The Ingenious Whisk Hack That Makes Transferring Flour A Breeze
Open a bag of flour and poof! The clouds seem inevitable as the fine powder bursts up and out, coating the package and all its surroundings. Transfer more than a tiny amount of ground grain between bowls or appliances to really feel the struggle that some happily welcome. It's a wisp of wild in a predictable world. It's a romantic, whimsical defiance to order. It's pure playtime, and letting the kids help in making cakes and pastries is a rite of passage for them too. Leisure baking can stand a little mess and play.
For others, however, messy kitchens are an unwelcome stop on the road to a finished product. Professionals could see flour dust as a menace. The pizza chef makes dough many times a day, after all. For bakers and high-volume cooks, at least a dozen studies published by the National Library of Medicine show that flour exposure can create a health hazard. We're talking about lung function issues, coughing, sneezing, and even occupational asthma.
Whether or not you're into spillage (and clean-up), an emerging kitchen hack might be just the fix. This hack claims to safely and effectively transport flour between vessels. Neatness guarantee? Maybe. Airborne particles be gone! This trick requires a kitchen tool you likely already have.
Julia Child's favorite tools keep on giving
We're not sure Julia Child knew about this hack, but she did popularize the requisite tool in the early 1960s. She made an omelet for the 1962 pilot episode of her own "The French Chef," and then beat egg whites into soft peaks on a 1963 television episode of "I've Been Reading" with it. The small but mighty kitchen whisk was less popular in America until that point when hand-cranked mixers might be used.
Though the history of the whisk goes back at least as far as the times when people would bundle branches of twigs — sometimes peach branches to impart the fruit's flavor – the whisk in question is a modern metal "whip," as Child called it (per Gourmet). And while at least half a dozen whisks exist, one, in particular, is the star of a video from TheKitchn. The video films a baker dipping into a bag of flour and then walking many steps across the floor to dump a whisk full of the stuff into a glass bowl without spilling anything. It's like magic.
The whisk hack all bakers need
Luckily, the whisk used in the viral hack is easy to find. It appears to be the one most people recognize, even if they don't know its exact name: A French whisk. A bundle of steel coils looped into a long, thin handle, the whisk tapers more gently than a balloon whisk, which flares more dramatically into a spherical shape at the end. French whisks are better at reaching into corners than balloon whisks because they're more narrow, which may or may not be helpful as you scoop flour.
You'll need a sack of flour filled up tall versus a flatter dish for this hack because you will dip the whisk straight down into it. Pull the whisk slowly straight up and then do your best flight attendant phrase as you remind yourself to make sure the whisk remains in that same upright position as you move it to the receiving vessel. The type of flour used is not specified, but you can try it with any of at least half a dozen types of flour to see if it works.
We'll give it to you. The amount of flour you can move this way is only a whisk-full at a time. For your industrial kitchens, it might be more of a party trick than a long-term solution. But who are we to say how large a whisk could ever be?