Sieve

Sieve, colander, chinois

Fine mesh sieve

Small holes, usually a round bowl on a handle. For straining sauces, sifting flour, dusting sugar, rinsing rice and grains, and rescuing anything lumpy. The one to own.

Colander

Large holes, a standing bowl. For draining pasta and vegetables. It cannot strain and it cannot sift.

Chinois

A conical fine sieve, usually with a stand. Professional kit for the smoothest possible sauces, used with a small ladle to press through.

Drum sieve or tamis

A flat mesh drum for the finest purées and for sieving flour in quantity.

Sifter

A cup with a mechanism. Does one job that a sieve does better and is harder to clean.

What it fixes

• Lumpy gravy or sauce. Pour it through and the lumps stay behind. Thirty seconds and the dish is saved.
• Lumpy matcha, cocoa, icing sugar or custard. Same principle.
• A soup that is not quite smooth. Blending gets you most of the way; sieving is what makes it velvety.
• Grainy scrambled eggs or a marginal custard — press it through.
• Rinsing rice, which is what stops it sticking.
• Draining and refreshing blanched vegetables, faster than a slotted spoon.
• Dusting flour or sugar evenly over a surface or a cake.

Sifting in baking

Sifting flour does two things. It breaks up compacted lumps, which matters because a lump of dry flour in a batter does not disperse. And it aerates, adding air and making the flour lighter and easier to fold in without over-mixing.

For most bread and rustic baking it makes no useful difference. For delicate cakes, and especially for anything where you fold flour into a foam — a genoise, a soufflé, macarons — it is genuinely worth doing, because the folding is where the air gets knocked out and sifted flour needs less of it.

Sifting dry ingredients together — flour, cocoa, baking powder, salt — also distributes the small quantities evenly, which is the more practical argument. A teaspoon of bicarbonate unevenly distributed gives you a cake with bitter patches.

Choosing and caring for one

• Get a fine mesh one — the coarse ones are colanders in a different shape.
• A hook opposite the handle so it can rest across a bowl or pan is more useful than it sounds.
• Stainless steel, and check the mesh is well attached to the rim; that join is where cheap sieves fail.
• Two sizes — a small one for dusting and spices, a larger one for straining and sifting.
• Clean it immediately, from the outside in, with a brush. Dried batter in a mesh is very hard to remove.
• Do not use it as a colander for hot pasta. The mesh distorts under weight and heat.

Jobs beyond sifting flour

• Straining stock and sauces to a clean finish. A fine sieve is the difference between a homemade sauce and a smooth one.
• Pressing a soup or purée through for a genuinely silky texture, after blending. This is what most restaurant purées have had done to them.
• Rescuing lumpy gravy, custard or béchamel. Push it through and nobody knows.
• Draining and rinsing small things a colander would lose — quinoa, lentils, capers, rice.
• Dusting icing sugar or cocoa evenly over a finished cake.
• Straining loose infusions, and lining it with muslin to strain yoghurt into something thicker.

Common questions