As a general rule, more gluten = stronger & chewier food. But sometimes you want tender and soft. Cakes obviously, but also cookies, pancakes and biscuits. So the question is, why don’t more recipes suggest cake flour? Is it really not all that different than AP flour? And especially when a recipe calls for AP flour then tells you not to overwork the batter/dough. Why not cake flour?
I’ve considered trying cake flour for some of those. But it costs more and i can be lazy about messing around with recipes. Especially for baking. Baking is fussy.
Most recipes are based on all purpose flour with enough gluten to make bread. I don’t do much baking but I’m sure products that aren’t yeast risen could use cake and pastry flour, maybe with small adjustments. All purpose flour in the southern states is usually lower gluten than up north, better for making biscuits and products risen with baking powder and or soda.
I think the actual difference between cake and AP flour in most recipes is going to be minimal. You might notice a difference in, say, biscuits if you had a batch made with each and Pepsi challenged them, but other factors are going to come into play far more than those couple of % gluten.
That said, Southern cooks swear by White Lily flour, especially for biscuits. They sell it as an AP flour but its gluten content of 9% puts it closer to cake flour (7-8%) than most AP (usually around 12%; King Arthur is 11.7%).
In one of his early biscuit recipes Alton Brown recommended mixing cake and AP flour, probably trying to emulate White Lily, which his grandmother used.
I found this blog post where a baker tested King Arthur vs. White Lily and got a mixed bag of results.
I saw a study that said AP flour today has as high a gluten content as bread flour from the 1950s
What’s amusing to me, is that we’re in the opposite scenario. 80-90% of what we use wheat flour for in our household is baking bread or handmade pasta, so we generally use bread flour for everything, buying semi-large (10lbs or so) amounts from Costco to offset the higher cost in most megamarts.
Overall I think AP wins here in the US (and I deeply wonder and solicit input from our non-American dopers!) because it works… okay… for everything, and we are a society deeply in love with the easy way.
Not everyone of course, but one thing that the Covid-era rush on baking supplies seemed to indicate is that from scratch cooking, especially baking, is that most Americans simply DON’T, or didn’t.
If you only do it rarely, for a special occasion, I bet the attitude (supported by AP) is “flour is flour”. Which probably lead to a lot of confusion and upset when cake or break flour would have made a big difference.
I wouldn’t have used king Arthur flour for the layer cake. I DO use cake flour for that, usually softasilk, because that’s the cake flour my grocery store carries. His observations on pie crusts were interesting, though.
And maybe i should try cake flour for biscuits and corn bread.
Most of the time I make biscuits using Bisquick. Nothing wonderful, good enough for biscuits and gravy, but better than the Pop’N Fresh type my wife makes.
I bake bread (small loaf) about twice a week and bake something else (cake, pies, croissants, tarts, etc) about once a week.
I also make parathas or naans once a week, and waffles/crepes/pancakes once a week.
I keep a canister of AP flour and one of bread flour on hand at all times. And usually an unopened 5lb bag of bread flour. I never buy cake flour.
There is a difference if I have to use bread flour for something that calls for AP flour or vice versa. At least I think I can tell the difference. My wife thinks I’m imagining it.
I’m willing to sink to the Walmart house brand for my roughly twice-weekly slam together of a batch of hot short flour with raisins and extra butter that keeps me away from the Dunkin Donuts. While they certainly could be better, they’re not bad at all. I just recycled the box, but I suspect it contains ‘flour’, not ‘bread flour’ or ‘cake flour’. Does Bisquick specify?
I have some cookie and biscuit recipes that call for cake flour, and if they do, I use it. Otherwise, I assume a recipe means what it says.
I do use cake flour for certain cakes, AP flour for others. But like @ParallelLines, I mostly use bread flour since that’s the sort of baking I do the most: Breads and pizza dough.
I add gluten to some recipes (sour dough, e.g.). Also if the recipe is European, I add gluten, because their bread flour gluten content is higher than ours here in the States.
I agree with @ParallelLines’ explanation that most people in the US use AP flour because they rarely get into artisanal baking to the point where it makes a difference, and American recipes are almost always predicated on the gluten content of AP flour.
Enriched white flour is listed.
Also, flour behavior is not determined solely by measured gluten content. What you do or don’t do to activate the gluten while mixing the flour into a bakeable substance also makes a difference.
If you’re whaling on your low-gluten-flour cake batter for twenty minutes or so before putting it in the oven, you’re going to get a tough and bready cake. If you mix your higher-gluten-flour cake batter as delicately as possible, you’re going to get a softer, more tender cake.
Grain size and wheat species matter too.
Right- our box of Swan’s Down says that it’s “27 times finer than all purpose flour”, which to me implies that there’s greater sifting and with finer sieves than regular old AP flour.
So overall, cake flour is most likely finer ground/sifted, and lower gluten than AP flour, even White Lily. It might work fine in a lot of applications, but I suspect it’s not better in many than AP flour, except for the obvious ones like making cakes.
And yes, the flour choice does have a large impact on how recipes work. Bread flour tends to make much better pizza dough than AP because of the higher gluten content, for example. Similarly, bread flour makes for harder, chewier cookies for the same reason.