Have a recipe that calls for self-rising flour? Don't run out to the grocery store; you can make it right at home!

You can fluff flour, and you can sift it. But do you know the difference?

Flour is the basic structural ingredient. It's the starch in the flour that will, when mixed with liquid and heated in the oven, gelatinize and set when cooled. Flour also contains the proteins you need to make gluten, which is great for baking bread but not so desirable for making pie crusts. All you have to do is use a flour with a lower protein content, which generally means all purpose flour (cake flour might be too weak).

Fats are considered tenderizing agents for baked goods like cakes and pie crusts, rather than shortening agents like they would be for bread. In pie crusts, fats like oil, vegetable shortening, butter, and lard prevent gluten from getting formed in the first place by coating the flour granules, thus ensuring tenderness. Flakiness is achieved by the way you mix the dough: larger chunks of fat from less mixing make for more flakiness while more mixing and smaller fat chunks make a less flaky crust. They also add a lot of flavor, especially in the case of butter and animal fats. Lard and butter are also generally considered to have a better feel in the mouth, and lard is reputed to create a flakier crust than other fats.

Water and milk are the most common liquids, while buttermilk, eggs, and cream can also be used. Liquids function as a binding agent: they allow all of the ingredients to be evenly dissolved and incorporated. They also hydrate the the starch and protein in the flour and activate whatever leavening is being used. If you're using a liquid besides water, you're also adding fats, sugar, and acidity which is a good thing. The fats add tenderness, the adds to crust color, and the acidity makes the dough more stable and easier to roll out as well as taste better. Make sure to always use a cold liquid to keep the fat nice and cold, so it'll retain its shape/temperature and produce a flaky product.

Eggs are used for hydrating the dough, creating structure, giving color to the dough, and flavor. The whites are 90% water and the rest protein, so that aids in hydration and structure. The yolks are 50% water with the rest being mostly fat, contributing to hydration and tenderness as well as flavor and crust color.

Sugar adds sweetness and contributes the most to crust color. Ths crust turns golden brown because the sugar in the dough caramelizes as it's baked. Also, the texture of the dough can be changed by using sugar ground to different levels of fineness. For instance, powdered sugar makes a dough that is smoother, even if it doesn't taste as good as granulated.

You may remember a few weeks ago that I brought you some information on starting your own sour dough culture. That is a very worthy pursuit, but even I admit that it can be hard to maintain and can be wasteful unless you make a lot of bread. But you want that great, complex taste that comes from the long development of yeast, right?

Well, there's a solution to that problem: preferments. Preferments are mixtures of flour, water, and very small amounts of yeast that are generally allowed to develop overnight. This way, you get highly developed yeast and organic acids without having to constantly feed a starter culture. There are four basic types of preferments. Keep reading to kind out all about them.

If you haven't heard about rising food costs by now, I'm sure you must have noticed them for yourself in the supermarket. Flour prices have gone up by 15 to 25 percent, but King Arthur Flour has some good news.

Baker's Banter, the blog aspect of the King Arthur Flour website, posted a letter from Michael Bittel, Senior VP and General Manager, yesterday that announced an immediate decrease in the price of their flours. It seems that the popular flour miller made some smart buying decisions, which allowed them to buy a good supply of wheat for less, so they're passing that savings on to the consumer.

King Arthur is lowering the prices it charges to retailers on it's Unbleached All Purpose, Unbleached Bread, and Traditional 100% Whole Wheat Flours. So look for lower prices in your local supermarket, and if you don't see them you know it's not King Arthur's fault.

A festival of scrapes/green garlic - the flower shoots of the garlic bulb - featuring green garlic dip, green garlic souffle, penne with green garlic and pancetta, chicken with green garlic aioli. Lots of recipes!

Picking the food for your same-sex wedding reception? A lot like picking the food for your heterosexual wedding reception. Who would have guessed?

The White Lily flour plant is moving from Knoxville to the midwest after 125 years; Southern bakers are freaking out that their biscuits won't ever be the same.

The Minimalist makes paletas, Mexican-style popsicles, with the adorable mini-Minimalist.

Eric Asimov discusses the brunello di Montalcino scandal, wherein unapproved grapes went into the wine.

David Karp, the Fruit Detective, talks apricots. Try the ultra-sweet CandyCot.

Clotilde over at Chocolate and Zucchini has conducted a most interesting experiment. She wanted to try baking with roasted flour - the nutty, toasty than bread crusts and roux so satisfying - but knew that roasting flour breaks down its gluten network and causes it to lose elasticity. So she employed the stuff in her mother's sablé recipe - sandy, crumbly sablés don't need strong gluten strands. But still, the cookies wouldn't stay together, so she simply squeezed them in her fists. The result, as you can see, bears the imprint of closed fingers, kind of like a plastic baby rattle. Or like a slug, as Clotilde points out. The cookies, flavored with nothing but butter and salt, are absolutely divine, she assures. Check out the recipe.

