FAQ #3: Flours

[rhiannon_666]

With users from 148 different countries, it stands to reason that a lot gets lost in translation, even amongst English speakers. For a number of years now, the mod team has rejected posts asking questions such as, "What is self-raising flour?" and answered them ourselves. It's something that appears constantly in the queue (twice already this week

Comments

[marsbareater12]

I'm not an amazing cook, but I'm enrolled in a commercial culinary course at the moment, and we were told there were four types of flours - plain, bakers, cake, and whole wheat. I understand why the others are there, but I'm just curious as to which one bakers would fit in/is synonymous to?

[rhiannon_666]

I think it's the same as bread flour, but I'm not 1000% sure on that one.

[someoneingrey]

The 50LB bag of Baker's flour I have is labled as both. And it performs as break flour should.

[rhiannon_666]

Great, thanks. I'll edit that into the post.

[mercy_rain]

OK, but what's cornflour? Is this the same as corn starch?

[rhiannon_666]

Yep, same as corn starch, but not corn meal. I nearly included a section for it, but left it out because it doesn't form the basis of the most common dry flour mixes. There's a lot that isn't here.

[lizziebuffy2008]

You might want to put corn starch in parentheses after corn flour, because I don't think most people (at least in the southern US) would know that is what you mean.

[doubletake]

Especially with the advent of gluten-free baking, where there is now in fact, "corn flour" which is NOT "corn starch"--just really finely ground corn meal. Eep!

[kalaam]

You know when how when you say/read a word so many times it starts to look a little nonsensical? That's what has happened to me with "flour" after this post. Super informative, thanks!

[rhiannon_666]

Haha! Oh I'm glad that wasn't just me. After writing this I saw the subject heading on the front pages and I was like, "Oh crap, typo, that's not how you spell flour" and couldn't remember how to spell it and now it doesn't look like a real word any more.

[sushidog]

Yep, me too. And yes, this is a really helpful post, thanks!

[mummy_owl]

I'm in France and here the flours have a numbering to give the protein content - I know plain flour is "65" but I'll have to check on all the others.

There's also "Farine a gateux" (cake flour) which is actually equivalent to self raising as it has raising agents included.

What you refer to as "cake flour" doesn't exist in France but I regularly make biscuits and shortbread with 4 parts plain flour / 1 part cornflour or rice flour.

What really confuses me is American measures - cups? - sticks of butter?? Why no weights?

[someoneingrey]

I can't describe the weight of a cup of flour, I don't know it. However, a stick of butter is 4OZ, so... 113 grams. aproximately.

I have to say, I like that your flour has the protien content easy to find and compare.

[mercy_rain]

Shirley Corriher gives the following weights for flour in Cookwise:

Cake, dipped: 130g/cup
Cake, spooned: 112g/cup
Cake, sifted: 99g/cup
AP, dipped: 145g/cup
AP, spooned: 120g/cup
AP, sifted: 114g/cup
Bread, dipped: 160g/cup

With a footnote pointing out, "The only way to be accurate with flour is to weigh the flour over and over in the manner that you measure volume and take an average."

[mummy_owl]

Thanks for that - I do have an "american cup"measure, but it always struck me as a very vague way to do it :-/

[eofs]

Note to UK bakers: self-raising flour does not contain salt here in the UK. So I guess when using American recipes which call for self-raising flour (which are few and far between, in my experience) we should probably be adding more salt.

(How strange to add salt! That must limit the sweet applications a bit.)

[frenchroast]

There's not *that* much salt in self-rising flour--certainly not enough to mess with sweet applications. It brings the sweet flavor out, in the same way a pinch of salt does.