Not All Flour is the Same
Written By: David Boehm | Technical MANAGER
Many people find themselves confined at home now, balancing taking care of their kids and a new found “work from home” lifestyle. This can be a great opportunity to spend time with kids and engage them in kitchen. Someone I know posted a failed attempt at baking bread this past week, thinking they are just not good at baking. Turns out, they were simply not using the right type of flour! Yes - not all flour is the same.
There are multiple types of flour, but with the recent shortage of products in the grocery aisle, you may have found yourself buying what was available thinking there was no difference. Let me explain;
Wheat flour can come from 4 predominant classes of wheat, namely hard red spring or hard red winter wheat, and soft red or soft white winter wheat. As you expect, based on grain color, hardness, and if planted in the spring or fall, these differences have a major impact on your end result.
There is a general relationship between grain hardness and percent protein. Protein is needed to add strength to dough and used to hold it together during baking for greater loaf volume and to give breads their “bite”. But you don’t want really hard cakes and cookies, so lower protein flours are used here. Therefore, bread flour is made with hard wheat, usually a higher mix of Hard Red Spring Wheat, and contains 12-14% protein, while the softer pastries and cakes are better with their own flours ranging from 8% protein pastry flour and 9-11% protein cake flour.
What you often find is an “all-purpose flour” that ranges from 8-11%. This is intended to be used for different bakery products in the kitchen, but would not have enough protein to make a good loaf of bread or buns (aka the failed-bread-social-media-post mentioned earlier!). The tricky part is that most labels just tell you the grams of protein per serving, not the percentage of protein, but you get the point. The more grams of protein per serving, the higher the percentage.
So next time you purchase flour, be thinking of how you are going to use it. Now get back in the kitchen and bake something to share with your family and add a little comfort to these stressful times, hopefully you can post it all over social media (make sure to tag us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook!)
Happy Baking!
