 It gets really, really stretchy. Hi, I'm Chef Nini Nguyen, and today we're gonna talk about flour. You're making bread at home and you might not have bread flour, but you might have all-purpose or whole wheat flour. Do you think you can use it? Well, let's see. So these are three very common flours you would find at the market. We have all-purpose flour, bread flour, and whole wheat flour. So all-purpose is truly the all-purpose flour. You can use this for things that are very tender, like a biscuit, or for something that wants a little bit more gluten, like bread or pizza. And here we have bread flour. Bread flour, I find, is a little bit more fine. You can kind of see slightly that it's a little bit lighter, and it has more protein in the grain. It does develop way more gluten, and when you think about gluten, you wanna think about elasticity. Bread flour is the best way to achieve those big, nice bubbles that you want. Now, we also have whole wheat flour, which has both the endosperm and the wheat bran along with flour. So I would not recommend using whole wheat flour for something like a cake because of all the extra nutrients that you get. It actually weighs down cakes. You wanna use this for something that's yeast-driven so that it can grow. The next thing we need to talk about is measuring. A lot of times, people want to just take their measuring cup and scoop right into your bag of flour. Now, there's so many things wrong with this measurement. One, it's heaping. So this is gonna be more than a cup of flour. And most of the time, when you are scooping with your cup measurement, it's making the flour way more dense than it needs to be. The proper way to measure flour is actually with a spoon. Fluff up the flour, scoop it, and pour it right into your measuring cups. To measure it correctly, you wanna take something with the flat surface like a knife and just level off the top. Now, not all recipes have cup measurements. Some will call for grams. And that's when a scale comes into play. You wanna zero out your scale to make sure that it does not include the weight of the bowl itself. And then you can measure out however many grams you need for your recipe. I really love recipes like this because I feel like it really gives you the most accurate ratios. So here we have three breads. Same recipe, the only thing we've changed are the flours that we use. So here I have an all-purpose flour loaf, bread flour, and whole wheat flour. Now, just from looking at it right now, you can see the difference in especially the whole wheat. You could tell that the whole wheat is a little bit smaller and it has more texture. Now, let's cut it and see what it looks like inside. And so this is my all-purpose flour. And it looks like a nice loaf. There's nice little air bubbles, some bigger than others. I have my bread flour. You can kinda see it's quite similar to the all-purpose flour and you can see bigger air bubbles. And now, let's see our whole wheat. Whew. You can see, wow, the whole wheat, it's, of course, it's browner because of all of the extra stuff, but if you kinda put them against each other, it's way more dense. I have some of my actual doughs here. I'm gonna show you the difference at this stage and how this affects this. Now, when you think about it, the stretchiness in dough, you know, when you're kneading it, it gets really, really stretchy. And even when you kind of hold it up, it kinda wants to slack down just like that. And what that stretchiness does is when you bake yeast, it releases a gas. And the gas, just like in a balloon, if you were to put helium in a balloon, it wants to expand the dough itself. Our all-purpose flour is quite stretchy, but let's look at our bread flour. This is even stretchier. Look at how it expands in so quickly. It's really relaxed. And this is going to create those bigger bubbles. Our whole wheat dough, it wants to stretch, but as you can see, you can see here, it almost cracks. Hence, it makes a more denser loaf. So if you really wanna have a whole wheat loaf, but you really want the air bubbles, I would actually do half and half, 50, 50 whole wheat flour and bread flour. That way you get the best of both worlds. You get the Indosperm and the wheat brand that's really high in nutrition, and you get the stretchiness and the elasticity of your bread flour. So the good news is you can make bread with any of these different types of flour. Now, what we really care about is how it tastes. I'm gonna just tear off a piece of our whole wheat. I love the flavor of whole wheat. This one is a little bit more dense for me, but I think it has so much deep, dark flavor, and you can really taste the yeast, and it's almost kind of buttery. And now, our bread flour. I can already tell this is a little bit extra fluffy. I think that all of these have great different types of flavor, and depending on what you're going for, or if you just wanna have bread, any of these would work. Cheers.