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Bread, cake, AP …. what does it all mean? With the variety of flour that is available on the market, it is easy to be confused. When you then add in the wealth of overseas recipes that seems to call for a particular kind of flour, it makes for one major headache before you have even turned on the oven!

In Australia, there are 3 main types of flour available:

• Plain/White (aka All Purpose, AP) Flour – this is your stock standard flour that you sees in the shops. It is what most recipes calls for. Generally this will contain ~10% protein.
• Bread Flour – Not to confused with “Bread Mixes”, these are pure flour that contains more of the gluten components that gives bread that stretchy feel and rise. This contains ~11.5%+ protein. This is generally used for breads, pizzas, rolls and anything that needs that resistance to tearing. This is made from a harder variety of wheat than white flour.
• Cake/Pastry Flour – These are special low protein flours that do not contain as much gluten. This is milled from a soft kind of wheat. Due to the low gluten level, it is used in cakes and products that need to be soft and crumbly. It generally contains <9% of protein. This is milled from a breed of wheat that are inherently softer. In fact if you put a bit of plain flour next to cake/pastry flour, you will find that cake/pastry flour will look more like baby powder than the plain flour.

(Note in America you can buy Cake or Pastry flour in the shops, one has been bleached to absorb more water in a recipe. However in Australia it tends to denote just low protein flour in general.)

Majority of the wheat flour in Australia will fall into one of the above categories. Any other terminology are likely to be a description of how and where the wheat has been processed.

Next up: Willy Wonka world of sugar…

Episode 2 of our flour series….

Wheat is a little seed, called kernel, that sits on top of a grass stalk. One stalk can have multiple wheat kernels. In fact, each little kernel is potential for a new stalk of wheat to grown. Inside each kernel are 3 main parts, germ, endosperm and bran.

Bran – its like our skin and clothes we put on. Its job is to protect the content inside from the weather and animals that may attack it. To do this, it is made of a tough material. The brown bits that you can see in wholemeal flour is mostly from the bran which is golden. This tougher material contains a lot of fibre, which is good for our health when we eat it.

Germ – Germ is where the core from which the baby wheat would have grown. As such it is high in protein, vitamins and minerals that the baby wheat would have needed to grow.

Endosperm – This makes up most of the wheat, sitting in between germ and bran, like a cushion. This is the part white flour comes from once the wheat is crushed. If you open a wheat up and zoom in, you will see mostly of this white powdery substance. It is also where the gluten (the stretchy component where bread and other baked goods get their texture) is located. Hence this is why most coeliac sufferers cannot eat wheat flour.