There's only 3 types of flour you should really know and keep on hand: bread flour, cake flour, and all-purpose flour—here's why.
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00:00I bake just about 24-7, and these are the three flours that I use the most often.
00:05The protein is what is going to develop the gluten and give structure to your baked goods.
00:10All-purpose flour has about 9-12% protein content.
00:13Your bread flour usually has about 12-15%, and cake flour has only 6-8%.
00:19So your bread and all-purpose look the most similar to each other.
00:23There's not a ton of difference, but you can kind of see, like even this one,
00:26the way it kept its crinkly better, and this one spread out more and is more smooth on top,
00:31you can see.
00:32Then your cake flour really looks different from the other two.
00:35It stayed almost the same shape and size before going into the oven,
00:41and that's just because cake flour, one, it's going to make it fluffier,
00:44so it's going to puff up your cookie a little bit more.
00:46And cake flour absorbs more moisture, so it most likely absorbed more of my butter
00:52and then didn't spread as much.
00:53And you can tell the bread flour one, it spread just a little bit more than our all-purpose
00:58because it absorbed less.
01:01So we have bread flour on top, all-purpose in the middle, and cake flour on the bottom.
01:06You'll be able to find more types of flour in your grocery stores,
01:10but these three really can cover basically all of your baking needs,
01:14so these are really the only three that I keep on hand.
01:17You can mix and match some of these flours to get the right structure
01:20that you prefer out of your baked goods.
01:22Try using a little bit of bread flour in with your all-purpose
01:25and see how your cookies turn out.
01:27All right.
01:31All right.