Hello Bakers,
Welcome to Ingredient Function Friday's Recipe Recap.
Here is a recipe recap of how I compared using bread flour and cake flour in a simple bread recipe. Let's look at what happens when cake flour is used in place of bread flour.
The recipes:
Bread Flour Version: 350g Bread Flour, 250g water 85 degrees, 7g instant yeast and 7g fine sea salt.
Cake Flour Version: 350g Cake Flour, 250g water 85 degrees, 7g instant yeast and 7g fine sea salt.
Hydration is 71%
Mixing time: by hand (old school) with a dough whisk and bench scraper, 2 minute mix in bowl then kneaded by hand 6 minutes until both doughs were smooth and resilient. BTW I needed to add a little flour when kneading both doughs by hand. I used bread flour with the bread flour test and cake flour with the cake flour test.
The cake flour test dough felt more slack - less resilient then the bread flour version. The stronger the flour the more bounce we get.
Proofing time 45 minutes - that's how long it took for them to be doubled in size. The cake flour loaf was not as voluminous as the bread flour loaf.
Blue Tape is the cake flour version
After that they were gently degassed and rounded into two boules (balls) I did skip benching them - it is ok to do that with round breads and rolls - I think. But not for other shapes of loaves and rolls.
Then I proofed them in the proofing bags for 30 minutes - it was warm in the kitchen. They both looked like they "had taken a breath and held it" and had a slight marshmallowy texture. The bread flour loaf looked normal and the cake flour one had a weird texture. This might come from the cake flour being bleached.
In the proofing bag....thank you Ziploc...
Now for baking - 375 for
Ready to bake - the surface of the bread flour cracked a little and see the odd texture of the cake flour loaf....but they are the same size now....
Next I dusted them with flour and slashed the surface with a bread knife. Then I baked them in a 375 degree oven, convection on for 40 minutes. Here are the results.
The bread flour loaf has a golden crust and a good crumb - the hydration was low, 71% so I was not expected big air holes in the crumb. Still you can see the cake flour loaf has a cottony crumb and had no crust color. Bleaching flour removes all the carotenoid pigments.
Bakers, that's the recipe recap for today's Ingredient Function Friday. I hope you enjoyed learning about bread flour.
Until next week.
Happy Baking!
Colette