Baking Question - Am I using the wrong flour?
This blog post is an excerpt from my weekly newsletter, where I notify you about the newest class releases, and answer your baking questions. To subscribe to the newsletter scroll to the bottom of this page and enter your email in the little box.
This weeks question is SUCH a good one! (Despite what the sender may have thought) please don’t be shy to send me your baking questions on social media or by email!
THE QUESTION:
'My question for your weekly email feels incredibly lame - it’s about flour, specifically different flours for different things. I buy the big 5kg bags of flour from the supermarket and use them interchangeably for both cake baking and bread making. I was wondering how much difference does it make for a “home baker” to use the “wrong” flour, essentially would my results be massively different if I used the baking flour for my pizza dough and vice verse (bread making flour in my cakes?) Is it worth having both types of flour in my pantry?'
THE ANSWER:
The short answer is no, it’s totally fine to use the wrong flour at home, it will just change how you need to work with your dough/mixture. I actually only keep one type of flour at home too! So let me explain why it works:
In New Zealand there are two types of flour easily available, high grade or bread making flour, and low grade or standard flour.
The difference between the two flours lies in the gluten content. Low grade or standard flour is low gluten, and high grade or bread flour is high gluten.
The way I like to picture it is that gluten is tiny little rubber bands inside the flour. The higher the gluten content, the more of these rubber bands there are. When they flour is mixed with a liquid, the gluten strands begin to activate, and the more you work the mixture, the stretchier the rubber bands become.
We want some mixes to have a lot of these rubber bands- for example, bread dough. The gluten, or rubber bands, allows our dough to be stretchy, meaning that when our yeast is growing, our dough has the structure to go with it.
However, if we look at a short crust pastry, we want these rubber bands to be short (which is why short crust or shortbread has that name), so that our finished product is crumbly and tender. If we develop the gluten in a shortcrust dough, the rubber bands will lengthen and the final product will be tough, rather than crumbly.
There are also in between mixtures, like a cake or cookies, where you want some gluten for structure, but not so much that it’s developed into long rubber bands, that will make your cake tough or chewy.
Once you understand what the purpose of gluten is in your mixture, then you know how much you need to develop those rubber bands. Starting with the right flour for what your making will make this easier. If you’re using high grade flour for shortbread, then you’ll need to be very careful not to overmix it because there is already more gluten (or little rubber bands) in there to start with. Conversely, if you want to make a bread dough with low grade flour, you’ll need to knead it for longer in order to develop the gluten properly, considering there’s less gluten in there to start with.
In bulk quantities, this can make quite a big difference, so it’s easier if you use the right flour to start with. But when baking at home, the difference is not nearly as make-or-break. I prefer to use low grade flour at home (like the question asker, I buy one 5kg bag and use that interchangeably). I find it much easier to start with the lower grade flour, and work my mixture more to develop the gluten when needed, than to start with a higher grade flour and try not to overmix my pastries. This does also depend on what you make the most- if you make mostly yeasted doughs and cakes, then occasionally a shortcrust pastry here or there, then I’d probably stick with a high grade flour.