When you go to buy all-purpose flour in the baking aisle, you're faced with two choices: bleached or unbleached. But what's the actual difference in these two oh-so-similar products? It's all about how each flour is produced. When flour is milled, it comes out of production with a slightly yellow-ish hue. This cast of color naturally fades within a few months of milling, but most companies don't want to wait for this process.
Instead, they will bleach the flour with chemical additives, like chlorine dioxide and benzoyl peroxide, to create the ultra-white flour most of us are familiar with. Unbleached flour simply has not gone through this extra step. The aging process of bleached flour is sped up when the chemical components are introduced.
The end product is a flour that is more white with a slightly softer texture and finer grain. Meanwhile, the denser texture of unbleached flour can help baked goods hold their shape a bit better, making it a good fit for puff pastries, eclairs, yeast breads, and popovers. That said, both types can be used interchangeably in most baked goods without significantly altering the final product or needing to adjust other ingredients in your recipe.
Bleached flour works well in recipes like cookies, pancakes, waffles, quick breads, and pie crusts. Meanwhile, unbleached flour is better suited for puff pastries, eclairs, yeast breads, and popovers. Bleached flour is treated with chemicals to speed up the aging process, whereas unbleached flour is aged naturally. Opting for unbleached, whole-wheat flour may increase your intake of several nutrients and minimize your exposure to potentially harmful chemicals.
Still, both varieties can be used interchangeably in most recipes without significantly altering the final product. A variety of healthy, gluten-free alternatives to regular or wheat flour exist for those who avoid gluten.
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The result is an ultra-white, ultra-fine flour that can rise faster in breads, and maintain a sharper color in baked goods. On the other hand, unbleached flour is still naturally bleached, simply because it is exposed to oxygen. When the flour is exposed to the air, it naturally whitens to a certain extent, though this does not affect the texture of the flour. During the bleaching process, a chemical breakdown occurs which diminishes the amount of nutrients in the flour — particularly vitamin E.
As a result, these nutrients typically have to be added back in. There are about 20 different chemicals used by companies to bleach flour, though only a few may be used at a time.
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