On: 2+1=4, by quinoa

[jameshart]

And... then you can weigh out 120g of it, right?

[IncRnd → jameshart]

Your prior point was that you don't need to sift flour but only weigh it. That is false, as sifting flour changes the properties of the final baked product. You now changed that to, in essence, say that weighing tells you the weight of flour. Yes, weighing tells you the weight of what is being weighed.

[jameshart → IncRnd]

My point was that ‘120g of sifted flour’ is a declarative statement. It describes a quantity of an ingredient.

‘Sift one cup of flour’ or ‘measure 1 cup of sifted flour’ are procedural statements. They describe a process to acquire a quantity of an ingredient.

And that, in general, the declarative form is better.

[IncRnd → jameshart]

In this case, the forms of the statement are identical. "One cup of sifted flour" is semantically identical with "sift one cup of flour."

The difference is the method of measurement, whether by volume or by weight. Then, it is important to either understand the rules of recipe specification, especially with baking, or to have the recipe specify as to whether there are implicit steps.