The mystery of the flour - revealed!

I was very confused for a very long time. My amazing loaf (see sidebar) turned out perfectly, despite appearing to have been made with all-purpose flour, rather than bread flour. Now, that shouldn't have happened because the yeast needs a certain amount of gluten to do its thing (or at least that's my understanding). But do its thing it did.

I was determined to make an even better loaf the next time, and so used what I was pretty sure was bread flour. But my loaf came out almost as flat as a pancake and much, much denser. I steadfastly ate about half of the loaf, but it was slow going. Fine, fine. It wasn't bread flour in the plastic container. (I thought I had labelled all of my containers...?)

Fast forward several weeks, and I set about making lazy Sunday morning biscuits. My first-ever batch of biscuits (cheddar) were ethereal and bursting with flavour. This second batch? Hard as rocks. Something was rotten in the state of York.

Though it pained me deeply, I decided to throw out all of that lovely flour (it wasn't that much really). I figured it would hurt me more to put all of that effort (and ingredients) into more baked goods that aren't fit to eat. So toss all the flour I did. First the bag of what I thought was all-purpose, then the container that I thought was bread flour...and as I was dumping it in my filthy organics container, it all became clear. The label had somehow slid around to the side. The label that read Pastry Flour.

I had made the 'bread' with pastry flour and the 'biscuits' with bread flour. No wonder the results were abysmal.

So until I started writing this blog entry, I thought my problems were solved. I was going to talk about hard and soft, bread and pastry and all-purpose flours, and talk about yesterday's purchase of whole wheat, all-purpose flour. That is, until I found out that the 'soft' flour that I bought thinking it was all-purpose is, in all likelihood, pastry flour.

And the serpent bites its tail.