"all purpose flour" news and stories

The flour aisle can be confusing with all its choices. What's the difference between all-purpose flour, self-rising flour and cake flour?

This weekend I got it into my head that I really wanted to try some bread from my Georgian cookbook. Up til now I've pretty much stuck to vegetables and sweets, but it was high time that I made one of the delicious looking bread options. I chose the Lobiani, which is a simple bread with a kidney bean filling, because I had most of the ingredients. I only had to get sour cream.

The Lobiani was very simple to make, you'll just need plenty of space to roll the dough out (which can be a problem in my tiny kitchen). I have an extra large cutting board that I use for rolling out bread doughs. The dough is made from sour cream, eggs, butter and flour, and it's leavened by working baking soda into the dough after it's mixed. The filling is made with lots of onions and kidney beans, plus seasoning and coriander.

Let me just tell you, I will make Lobiani again! It is so good, with the mild kidney beans mixing quite nicely with the sweet onion flavor and coriander. I took a loaf over to share with my Georgian friend and he told me more than once how delicious the Lobiani was.

I did change a few things. First off, the recipe said not to leave the dough out for more than 8 hours or it'll turn sour. Of course I did (just FYI, don't fall asleep on the couch at about the time you're supposed to be starting a baking project), but I just threw the dough in the fridge overnight and let it warm up the next morning and everything was fine. I actually liked the sour taste. Also, I used canned white kidney beans because I had them. Other than that, I did everything the recipe told me to do, and everything was great. The recipe after the jump.

In the UK, the Food Standards Agency is considering implementing a program that would require fortification of white flour with folic acid. The reason for this is that folic acid has been linked to a decrease in birth defects such as spina bifida. In the US and Canada, white flour has been fortified with folic acid since 1998. Since that time, studies have shown a significant drop in stroke mortality when the rates were compared with data taken from the UK. This appears to have been an unintended benefit of the folic acid fortification, but is likely to be a contributing factor to the Food Standards Agency's move towards require the same policy in the UK. If they adopt the plan, it would be the first mandatory food fortification since the 1940s.

Folic acid is found in whole grain wheat, but is largely stripped away by the refining processes used to make white flour. Some bakers and other manufacturers in the UK voluntarily fortify their flour with folic acid already.

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