Baking 101: Which flour should I use in my recipe?

Flour is made with a range of hard and soft wheat, which influences how much protein the flour has. The higher the protein content, the tougher and stronger the baked product will be.

Those luscious Italian country breads are made with bread flour or gluten flour, two of the highest-protein flours.

Delicate cakes with a soft crumb are made with cake flour, one of the lowest-protein flours. Cakes lack the internal structure that well-made country breads have, and protein is one of the reasons. Here are some protein contents for common flours.

Bread: Twelve to 13 percent protein. Use it in pizza crusts and machine-made and traditional breads.

All-purpose: Nine to 12 percent protein. All-purpose is your everyday-use flour.

Self-rising: Nine to 11 percent protein. Self-rising flour is all-purpose flour with baking powder added. Save money. Add your own baking powder.

Pastry: Eight to 9 percent protein. This blend is ideally suited to pie crust with its need for tenderness and structure.

Cake: Five to 8 percent protein. Use it for cakes and other delicate baked goods where a soft, fine crumb is needed.

Store it:

Flour lasts longest in the refrigerator or freezer, but who has room for it? The alternative is a cool, dark corner of your kitchen in an air-tight container. Buy what you need and use it fast to make sure your flour is always fresh. Whole wheat flour spoils much faster than white.

A note on bleaching:

Freshly milled flour is aged before it is packed and shipped. Before the introduction of chemical aging and bleaching agents, flour was stored for months until it had oxidized and lost some of its natural yellow pigment.

To make the aging process faster and more reliable, flour makers use potassium bromate and chlorine dioxide gas to remove pigments and make the protein more stable. Chemical bleaching reduces the amount of protein and removes some of the vitamin E naturally found in wheat products. Enriched flour replaces vitamins lost during the bleaching process. Unbleached flour has a buttery golden color but performs in recipes essentailly the same as bleached all-purpose flour.