The shelves around me are completely empty of all purpose flour. I have about a pound of APF left. Also most of 5 pound bags of both cake flour and wheat flour. Plus about 2 pounds of masa (corn flour).
I want to treat my hard working son and husband to oatmeal raisin cookies tonight but do not want to use my precious APF. Is cake flour a good replacement? Is it a 1 to 1 replacement? I use masa to thicken chili but is it a good replacement in brown gravy? Does wheat flour make good pancakes?
Help me stretch my flours!
Cake flour is very finely milled, so I think that if you use weight measure instead of cup measure, you’ll be fine. You can probably find the weight/cup for your brand of flour online, but in general a cup of cake flour will weigh significantly fewer grams than AP. Cookies aren’t all that sensitive to flour type, so the lower protein of the cake flour likely will make very little difference. Also, once you have the wet and dry ingredients mixed, use your eye to tell you if the mix is too wet and add more flour accordingly.
Wheat flour makes excellent pancakes. I prefer a 50/50 mix with regular flour, but there are plenty of recipes with 100% whole wheat, so lots of people must like it.
And a tip - flour is very tough to find on the grocery shelves around here, but I can buy a 25-pound bag from a bakery near my house. The big problem with flour production right now is packaging for consumer use, not the actual flour. You might try that route.
Thank you! Thank you! This is the kind of info that has kept me here for (checks join date). . . TWENTY FUCKING YEARS!!! Holy shit!
I only use whole wheat flour for anything that requires flour at all, and have done so for a good forty years now. Whatever you make will be more ‘rustic’ in taste but otherwise just the same. Except better for you.
Cake flour is not just finely milled. It is also made from low gluten wheat. It works best for cake, cookies, pancakes, pie crusts etc. Anything using baking soda rather than yeast for leavening and is not kneaded. It won’t make very good bread. For that use the whole wheat.
Make sure that the cake flour isn’t ‘self-rising’ aka already has leavening in it, before you use it in a recipe.
Nope, not self-rising. I have both baking powder and soda (and yeast). I’m like Jesus, I can rise myself.
I’m confused—aren’t your all-purpose flour and your cake flour both made entirely from wheat? If so, what do you mean when you say “wheat flour”?
It’s shorthand for whole wheat flour, which includes the bran, endosperm, and germ of the wheat grain.