[Annen]

Does anybody know why we should use strong flour for bread making? And what happens if you use ordinary plain flour?  Does it still make a decent loaf?

[GrannieAnnie]

My friend who is on benefits uses plain flour as she said she can't afford the proper stuff.  He bread isnt bad, but not actually sure why we are supposed to only use strong bread flour.

I occasionally top up with plain if I'm short of the other stuff!

[maloneranger]

You will get a much better loaf with strong flour - it will give a tougher, stronger dough that will hold the gas better, and give you a better rise, and a loaf with a higher volume.

Ordinary "plain" flour is a weak flour and is best for cakes and pastry.

[grendel]

'strong' flour has a higher Gluten content. Gluten is the stuff that makes dough sticky and hold the air bubbles the yeast puts in, you get a better rise with gluten rich flours, ones with less give you a dense heavy loaf.
Now you could probably use plain flour (Americans don't really grade their flours as such and use one type for most everything) if you do a tiny pinch of vitamin c powder will help it rise (as it does with wholemeal flour).
I have been experimenting recently to get a good white bread that rises well and stays soft for more than a day, and the trick here is to have extra oil and milk powder (I use 2 tablespoons of milk powder in 330Ml water and 5 table spoons of oil) and my bread now stays soft for several days (I had some bread baked Friday for lunch today and it was getting to the same point as I had been the day after the loaf was made before my experiments).
so give it a go and try it at worst you will get a heavy loaf that doesn't rise well, make sure your dough isn't too dry as that wont help, it needs to be quite sticky, and don't add too much flour stopping it sticking, a drop of oil on the kneading surface and your hands helps there too.
Grendel

[Aunt Sally]

Strong flour is used for bread as it has a high protein (gluten) content and makes the dough an hence the crumb of the bread more elastic.  Bread made with ordinary flour would be more cakey in texture.

[Trillium]

Over here most shops sell All Purpose flour which can be used for breads as well as pastry but the loaves don't rise quite as nicely as strong/bread flour will do, as grannie says. The only flour you really want to avoid is stated cake and pastry flour; it truly makes dud loaves.

[Aunt Sally]

My father-in-law was an artisan bread baker and he maintained that Canadian bread flour was the best in the world

[Snoop]

I use plain flour, instant/active yeast (whatever the latest visitor has brought over from the UK!), salt and water to a recipe in "Healthy Bread in Five Minutes" (British edition). If you're interested, have a look at the website artisanbreadinfive.com

They are very careful not to give recipes away on the website but have lots of posts on techniques for different types of bread. If you're interested in trying their approach, get the latest American edition of their book (The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day) rather than my edition, as it contains a lot more dough recipes. Plus it gives ingredients in weights rather than just cups (cups only in their earlier American edition). I've tried a few of their recipes (olive oil bread, buttermilk bread as well as their 'master recipe' for ordinary white bread) and they've all turned out well. Their enriched doughs look fantastic, but contain too much butter and too many egg yolks for my OH, so I haven't tried those.

If you count input time (rather than proving time), you can make bread in two minutes a day. No kneading involved, which is great if you've got arthritis.

I did not believe the method would work but it does. I even use the same technique for Lidl bread mixes (just add an extra 50 ml or so of water). We get good loaves, although it should be said that I'm comparing my bread with bread locally available (minimarkets and bakeries), which is not great.

On the website, they talk about six-quart containers, which is the equivalent of six litres not twelve pints. You can halve the recipes very easily, so you wouldn't need to use such a large container. I use a squat square job rather than the tall cylinder they use, as it fits in my fridge better. In fact, I often have two lots of dough on the go, like today: one for brown loaves (Lidl mix) and one master recipe for rolls, naans and pizza bases. Our Italian neighbour can't believe I manage to make such good pizzas, and it's all down to the dough.

Edited to add this: http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/2013/11/01/english-muffins-on-the-stove-top-with-gold-medal-flour-and-red-star-yeast#more-6412

This page gives a recipe (in cups) for the master recipe and a link. Essentially, mix water, salt and yeast and then mix in the flour (I use an ordinary tablespoon), leave to rise for two hours and then bung in fridge for a while, as the dough is much easier to handle when it's cold. Check their site for what they call their 'cloaking' technique if I recall rightly. This is quite important and worth seeing them do. Despite the term, it is not some kind of Star-Trek advanced technology but dead easy once you have the idea. Washing-up is a doddle in comparison with traditional breadmaking. I have to say, they have a bit of a nerve using the word 'artisan', but the result is good.

