What’s the Difference Between AP Flour and All-Purpose Flour?

“Huh?” you think as you read the ingredient list in a new recipe. You know how to cook and you know how to read a recipe and follow directions. But occasionally, you can find a puzzling or unfamiliar ingredient. Sometimes it doesn’t matter much. Other times, it’s the difference between a cake that feels like a brick and a cake that’s fluffy.

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In this case, AP flour and All-Purpose flour are the same thing. It’s the most commonly requested and used flour … for the reason stated in its name. ” All-purpose is designed to be used in a wide range of recipes written for home cooks who do not have the kind of high-intensity mixers or the expertise necessary to use the specialized flours made for commercial bakeries,” according to Cook’s Illustrated All-Purpose Flour Taste Test. King Arthur Unbleached Enriched All-Purpose Flour and Pillsbury Unbleached Enriched All-Purpose Flour are two top-rated brands.

Flour in general is finely ground and sifted meal of any edible grain. This is about to get science-y: Wheat is the main grain: hard red winter wheat (10 to 13 percent protein), soft red winter wheat (8 to 10 percent protein), or a combination of the two. High-protein flours are best for yeasted products and other baked goods that need a lot of structural support. the The higher the protein level in a flour, the greater the potential for the formation of gluten, which creates an elastic network. Gluten sheets can move with the gas that yeast produces, but not let that gas escape. So the product won’t flatten. Lower protein flour is best for quick, chemically leavened goods that use baking soda and baking powder. Too much gluten can overpower quick leaveners and the whole thing can deflate.

All grain is either ground by steel or stone. Steel-ground flour, the most common, is crushed with huge, high-speed steel rollers or hammers, creating a heat so intense that the wheat germ is stripped away, including valuable vitamins and enzymes. Stone-ground flour is usually found in natural food grocery stores. Two moving stones crush the grain without generating much heat so it retains the nutrients.

Technically, all flour is bleached by the natural process of the wheat’s pigment oxidizing after three months from yellowish to a whiter hue. These days, most all-purpose flours undergo a (totally safe) benzoyl peroxide or chlorine gas bleaching process to expedite the whitening of the flour. You can use bleached or unbleached flour interchangeably.

Flour texture can range from course to soft and powdery, depending on the bolting (sifting). All-purpose flour is a fine-textured flour milled from the inner part of the wheat kernel and contains neither the germ (the sprout) nor the bran (outer coating). U.S. law requires that all flours without the wheat germ have riboflavin, niacin, iron, and thiamin added. The labels call this “enriched.”

So if you’re going to stock your pantry with only one kind of flour, it should be all-purpose flour. Cake flour, bread flour, whole-wheat flour, pastry flour, self-rising flour, and instant flour are all different things and shouldn’t be used interchangeably with all-purpose flour. And we’re not even getting started on all the flours that use grains other than wheat.

Bake something now that you’ve learned more than you ever thought you’d want to know about all-purpose flour. Here are a few great ideas: