A Bread Machine Question

Factual Questions
1

Is it possible to use self-rising flour instead of adding yeast? If so, how?

2

Yeast and self-rising flour don’t do the same thing at all - the leavening agent in self-rising flour is baking powder, not yeast (look carefully on the flour bag label). So you could substitute self-rising flour for regular in a quick bread recipe calling for baking powder, reducing the baking powder accordingly - one of my cookbooks had a table showing the proper proportions, but I can’t find the darn thing right now.

P.S. You might have better luck with this question in Cafe Society - a lot of cooking threads end up there.

3

Depends on what you’re making. For most breads - no. Self-rising means it has baking powder for non-leavened rising. You’ll still need yeast.

4

You can’t even make that substitution for hand-made bread. Self-rising flour is for things like pancakes and muffins. It can’t be used to make bread.

5

Here’s a suggested proportion for substitutions:

http://dbs.extension.iastate.edu/answers/projects/answerline/questions/answer111.html

And another one:

http://www.pastrywiz.com/archive/recipe/0120.htm

And another one:

http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/thriftyliving/tl-baking.html

6

To elaborate on this a bit, even if you take the baking powder/yeast issue off the table, there’s still the problem of protein content. Different flours vary in the amount of protein they contain – softer flours like cake flour and most self-rising flours have the least, and “hard” bread flours contain the most, with most all-purpose flours somewhere in between. For most non-sweetened breads, you want a significant amount of gluten to develop in the dough, and that means you need more protein. For cakes, muffins, quick breads (banana bread, etc.), biscuits, pancakes, etc., you don’t want a doughy, bready consistency, but something more flaky or “crumby” or whatever – the lower protein content of cake and self-rising flours means that the protein chains that form in the dough or batter are shorter than the long chains in bread, and the effect of this is heightened by the incorporation of fat of some type, which serves to isolate the protein chains from one another and keep them from linking up – that’s what makes biscuits flaky, for example.