If you are new with a bread machine, then you must be gearing into the process of choosing which bread to make and what ingredients to choose. While there are many fancy ones out there, most people are confused between bread flour and all-purpose flour.
What is the distinction between them? Why would you need to know all this in the first place?
It all comes down to the type of bread you are making. You must be so accustomed to eating ready-made bread that you might not even know whether you enjoy just flour bread or all-purpose flour bread.
All in the Protein
If you are looking for bread with a high rise, then you need the bread flour which has about 12 to 14 percent of protein. On the other hand, all-purpose flour has about 8 to 11% of the protein, which does not give the same kind of rise. Another plus point for the bread flour is the presence of gluten – giving it a chewier and denser nature.
If this is your first time and you’re not sure which one would be better for you in terms of taste, how about just going with the all-purpose flour? Experiment with it and play around with your machines features. Look into the recipes involving all-purpose flour. You will be surprised by the taste. Plus, point is you save more by cutting out on all-purpose flour.
While the bread flour might be easy on the pocket, all-purpose flour definitely grabs the taste buds faster.
Baby Steps
When making your bread – regardless of the flour type, make sure that you measure the right amount. If you don’t take accurate measurements, you might end up with dry and dense bread. This can happen with any flour.
Other Substitutes
Being a beginner, you might not want to stack up your shelves with extra baggage of flour bags, especially the ones you might never use – and that’s completely fine.
Professional bakers usually are very picky about the type of bread they want for a recipe as they don’t believe in substitute. But have you ever seen your mother work her spell in the kitchen? When was the last time she didn’t substitute ingredients? The type of flour used will hardly matter as the difference is usually quite subtle:
- Cake flour
- Pastry flour
- Self-rising flour
- Whole wheat flour
