Cooking tips, tricks, and advice from professional kitchens
Questions and Answers
Which type of flour has the most gluten?
Nov 27th
Q. Which type of flour has the most gluten?
A. This is sort of a mis-question as no flour actually contains gluten. They all contain various amounts of protein which when mixed with liquid and agitated, can develop into gluten. Bread flour contains the most protein (roughly 9-10%) all-purpose is next with approx 8-7%, and cake and pastry can contain as much as 6% or as little as 4%.
You can read more about flour, the types, and substitutions here in our types of flour post.
What type of flour to use for pies?
Nov 26th
Q. What type of flour to use for pies?
A. This is a tough one. It depends on the type of dough you’re making and how flaky you want your crust to turn out.
For regular pie dough, all purpose works perfectly well, since you’re cutting the fat into the flour the strands are fully coated and shouldn’t develop too much gluten anyway.
For sweet short pastry (SSP, sweet dough or pate sucree), a combination of half bread and half cake flour works best. But whatever you have on hand will work fine.
Puff pastry requires bread flour ideally, but it’s not too common for that to be made at home. In Michel Roux’s awesome book, Pastry, he uses all purpose flour for all his doughs, and he has 3 michelin stars, so who am I to argue?
What is the best type of flour for extra light cookies?
Nov 24th
Q. What is the best type of flour for extra light cookies?
A. There are several tricks to light and fluffy cookies. The first is to make sure you’re using the right kind of leavener.
Ammonium Bicarbonate isn’t common, but it is used a lot in Christmas cookies such as gingerbread or Lebkuchen. It has one feature over all the other leaveners out there; it will make your cookies crisp.
Using fresh baking powder and/or soda will help a lot, as then they will be in correct proportion to your other ingredients.
In terms of types of flour, you probably want to go with a cake or pastry flour. These flours will feel more dense in your hands and weigh a little bit more per cup than other flours but they have the lowest protein content. A less protein rich flour will allow for less gluten development giving you a less dense cookie. That said, using the correct type of flour will only help if it is used correctly.
Don’t overwork your dough. Overworked dough is the most common cause of dense cookies. If you’ve done all this and your cookies are still little rocks, check the recipe to see what the ratio of fat to other ingredients is. It should be about 20-30% of the total weight. Much less than this and there’s not much chance of a light cookie. Much more than this and it will be too dense to leaven.
