Sift Happens

Antiquated; rarely retrieved from the back of the kitchen drawer, hidden behind stacks of nested mixing bowls and precariously arranged ceramic plates; even less commonly found in the first place with every passing year. The metal tin can sits alone in the dark, quietly collecting dust instead of churning through those fine particles as it was intended. I would ask what ever happened to sifters, but it’s no mystery to anyone who’s puttered about the stove for a minute of their lives. Once an essential piece of equipment, the simple sifter has fallen clear off the list of staples and straight into the recycling bin along with the empty cardboard boxes and discarded instruction manuals of every electronic purchase of decades past. As time rushes forward, no one wants to slow down long enough to simply sift.

Guilty of the same negligence, I’m not one to point fingers here. Even when a recipe clearly states “flour, sifted,” I’ll breeze right past that specification, pretending that a quick whisk or prodding with a fork with do the trick. Fluffy up the top layer of sediment, breakdown the pesky clumps, get on with the task at hand. No harm, no foul. Cakes still manage to emerge properly risen, pie dough comes out as butter and flaky as ever, and no one is the wiser to my procedural omission. But the point of sifting isn’t to make something adequate, to craft something that passes as edible. Such a low standard shouldn’t be considered a true success. Without sifting, untold heights will never be attained, and more importantly, so many less savory bits end up jumping into the pool, doing their best cannon ball to ruin the whole party.

Have you ever bitten into a luscious, devilishly dark chocolate cake, relished the intensity of flavor and tender crumb, only to discover a powdery mouthful of unincorporated cocoa in the very next forkful? A common pitfall, quite forgivable in most cases, but entirely avoidable. Why can’t we just take an extra minute to pull out that old fashioned sifter and wade through the murky mixture to remove those unwanted interlopers? Like overenthusiastic ideas or overwritten novels, why can’t we edit our actions accordingly to cut down on the messes left in our wake? In that same spirit, where is the mental sifter for our anxieties, our baseless fears, our unfiltered, indiscriminate consumption of all the junk we’re fed? I get indigestion just thinking about all those unchecked contaminants.

Let’s stop pretending like those lumpy, cracked loaves are exactly what we intended to pull out of the oven. They’re fine, perfectly okay, but we should really demand more of our baked goods, and of ourselves. Bring back the sifter, allow extra time to churn through the list of dry ingredients, watch the fine powder fall like snow, soft and fresh, into the batter. Feel the resistance of the creaky springs snapping back as we release our grip, squeeze and release, squeeze and release, showering small flurries downward with each motion. Take a peek inside when the full measure has been dispensed, and with great pleasure, discard the excess. Leave out the bad, the unnecessary, the mischievous interlopers that bring fragile pastries down. Sift once for due diligence, sift twice if you’re feeling particularly reflective. It doesn’t hurt to comb through the full recipe before setting it to bake. What goes in matters just as much as what doesn’t.