Instant flours (like Wondra) are very interesting things, low-gluten wheat flours that are extremely handy for thickening sauces (especially gravy before a turkey dinner!). What makes them “instant”? Simply the fact that they’re cooked ahead of time so as to cause the starch granules to swell and gelatinize. Then they’re dried again. The process is […]
READ ONSelf-rising flours are generally cake or pasty flours that have leavening and salt already formulated into them. Other than that, they’re the same as other flours. I tend not to buy them very much unless I’m certain I’m getting them from a store with high turnover, since the chemical leavening loses its potency over time. […]
READ ONPastry flour is something you’ll almost never see in stores, though quite a few cookbooks call for it. Which, you know, is aggravating. The idea is that it’s not so low in protein (gluten) that it can’t stand up or rise, but not so high in protein that it will make your biscuits or pastry […]
READ ONCake flour isn’t just a very low-protein (gluten) version of all-purpose flour, it’s actually made from a completely different species of wheat known as club wheat. The wheat is cracked, sifted and very finely milled to an almost talcum powder-like consistency, making it quite light by volume (about half an ounce less per cup than […]
READ ONBread flour is much like all-purpose flour, save for the fact that it’s often made from just a single type of hard wheat (versus a blend). It’s high in gluten, as you’d expect (usually around 13 percent) and because of that it produces the highest, fluffiest and chewiest breads. Oftentimes millers will add special “dough […]
READ ONWhite wheat flour is very similar to whole wheat flour, except that it’s made from a blend of hard and soft white wheats as opposed the more common (at least in America) red wheats. It has almost identical characteristics to conventional whole wheat flour, save for the fact that it has a milder taste. The […]
READ ONHere we have a far easier animal to classify, since whole wheat flour (called “whole meal” flour in other parts of the English-speaking world) is a 100% extraction flour, simply whole wheat berries ground to a fine powder. The types of wheat used in whole wheat flour may vary from mill to mill, but in […]
READ ONIts other names are “family”, “occident” or “plain” flour. It is by far the most common type of flour sold in stores, but at the same time, the hardest to define. Why is that? Because all-purpose flour is a blend of hard and soft wheats that almost every miller combines in different proportions. Part of […]
READ ONThe first of the “Big Three” leavening methods is chemical leavening. It’s the latest of the three to arrive on the baking scene, having been invented right about the time of the First Industrial Revolution, some 230 years ago. As its name implies, it involves using chemicals to create “seed” bubbles (usually of carbon dioxide) […]
READ ONSo what is “mechanical” leavening? What is the “mechanism” that results in rising vis-à-vis a microbe or some chemical reaction? In a word: steam. Though to be fair steam is the chief rising agent in any type of leavening. Microbes or chemicals may create the initial bubbles in, say, a loaf of sandwich or banana […]
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