Miss the first installment of my Just Eat It: Brain Food 101 Wheat Flour series? No worries, you can find it here!
Today’s experiment compares the use of pastry flour to all-purpose flour for making scones. Orange Coconut & White Chocolate Chip scones, to be exact. Both the pastry and all-purpose flours I used were whole wheat and came from the bulk bins at Whole Foods.
The recipe that inspired these scones came from the cookbook Moosewood Restaurant: New Classics (Moosewood is, conveniently, in Ithaca), and called for pastry flour.
Enough logistics, let’s look at the scones!
With pastry flour:
With all-purpose flour:
Side by side: Pastry flour on the left, all-purpose on the right.
As you can see, the scones made with pastry flour came out more more smooth and doughy. They were almost too doughy for my tastes. I think I accidentally underbaked them a bit, though… I baked them for a slightly shorter period of time because I was making only half a batch. I should have trusted my eyes when I didn’t think they looked done!
The scones made with all-purpose flour were crumbly, and they have been falling apart whenever I pick one up to eat it.
The verdict?
Pastry flour works for scones, but you may want to add a little more leavener or bake them for a few more minutes if you don’t want your scones super doughy.
All-purpose flour will work too, but because of the higher levels of protein, you will want to add a little extra moisture so that they stick together. Try adding a little extra milk, oil, butter, or eggs (or flax eggs!) to hold them. Remember, flours with more protein absorb more moisture!
What Have I Learned?
- If you change out flours from what is called for in the recipe, make sure to check both the texture of the dough and the bake time. Trust your eyes!
- Lower protein flours = more moist baked goods.
Coming up next in the Wheat Flour series:
- Whole wheat flour versus white flour
- Make your own cake flour?
- Flours to use for quick breads versus yeast breads
See you for more wheat flour fun later!
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
those sound pretty good!! yum
I love that you made a Moosewood recipe! I just went to Moosewood Restaurant last night for dinner!
Thanks for the post! Very informative!
This is going to be so informative for me. I love it!
I love this series! I can’t wait to read the future posts. This is stuff that I have wanted to know but have never taken the time to look up.
Very interesting! Thanks girlie! I always sub WW in for pastry flour, and now I see it won’t work perfectly.
Thanks for posting this- I had to use Whole Wheat Pastry Flour instead of Whole Wheat Flour in one of my cookie recipes today because my store was out!
Great experiment! I love stuff like this. Can’t wait to read future posts
Great post! I always use whole wheat pastry flour when baking! I love it and find I get the same results!!