Is pastry/pie flour the same as cake flour?!
Is pastry/pie flour the same as cake flour?
Answers: NO, THEY ARE DIFFERENT.
pastry flour is also pie flour
Pastry flour or cookie flour or cracker flour
This flour has slightly higher gluten content than cake flour, but lower than all-purpose flour. It is suitable for fine, light-textured pastries.
Cake flour
This is a finely milled flour made from soft wheat. It has very low gluten content, making it suitable for soft-textured cakes and cookies. The higher gluten content of other flours would make the cakes tough.
In Britain, many flours go by names different than those from America. Some American flours and British equivalents include:
* Cake and pastry flour = soft flour
* All-purpose flour = plain flour
* Bread flour = strong flour, hard flour
* Self-rising flour = self-raising flour
* Whole-wheat flour = wholemeal flour
for different type of flour, go here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/flour... The answer to this question is No, pastry flour is called plain flour and does not rise but cake flour is called self-raising for the reason that it rises on its own. No. There are boxes of flours for everything and for different things too. Cake flour is made from soft wheat, while all-purpose flour is a blend of soft and hard wheat.
The second difference between cake and all-purpose flour is the amount of the starchy portion of the wheat kernel or endosperm that is used to make the flour. The third difference is the extent to which the flour particles are ground.
The term patent refers to the amount of endosperm used to make flour. Long-patent flour contains a higher percentage, including those portions that are more resistant to crushing and contain slightly more protein. Short-patent flour contains the smallest portion of endosperm and a lesser amount of protein.
All-purpose flour, which is commonly used at home for making bread, lies between the long patent or bread flour and cake flour.
Differences in protein content, while not nutritionally important, influence the structure of the finished baked product, says Struempler. In bread flour, gluten -- protein component of the grain -- is stronger and more elastic than in all-purpose flour. Cake flour, has a weak gluten, which is desirable for the delicate texture of cakes.
Should you run out of cake flour and want to bake a cake, you can substitute all-purpose flour, using 2 tablespoons less per cup. The reverse is not true. Desired
results cannot be achieved by substituting cake flour for all-purpose flour.
Source: Dr. Barbara Struempler, Nutritionist, Alabama Cooperative Extension System, (334) 844-2217 No it's not, and it goes along the spectrum of what libby said.
Cake flour has the least amount of protein
All Purpose flour has a combination of cake flour and bread flour
Pastry flour has slightly more protein than all purpose flour
Bread flour has the most protein
If you're trying to substitute something for pastry flour, I would use all purpose.
Basically flour manufacturers managed to create various flours so that they would be best suited for the baking good that they would be the ingredient of.
Hope it helps.