Wheat flours are the building blocks we use to make our favorite breads, pastries, and other baked goods, but the array of available flours can get overwhelming. We’re lucky to live in a time of so many options, but what good are they if you don’t understand their attributes and idiosyncrasies? Read on to learn about 11 different wheat-based flours—from A.P. to durum—and how to use them.
All-purpose flour is the pastry chef’s multitool. With it, you can make cake batter, roux, pizza dough, or paper mache masks. (Do not eat the mask.) All-purpose flour is so ubiquitous, it’s usually not specified by name in a recipe, and often referred to simply as “flour.” With a middle-of-the-road percentage of gluten (10-12%), all-purpose flour has the ability to develop enough elasticity to make a decent lean bread.
These days, you can find it bleached or unbleached. The bleaching process creates a stark white product, with a finer, clumpier crumb, and a slightly different flavor. Unbleached (my go-to is Heckers) has a creamier white color and a looser texture, as it hasn’t been refined by the bleaching process.
When treated delicately, and mixed with enough shortening agents, all-purpose flour can create a crumbly cookie or tender cake. Any American recipe that simply lists “flour” is referring to all-purpose. In a pinch you can use this flour to substitute for others, understanding that it will slightly affect the texture of your baked good.
To achieve a tender, flaky pastry, you want pastry flour. The gluten content is comparatively low (8-10%), and it’s milled to be much finer than all-purpose flour, resulting in a softer, less chewy product with a closer crumb texture. This small amount of gluten allows one to make a pastry that’s tender, but keeps its structure well enough for a crackling, flaky pie crust, or a plush sponge cake. Finely milled flours can clump together, so it’s beneficial to run these through a sifter before adding to a wet batter.
Cake flour is nearly identical to pastry flour save one very small difference, and even then the difference is questionable. Surprise, it’s gluten. Cake flours have a reduced gluten content of 7-10%. Much like pastry flour, it is finely milled and available bleached or unbleached. The difference between cake and pastry flour is trivial, and as you probably noticed, the gluten content range is nearly identical save for one measly percent (maybe).
The ranges in gluten percentage account for the differences between producers, the wheats they use, and slight variations in their processing. It’s possible for a cake flour, like King Arthur, and an all-purpose flour, like Bob’s Red Mill, to have the same gluten percentage (in this case 10%).
Note that all-purpose isn’t as finely milled, so the difference between those products can be noticeable, and they are not interchangeable. However, regarding cake flour and pastry flour—two finely milled, low-gluten flours—even a trained pastry chef would be hard-pressed to notice the difference in the final product. If you need cake flour but your store only has the pastry variety, go ahead and buy it. For all intents and purposes, they are interchangeable.
Enough with the low-protein powders, let’s get jacked. Bread flour clocks in with a healthy gluten content of 12-14%. It’s made from a hard variety of wheat, and does not go through an extra fine milling process. The boost in protein is ideal for breads, creating a network of strong, chewy bonds that hold onto air as it’s released by leavening agents. Attempting to make a chewy, lean bread like ciabatta or a baguette with a low-gluten flour, like all-purpose, will result in an inferior product. It might make a good sandwich, but it will not be as chewy, or have the same rise as one made with bread flour.
Lower range gluten flours aren’t the only ones that get treated to a fine milling process. Double zero flour is a type of flour that’s commonly used in Italy to make pizza and pasta. It has a high protein content and it is finely milled. The small particle structure allows for higher hydration of the dough. A pizza crust made with doppio zero flour can be stretched thinly while still providing plenty of chew and not drying out into a cracker when baked. This might be one of the reasons pizza just tastes better in Italy. You may not be able to find 00 flour in the grocery store, but Italian specialty stores usually carry it, or you can order it online.
I’ll try to stop talking about gluten after this, the most gluten-y of powders, vital wheat gluten. Although it may not traditionally be included in flour talk, vital wheat gluten is a single powdered ingredient that can be mixed with other ingredients to form a flour with a higher gluten content. Vital wheat gluten is the pure, isolated wheat protein, processed to separate the gluten from the starch. Vital wheat gluten is the primary ingredient in seitan, a vegan meat replacement. It is also a great tool to keep in the pantry for those moments when you need to boost the gluten content of your flour for a given recipe. (Remember that time we all wanted to make sourdough, but the shelves were bereft of bread flour?) Grab a bag of all-purpose flour and add some vital wheat gluten, and you’ve got an effective bread flour.
More frequently found in recipes from Europe and North America, self-rising flour is a mixture of all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt, the most common dry ingredients in popular recipes like biscuits, pancakes, cakes, and muffins. You can buy it pre-made or make a batch of your own. While the ratio of flour to leavening agents in store-bought is the most common, it may not be a perfect fit for all recipes. A chocolate chip banana loaf certainly requires more lifting power than a two-inch buttermilk biscuit. Be sure to check the notes in the recipe to see if self-rising flour can be substituted in, or do a little math to see if the ratio is the same.
Like all-purpose flour, white flour is made through a milling process that softens the starchy endosperm of the wheat and separates it from the bran, the germ, and any other outer plant components. But “white flour” can refer to any flour made this way, regardless of protein content. The endosperm is the white part of the wheat, and, after grinding, and possibly an additional bleaching procedure, is the white flour you see in the store.
Whole wheat flours are not available in as many forms as white, and that is due, in part, to the naturally-occurring gluten in the wheat. Whole wheat flour is made with the entire wheat berry–endosperm, bran, and germ, and the color difference you see is a result of those being included. Since much of the appeal of whole wheat flour is that the whole berry is used, and processing is minimal, whole wheat flours tend to include more protein, but there are whole wheat pastry flours available that are made from softer wheats.
To use whole wheat flour in recipes that list all-purpose flour, like muffins, or pancakes, substitute half of the flour called for with whole wheat. Whole wheat flour is usually milled rather coarsely, so it won’t catch as much air while leavening as white flour, and using a mixture of the two will allow you to get more flavor, color, and texture from the wheat flour while maintaining a bouncy finished product.
Sprouted flour simply means the seed of the plant was allowed to germinate (begin the plant making process) before it was dried and milled to become the product you see in stores. It’s been said that this triggers the plant to make more nutrients and proteins available to the eater. Cook’s Illustrated ran a few trials using sprouted flour instead of whole wheat flour to see how it would affect their recipes. Read here to see the differences that sprang up.
Unless specified, most wheat flours, or derivatives, are made from the common wheat plant, but durum flour is made from the durum wheat cultivar. Durum is one of the hardest wheats available, and hard wheats tend to yield high gluten flours, making it an excellent choice for pasta and bread recipes. The wheat berry yields a soft, golden-hued flour we associate with semolina flour, which is—surprise—made from durum wheat. It can be milled into coarse semolina, or into an ultra fine flour for chewy, smooth pasta.