All-purpose. Wheat. White whole-wheat. Self-rising. Bread. Rye. Cake.

What the heck is the difference between all those flours?

Well, I’m here to tell you. Flour 101, here we go!

All-purpose: As you might gather from its rather clever name, all-purpose flour can be used for pretty much anything and everything. People on gluten-free diets can’t have it, but if you don’t have to worry about that, you can use all-purpose for baking, cooking, bread-making… whatever. It’s all good.

Wheat: Wheat flour is like all-purpose’s healthier and less versatile cousin. It has fiber and protein that all-purpose doesn’t have, but it can be a pain to bake with because it tends to produce very dense items. In many recipes, it’s OK to sub up to 1/3 the total amount of all-purpose flour with wheat flour.

White whole-wheat. Now this is good stuff. White whole-wheat flour has all the nutrition of wheat flour with the lightness of all-purpose. I wouldn’t use it to replace the full amount of all-purpose in any recipe, but you should be able to sub in at least half the amount. These delicious muffins use entirely wheat flour, and white whole-wheat gives them a nice, fluffy texture.

Self-rising. Using self-rising flour is a little bit like using yeast for pastries and other sweet things. The idea is that the flour has leavening agents already mixed into it, so your baked goods will be high as the sky when you take them out of the oven instead of falling flat and being mushy in the middle. To make self-rising flour yourself, just add 1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder and ¼ tsp salt to 1 cup of regular flour.

Bread. Bread flour has a lot of gluten, more gluten than all-purpose, so that your bread will stay strong and keep its shape while baking. On the negative side, you probably don’t want to use it for anything except making bread, so if you don’t make a lot of bread, this flour might not be worth your while.

Rye. Rye flour has a low gluten content and is good for making sourdoughs and breads like pumpernickel or, gasp, rye.

Corn, rice, or nut. These flours aren’t widely used, but they are great for people with gluten-free diets.

Cake flour. Cake flour is as soft as a pillow and very light. It’s primarily used for making cakes (who would have guessed?) and soft, cake-like cookies. A lot of gluten tends to make things tougher, so cake flour has just a little bit of gluten to guarantee a light texture for baked goods.

And one product plug: Flour is kind of a generic cooking substance, so you won’t find a ton of variation across brands. But King Arthur is, in my opinion, the best, and they have a wide variety of excellent flours to choose from.

[photo from cookbookcatchall.blogspot.com]