Is there a difference when using bleached or unbleached flour for cooking and baking?
No
Bleached flour is lighter in color than unbleached. So, if whiteness is a factor in the recipe, bleached flour would make a minor difference.
There are so many different types of flour, it would be impossible to answer your question.
I can make the assumption you are talking about wheat flour…
What is the difference in Bleached and Unbleached Flour??
To know how these differences will effect whatever your making, we would first need to know what your making!?!
Food and cooking questions are better suited to Cafe Society. Off we go!
Bleached flour is, well, bleached. It’s a kinda icky chemical process. If that disturbs you, you might not want to use it, since the only effect otherwise is to make the color lighter and the flour a tiny bit lighter in ‘weight’. This is basically only relevant if you’re making something that really relies on the lightness of the flour - cake, basically.
That doesn’t even really begin to cover the different types of flour, but it does answer your question.
As Airk said, it can make a little bit of difference. Bleached flour is a little lighter in cakes, etc.
Here’s a professional pastry chef: Why You'll Never Find Unbleached Cake Flour in My Pantry
But it’s not a huge difference. You can certainly use either bleached or unbleached in any recipe and it will come out fine. Unless you’re a professional pastry chef, you probably couldn’t even tell the difference.
Note that there are other differences in flour types besides whether or not it’s bleached. My dad once bought my mom a hundred-pound bag of flour as a Christmas present, but since he considered it beneath him to know anything about “women’s work” like cooking, he got her cake flour instead of all-purpose flour. It took her ages to use that up.
Right. Restricting ourselves to wheat flour, there’s a lot of variation.
[ul]
[li]General-purpose flour – middlin’ protein (i.e., gluten) content (9-12%), making for a moderately tender (not particularly chewy) texture, but with enough elasticity to hold yeast or soda rising. May be bleached or unbleached.[/li][li]Bread flour – more protein content (10-13%), ground from hard wheat varieties. Bread, yeast bread particularly, is expected to have more tooth and crust than other baked goods, so bread flour fills this need by being high-gluten. May also be bleached or unbleached.[/li][li]Cake flour – lower protein content than GP flour, and ground from soft wheat. Yields more tender texture after baking, as expected of cake. Usually bleached.[/li][/ul]There’s also whole-grain (all parts of the wheat kernel ground, including bran and germ, versus white (endosperm – starchy part of the kernel only). Which can be unbleached, making it actually pale yellow instead of white, despite the name.
My beloved is a hell of a baker, and I’ve had to learn these things by getting them wrong while shopping on her behalf.
There’s a slight flavor difference between unbleached and bleached flour. If you’re doing something with a lot of flavor, like cake, cookies, bread, etc. then there is no discernible difference. If you are making something with a very mild flavor, like pancakes or biscuits, there is a difference in flavor. Well, at least I can tell the difference. This is also the reason I buy aluminum free baking powder. we make a lot of biscuits and pancakes around here so I buy the cleanest tasting ingredients so we get a better end product.
If you eat a lot of processed foods or do not have a sensitive tongue you may not be able to taste the difference no matter what you’re making.
Also really high-gluten flours, like 14% or 15%. We use that to make water bagels.
Thank you all! I appreciate the information.
I just add vital wheat gluten to AP, if I need a higher gluten content. Easier to keep one bag of flour and one of gluten, rather than umpteen bags of special flours.
Thanks, I was unaware of that and looked it up, it looks way easier.