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I love to cook but I'm not too much into baking. My mom is currently visiting from overseas so there is more baking going on in the house. Unfortunately, she doesn't really know English so it's hard for her to evaluate different types of flour that are available in the supermarket. I got her the King Arthur All-Purpose the other day and she baked some rolls with it but said they didn't rise as much despite using baking powder.

I use flour mainly for making frying batter for fish as well as for roux when I cook stews.

I noticed that, in addition to the differentiation between bread and all-purpose, flours also differ in whether they are bleached vs non-bleached.

I would like to learn more about different kinds of flour and what makes them different and what the best kinds are for different uses.

Cascabel
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amphibient
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  • Also, the deal about your mom's rolls might be best posted as a different question. There are a lot of other things that could be going on besides flour, and helpfully answering that is going to require a bit more detail - a rough recipe would be good (usually rolls means yeast, not baking powder). – Cascabel Dec 19 '14 at 23:19
  • let's keep it here for now – amphibient Dec 19 '14 at 23:21
  • So, assuming you add in a recipe so that people have a chance of figuring out what happened, you're inviting answers that say both "here's what bread/all-purpose, bleached/unbleached are for" AND "the problem with your mom's rolls could be X, Y, or Z (which might be nothing to do with flour)"? Really seems like two questions in one, and we do put things on hold when they're too broad. – Cascabel Dec 19 '14 at 23:26
  • See also: http://cooking.stackexchange.com/q/356/1672 - it answers bread vs all-purpose, but not bleached vs unbleached. – Cascabel Dec 19 '14 at 23:29
  • It might also help to know where your mother is from - perhaps someone familiar with flour offerings there could contribute recommendations that would be meaningful to her. I'll also comment that King Arthur AP flour is a magnificent flour - I probably have 10 different types of flour in my kitchen and use KA's AP flour for more of my baked goods than anything else. Unless your mom needs pastry flour for what she's baking, it's hard to go wrong with KAAP. Having said that, how old is your baking powder? If you've had an open canister for a while, that could be part of the problem. – Stephen Eure Dec 20 '14 at 14:16

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Please see this question and the accepted answer. It has a great deal of information.

Without really knowing the reason why there were differences, I learned several years ago that there are most definitely major differences between brands. In my area, for most uses I buy Gold Medal. However, I will never use that for biscuits or rolls. They turn out way too heavy. For making biscuits and rolls I buy either White Lily or Snowflake.

Not sure where you are located, so I have no idea what brands may be available. This page gives some good information and has this chart that lists info for some brands/types of flour.

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Cindy
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