Ever wonder what makes the crust from your favorite wood-fired oven pizza joint so insanely delicious? Or how to make extra-chewy bagels at home? Or how to make no-knead bread that doesn't tear apart when you cut a slice? The answer is gluten, lots of it. And our best bet for getting this gluten in our home kitchens is to pick up a bag of bread flour the next time we're at the store.
Bread flour contains 13 or more grams of gluten-forming protein per cup. By contrast, the all-purpose flour we generally use for baking contains anywhere between 9 grams and 11 grams these same proteins. This means that doughs made with bread flour will be stronger and more elastic, and the breads they make will be more dense and chewy.
This kind of flour is best used in recipes where you want that chewier texture. Pizza dough, artisan round loaves, bagels, and soft pretzels are all good candidates. You can also use this high-gluten flour when combining with low-gluten or gluten-free flours like rye, whole wheat, and buckwheat for better structure. I've also found it useful to use bread flour in recipes with a lot of "stuff" in the dough, like seeds and dried fruit.
If you're substituting bread flour in a recipe that calls for another kind, know that bread flour will absorb more water than other kinds of flour. You'll want to increase the liquids in the recipe by a quarter or half cup to compensate. You can also mimic the strengthening effect of bread flour by adding vital wheat gluten. Between 1 and 4 tablespoons of vital wheat gluten per loaf is all you need.
If you're feeling extra-fancy, look for a bag of Italian "00" flour. This is a high protein flour similar to bread flour, but ground from a different kind of wheat. It makes breads with a strong gluten structure, but with less chewiness in the final bread. It's used most frequently for making pasta and authentic Neapolitan-style pizzas.
The best source I've found for bread flour is from King Arthur Flour, available at most grocery stores and online. This flour has a consistent quality and protein content, and bakes lovely loaves week after week:
Find It! King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour, $4.95 for a 5-pound bag
Do you bake with bread flour?
Related: What's the Difference? Cake Flour, Pastry Flour, All-Purpose Flour, and Bread Flour
(Image: King Arthur Flour)
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I've been baking out of Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce a lot lately. Many of her recipes combine non-gluten grains with AP flour for obvious reasons, but I'm realizing that I should try using bread flour in those cases. I do use bread flour for cookies at times, when I want a chewy texture. Thanks for the tip!
My flour of choice is Dakota Maid bread flour, because it's local-ish, but mostly because it's also milled from hard North Dakota winter wheat. Lots of gluten. I also add a tablespoon of wheat gluten per recipe (the standard 2 to 1 no-knead ratio, with the long fermentation). I find the lift is a lot better if I DO NOT do it the violence of dropping into a dutch oven. I keep a heavy cast iron skillet in my oven, and use that for it's thermal mass when I'm baking my bread. The dough itself spends it's final rest on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Maybe it's because the dough is pretty wet anyway, or maybe it's just that I have a small efficiency apartment oven, but the oven spring is plenty good without having to have the loaf hang out in a dutch oven. It's so good that the bottom of the loaf comes out rounded- you can only get that kind of lift and maintain it long enough for it to set as the bread bakes if you use a high gluten flour.
Let my work speak for me:
http://flic.kr/p/dfbcVq
I wonder if using bread flour instead of all-purpose would make my brownies chewier. Does anyone do this?
As a New Englander, I don't use anything but King Arthur.
Their Sir Lancelot high-gluten flour is perfect for bagels and pizza dough but unless you buy it by the 50lb bag, it's super expensive. :-/
Is anybody else noticing a problem with commenting? It's kind of slow/unresponsive lately...
Anyway.
Better to buy local if you can. A couple years back I could get 25 pound bags of Dakota Maid for $8.00- but with all the pressure to grow corn instead of wheat plus a couple dry years means it's up around $12.00 now. Still a steal compared to buying bread in the shops, though.
Interesting! I just did a quick comparison between DM and KA flours and what they charge on their websites:
The King Arthur website offers 25 pounds sacks of AP flour for $20.50 http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/ingredients/flours
And you can score Dakota Maid on it's website for $12.50
https://www.ndmill.com/store/proddetail.cfm?CFID=48378&CFTOKEN=97526556&ItemID=13&CategoryID=3
Kind of makes wonder *where* the wheat King Arthur flour uses comes from in the first place- I wonder if a lot of the differential has to do with the cost of freight. I guess it helps to live close to the source.