9 Types of Flour You Can Use for Everyday Baking and CookingWho knew flour could come in so many varieties?

1. All-purpose flourAs the most widely used of all flours, all-purpose flour is made from a mixture of both hard and soft wheat.

It comes from the endosperm, which is the finely ground part of the wheat kernel.

All-purpose flour is used in a wide variety of baked products like cakes, cookies, breads, and pastries.

2. Cake flour

Cake flour has a fine, silky texture because it’s milled from soft wheat and has a low protein content. It’s great for baking cakes because it has more starch and less protein than bread flour, which means it creates cakes that are tender and delicate.

3. Bread flour

Bread flour is similar to all-purpose flour, but it has a higher gluten content, which makes it perfect for making yeast breads. It’s milled mostly for commercial baking use, but it can be found at most grocery stores.

4. Pastry flour

Pastry flour has a higher protein content than cake flour, and it has less starch.

Made from soft wheat, it’s mostly used for making pastries, but it can also be used for cookies and cakes.

5. Self-rising flourSelf-rising flour is actually a type of all-purpose flour that has had salt and a leavening agent added to it.

There’s 1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder and ½ teaspoon of salt in one cup.

You can substitute this flour for all-purpose flour by reducing the salt and baking powder in a recipe.

6. Durum flour

Durum flour comes from durum wheat, and it’s a byproduct of semolina, which is the coarsely ground endosperm of durum wheat. It’s enriched with four B vitamins and iron, and it’s usually used to make noodles and other types of pasta.

7. Whole wheat flour

Milled from the whole kernel of wheat, whole wheat flour tends to make baked products more dense than ones made with enriched flour. To keep this from happening, many bakers add additional gluten.

8. Graham flour

Graham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat flour named after Dr. Sylvester Graham. He created the graham cracker and urged people to use whole wheat flour in the early 1800s.

9. Coconut flour

Coconut flour is a soft flour made by grounding up dried coconut meat. It is gluten free, rich in protein, and a good source of lauric acid—a saturated fat that helps fight off infections.

While coconut flour can be used for all sorts of baking purposes (like making coconut flour tortillas), you cannot substitute it for wheat-based flour at a 1:1 ratio. You generally use ¼ cup for every 1 cup grain flour.

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