For The Most Heavenly Angel Food Cake, Double Up On This Crucial Baking Step

Angel food cake is an awfully lofty name for a dessert, isn't it? Far be it from us to turn our noses up at sweet, crumbly sponge cake, but whoever thought to compare it to divine succor was probably a little too high on their own cakey supply. Still, when you take a bite of an especially light and fluffy angel food cake, the name certainly feels apt. So how do you get your homemade angel food cake as airy as possible? Chef Vivian Villa, founder of the plant-based butter company UnButter, tells us that you're going to want to sift your flour twice.

"The first sift is to remove the lumps, the second is to aerate the flour," Villa explains. "This extra step incorporates air into the cake, allowing the liquids in the recipe to surround the flour particles more evenly, reducing mixing time, which can overdevelop gluten (leading to a heavier cake)." Gluten development may be welcome when you're making bread, but when it comes to a delicate angel cake, you want as little as possible. By sifting your flour twice, you will get a lighter, more airy cake — bonus points if you use bleached cake flour for an even fluffier result.

If sifting your flour twice seems a little too fussy for you, don't worry. After correctly measuring your flour, just giving it one good shake through a fine mesh sieve is enough to make a noticeable difference in the final product. Vivian Villa says, "Sifting is crucial for successful baking since humidity causes clumping in most dry ingredients." By getting rid of those clumps, you not only get a fluffier texture, but you also make it easier to mix. While most commercially available flour is already ground finely enough that sifting isn't necessarily vital, it really can make a difference, especially with a dish like angel food cake.

As for what equipment you should use, Villa prefers a fine mesh sieve: "It has a wider surface area that allows me to place over my mixing bowl to weigh and sift simultaneously." However, if your kitchen is limited, the expert says that "any fine mesh strainer purchased online will work" (as well as fine mesh strainers purchased offline, we presume). This convenience makes sifting flour for your angel food cake a total breeze, bleached or otherwise. And if you have any that survives until the next day, you can always use your leftover cake to make French toast.