Pastry flour, what is it?

Pastry flour, sometimes also called cookie flour, is a type of soft wheat flour. Soft flours are those flours that have reduced gluten, a special type of protein, than the average all-purpose flour or bread flour. They’re recommended for pastry because they help cut down on how glutinous flour will get when added to pastry recipes, and they’re usually superior in the end result to all purpose flour for pastries, helping to produce a crunchy and delicate, rather than an overworked or tough crust.

The softest flour is normally cake flour, which may also be treated with bleaching agents, in addition to being finely milled. It has the lowest gluten amount and is ideal when you’re making most cakes. Generally the softer and less glutinous the flour, the more tender the resultant cake. Cake flour has about 5-8% gluten or protein.

It can be a challenge to find pastry flour. Even well-stocked supermarkets seldom carry more varieties than cake flour, all-purpose flour (9% to 12% protein), and bread flour. If you can't find pastry flour, you can mix you own by combining cake flour and all-purpose flour in a ratio somewhere between two parts cake flour to one part all-purpose and one part cake flour to one part all-purpose.