I make a lot of pizza from scratch, and I used to use all-purpose flour. The day I discovered bread flour was a pretty big day for me: for twenty cents more per pound, my dough improved tenfold. For a few years now, I’ve bought big bags of bread flour, and kept a small bag of all-purpose around just in case. I figured there’s gotta be a reason they make it, and when I find a recipe that calls for it, I’ll have it. Probably non-bready things like cookies and brownies, right?
Well, today I encountered Alton Brown’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It calls for bread flour. I hold Alton in pretty high esteem, so this prompts the question: just what is all-purpose flour good for? In what kinds of foods is all-purpose better than bread flour? Why does it even exist?
*Cake flour has a 6-8% protein content and is made from soft wheat flour. It is chlorinated to further break down the strength of the gluten and is smooth and velvety in texture. Good for making cakes (especially white cakes and biscuits) and cookies where a tender and delicate texture is desired.
Bread flour has a 12-14% protein content and is made from hard wheat flour. The high gluten content causes the bread to rise and gives it shape and structure.*
All-purpose sits between those two, and hence can kinda-sorta be used for either while not being great at both. If you’re fine to have two bags sitting around, you may as well keep cake flour instead of all-purpose.
AP is good for thickening (mix it with butter or other fat to equal volume, cook for a while, stir into liquid to be thickened). Bread flour gets…“stringy” maybe is the word–it seems to make the thickened sauce fibrous rather than thick.
But mostly, I’d keep it around because it’s a standard. Most recipes you discover that call for flour call for AP. If you’ve seen Alton’s cookie show, he actually did three different kinds of cookie, one each with bread, AP, and cake flour for different effects.
But in general I agree – I use a lot more bread and cake flour than I do AP. If it were easier to find cake flour in quantity rather than those tiny little boxes, I wouldn’t bother with AP at all - I’d mix half-and-half bread and cake on the rare occasions I needed it.
I use bread flour for all kinds of yeast breads. It’s worth the extra cost. For other kinds of baking, I would think that bread flour has too much gluten.
I use all-purpose flour for quick breads (biscuits, pancakes, coffee cakes, muffins), cookies (including brownies and other bar cookies), and pastries (especially pie crust). Sometimes I use it for cakes too. Cake flour is better for cakes but I’m on the fence about whether it’s worth the extra cost. There’s also such a thing as special-purpose pastry flour but in my experience it’s only more expensive, not better, than all-purpose flour for pie crust.
Not well since cornbread is closer to a cake texture than bread. You need a lower protein flour so you won’t form as much gluten. I sidestep the issue by not using flour at all in cornbread; I use self-rising cornmeal.
Alton actually did 3 chocolate chip recipes that episode - only “The Chewy” called for bread flour.
“The Thin” used all-purpose flour, and “The Puffy” used cake flour. He specifically wanted Bread flour in the chewy cookies to get lots of gluten formed, so they stayed chewy over time.
By the way, The Chewy is the best freakin’ cookie in the entire world. I made 6 batches in 5 days. Sweet lord they are divine.
I make a lot of bread. Usually when making the poolish, it is ok to use AP flour. Most generic recipes will call for AP. While I usually have ~20lbs of bread flour, I rarely have more than 5lb of AP flour.
I’ve never seen any major difference between all-purpose and bread flour. All-purpose might rise just a little bit less (though the difference I’ve seen may also be attributed to the age of the yeast), but not all that much. And I’ve made great cakes from all-purpose, too.
I once made ciabatta bread with all-purpose flour instead of bread flour. It was much heavier and lacked the internal air pockets that ciabatta bread should have.
I use it for a brownie recipe from the New Best Recipe cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen, which specifically calls for cake flour. Considering that the reception those brownies get is typically near-orgasmic, I’m not messing with that recipe.
I was going to post that I can never get the chewy to turn out right for me. The baking time and temp seems to leave me with cookies that are raw in the middle and burnt on the bottom. I have used standard cookie sheets and I have used silpats, and nothing seems to get me to the point where I have really good, chewy cookies.
2 trays, maybe 12-15 per sheet. I do some moving around between racks when putting in new trays - I’ve got 1-3 assistants under the age of 10 scooping dough on the sheets, so it gets a little haphazard.
Some people prefer the texture of AP flour to bread flour for things like this. Italian pizza flour, for example, is usually around 11%-12% gluten (and also more finely ground than American flours), which puts it closer to AP flour than bread flour. Some people even make pizza dough with a mix of AP and cake flour, about 3:1. Others prefer the high-gluten bread flours. It depends on what kind of texture you like. In general, Italian-style pizza crusts go for lower gluten usually, while New York style-pizza crusts generally use high gluten flour.
For most purposes, though, I find all-purpose flour to be the most useful. It’s not as tender as pastry flour, but not as hard as bread flour.
Consider getting an oven thermometer. If recipes turn out wrong once or twice, it might be because you left out an ingredient (my brother once left the flour out of a cookie recipe and made a passable chocolate chip “brittle”) or mismeasured. Consistent failures are either enemy action or temperature, and the built in oven thermometers are notoriously inaccurate (mine’s off by 50 degrees at 400 F).
The only other thing I can think of is the usual problem with flour-bearing recipes: using volume instead of weight. If your recipe gives flour volumetrically (and despite Alton’s ranting about always using weight, I notice that the Food Network helpfully converts all his recipes to volumetric when they post them online), try replacing each cup of flour by 4.5 oz weight instead.