[Annen]

  (I use 2 tablespoons of milk powder in 330Ml water and 5 table spoons of oil)

That's interesting Grendel, when you say 5 tablespoon of oil, to how much flour is that? its a lot more than I would normally use.

Snoop, thanks for that link, I can hardly believe it is that easy, and I have got arthritis! I will give that a go, the one on the video done in the crockpot look interesting.

[grendel]

thats to 3 cups of flour, its a lot more than I used to use, I used to put 2 tablespoons of oil, I have to admit I built up to that one extra spoon at a time, and the bread stays soft a lot longer now, its all about trying it and changing just one thing at a time.
Grendel

[Trillium]

My father-in-law was an artisan bread baker and he maintained that Canadian bread flour was the best in the world

My late FIL was the managing master baker at a huge commercial bakery and they would get daily shipments of fresh flour. But he wouldn't let the bakers use it until it was about 2-3 days old. I forget the exact reason but it was something to do with very freshly ground flour not rising quite as well as slightly 'aged' flour. He left me his personal recipe book but sadly the volumes are huge, like 80 pounds of salt, 40 pounds of yeast, etc   

In the interim, as I've read up on flours, apparently the bread flour of France is the ideal bread flour. The grain variety and the way it's ground is superior to even Canadian wheat. An artisan bakery near us used to import flour from France, but the prices got so high that customers couldn't afford to buy it so the bakery had to use local organic bread flour. Not exactly a hardship but it certainly reduced the haughty factor the shop wanted to maintain. 

[Jackypam]

I slice the bread and freeze part of the loaf - keeps fresh for ages that way, without extra fat, in fact without any fat.  I don't ever remember putting fat in ordinary bread, just flour, salt, yeast and water.  And seeds too, and fried onion is fatty I suppose, and so is cheese I guess...but no fat in plain bread

[Paul Plots]

I slice the bread and freeze part of the loaf - keeps fresh for ages that way, without extra fat, in fact without any fat.  I don't ever remember putting fat in ordinary bread, just flour, salt, yeast and water.  And seeds too, and fried onion is fatty I suppose, and so is cheese I guess...but no fat in plain bread

Fat? I use one or two table-spoons of olive oil depending on the type of loaf.

Strong white or strong brown flour 83p (or 89p) for 1.5kg from a local supermarket beginning with T. Ownbrand.

I use it every day - rarely buy bread these days.

[Snoop]

Snoop, thanks for that link, I can hardly believe it is that easy, and I have got arthritis! I will give that a go, the one on the video done in the crockpot look interesting.

I came across the website by chance and mentioned it to a friend. She got me the book for Christmas and I looked at it for weeks, convinced it would just be a waste of flour, but my OH loves this bread. The dough is quite soft when warm, which is why, I think, they concentrate on making loaves from no more than a 650 g of dough, though most of their recipes are for 450 g of dough. Which seems like not much, but it is so easy to make that you can bake every day if you have no qualms about putting the oven on. As we have a wood-burning range for heating in winter, it's no problem for me to bake every day. It sounds like a big deal, making bread every day, but I've even had spates of fresh rolls for lunch. Must have taken me all of three minutes to get the dough out of the fridge, prepare the surface and shape the rolls. When the weather gets warmer, I'll probably start using some of their pan-fried and grilled recipes (English muffins, naans and the like).

I'd much rather eat this bread than anything I can buy locally and it works out very cheap, especially with ordinary flour. They don't recommend cake flour but unbleached plain flour, which has a protein content of around 10%. Even the bags of flour here give protein values, so I imagine you should be able to identify this in the UK.

[grendel]

I too pretty much bake bread every day - I do use a bread machine a lot of the time but my recipe is the same for hand kneaded as machine bread. yesterday I put a loaf on to bake when I was making my sandwiches, and had to put another loaf on last night as that loaf had been used during the day, so nice fresh bread this morning. When I have time I will bake by hand kneading and rising and cooking in the oven (mostly at weekends / bank holidays ) and I do a nice cheese topped roll too. here is my loaf from this morning (with the 5 tablespoons of rapeseed oil).
Grendel