. I’d hear Edd Kimber talk on Bake Club about weighing everything and think, that is an enormous amount of ceremony for something I can do with a scoop. I keep a half-cup measure living inside my flour container, right beside the leveler, so I can dip and sweep without breaking stride. Efficient. I like efficient.

But when I weigh, my bread is the same loaf every time. My pizza is the same pizza every time. When I scoop, things drift, and I get that thing where something’s in the oven and I’m not totally sure what’s about to come out of it. I hate that thing. Precision is one of the few qualities I’m genuinely drawn to, and I’d been working against it for no reason except habit.

Photo by Brimly.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Orange Spoon Cake

See the recipe.

The part that actually got me, though, had nothing to do with my kitchen. It was realizing I have no idea what’s happening in anyone else’s. When someone tells me a recipe came out dry, I can’t know if they packed the cup, or fluffed the flour first, or dipped straight into the bag the way I do. Which recipe did they even make? Not mine, necessarily.

There is no way to close that gap with cups. There is every way to close it with grams. A weight is a weight in my kitchen and in yours, and that is more or less the entire point of writing a recipe down in the first place.

So I’m migrating. Not all at once, but Brimly is headed toward grams, because I’d rather hand you something that works in your kitchen than something that only works in mine.

The sieves, though. Still wrapped. Still unused. One thing at a time.