What is the difference between bread and all purpose flour?
Nicholas W., Oreland, PA. All purpose flour is made from a blend of flours milled from both hard wheat and soft wheat. Hard wheat produces a high gluten flour, whereas soft wheat produces a low gluten flour. In yeast breads you want to use a bread flour that is high in gluten so that it develops the characteristic stretchy chewy texture. In cakes though, you don’t want a chewy crumb, but a crumbly tender one, so cake flour or low gluten flour is used. All purpose flour, as its name implies, is in fact used in all baking, because it has that medium stretch. Bread flour though is used only for yeast bread making and, in addition to the fact that it is made of high gluten hard wheat flour, it includes a tiny amount of malted barley flour and potassium bromate to both improve the yeast activity and the dough’s elasticity .