How many times have you come across a certain ingredient in your pantry and wondered if was still safe to eat?

If you keep up with the news, you've probably heard about the food shortages and riots in Haiti and Egypt. You've also probably heard about the drought in Australia and the fact that China and India are limiting exports of rice. That's all going to lead to a lot of problems worldwide, as it already has in some places, but have food shortages hit the US?

According to this article in the New York Sun, the answer is yes. Some stores in New York and California are limiting the amount of rice and flour that consumers can take home. Retailers are also complaining about spotty deliveries for rice in California.

We tend to think of food shortages as something very far away, something that doesn't affect us. With the possibility that Americans could be affected by this, will we be able to come up with a solution in time to prevent a real crisis?

Have you ever stood at your stove cooking pasta sauce and you realize it's too watery, and you don't have any tomato paste, flour, or corn starch? Here's how to thicken it.

I bet you were more than relieved when the final glittery colored Easter egg was found. Finally! A moment to relax from all the holiday-ing of March from St. Patrick's Day to the First Day of Spring to Easter. We're not looking at another food holiday until, what? Mother's Day in May?

Wrong. If you thought November and December were crazy holiday months, the real madness is March, which happens to be National [insert-food-here] Month for no less than seven different things. So get ready to throw a few more dinner parties and brunches to, uh celebrate?

First up, March is National Flour Month, which we at Slashfood are going to celebrate by not doing anything because in case you haven't been paying attention, the price of flour is going way way up. So we salute flour in all its luxury, but will be happy getting our carbohydrate requirements from potatoes.

Stay tuned over the next few days to see how we celebrate the rest of March is National [insert-food-here] Month!

I'm a chronic muffin baker, and I love adding whatever I have in the kitchen into the mix -- chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, nuts, dried fruits, seeds, marshmallows, oats, really anything. The problem with adding extra ingredients to muffins, however, is that they frequently sink. It's not so bad with seeds and other light additions, but it become very annoying with chocolate chips and heavier ingredients.

There are tons of suggestions about preventing chocolate chips from sinking, but some are definitely more useful than others. Firstly, you can try coating chocolate chips in flour before folding them into your mixture. I've found this to be moderately helpful, but I've read accounts of people who call it completely useless. You can also make sure that your batter is thick enough to suspend chocolate chips -- the thinner the batter, the more likely they are to sink. If you stand by your thin batter however, try using smaller, lighter chips, or reserving half of the chips to sprinkle on top after you've spooned the batter into the muffin cups.

The problem isn't limited to muffins, so feel free to try these tips with anything that you are baking. And though these are some of my favorite methods for suspending chips and other ingredients, I'm sure there are others out there, so please share any that work for you!

Pizza, that inexpensive, staple food of students and late night revelers, is about to get a little more expensive. Pizza shops and other businesses that use a lot of flour are feeling the pinch of rising prices and are starting to pass those costs along to the consumers. According to a report on Philadelphia's NBC10, in addition to being effected by rising fuel costs, flour prices are also going up as farmers plant corn in place of wheat in order to meet the demands of alternative fuel manufacturers.

Pizza will still remain relatively inexpensive, with slice prices going up in $.25 and $.50 increments. Whole pie might run you a buck or two more than they did in the past.

[via NBC10]

OK, that title is slightly misleading I guess. This recipe from Meg over at Megnut.com is actually for a Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie. She asked for chocolate chip cookie receipes from her readers and then took the average of all the recipes and created her own recipe. The measurements are rather...exact?

After the jump, the recipe Meg came up with.

Our pancake roundup this morning only included eight delicious recipes that were sure to tempt just about everyone to get out their frying pan and make up a batch. But as tempting as they may have been, most of the recipes presented there would not be good choices for gluten-free eaters because they were almost all flour-based. In fact, most pancake recipes are. Fortunately, there happen to be a lot of equally delicious gluten-free pancake options out there that ensure everyone who wants to can celebrate Fat Tuesday (a.k.a. National Pancake Day).

The easiest GF option is a pancake mix. Jay used Kinnikinnick Pancake Mix to make the lovely stack pictured above. There are many mixes out there to choose from, including Bob's Red Mill, which is widely available at Whole Foods Stores.

If you want to make your own, try using an alternative flour, as was done in these Rice Flour Crepes or Almond Flour Pancakes. You can find several more GF pancake recipes here, which use buckwheat, quinoa, potato flour and other gluten-free bases.

[Thanks for the reminder, Jay!]