I've noticed a trick to some "cheap" flour. They are now making some flour in 4 lb bags and not 5 lb pound bags. So be careful of that. I buy flour in bulk at Sam's Club. It works for me.

I agree with your observation. The cheaper flour does seem lumpier and not as fine. I give it a good stir to fluff it up somewhat and stir it in well so I don't have clumps of uncooked flour in my breads. Usually it turns out fine. I bake a lot of yeast and quick breads for a small farmers' market and would like to buy in bulk. If I can manage to travel across the county, I can get 25# bags of bulk organic flour, but their schedule and mine just don't jive. We do have a BJ's now, so maybe next year will be easier to get the larger sacks of flour.

Teresa

I buy it whenever there is a big sale....I add a table spoon of gluten flour for every 2 cups of AP for bread or rolls...but have not noticed the lumps at all. Outside of buying KA flour for breads and cake flour for pastry, I really don't have any problem with cheap no name flour.....and have never noticed lumps. I always "fluff" any flour before I measure, and sift for a cake.
Linda C

I actually found some at Trader Joe's for $2.99 for 5 pounds. I've used it and it's just fine for me. That's much cheaper than flour in the regular grocery stores in my area.

Like you, I did the exact same thing and I won't buy the cheapest flour at Wal Mart anymore because it is too lumpy.
The Gold Medal and Pillsbury do cost more but are ready to use.

I've been using the flour from Aldi--stocked up several months ago when it was $1.19 for 5#. I think it's $1.69 now. Anyway, I've been happy with it. Was in the name brand camp for a long time after getting some generic flour that had an off-taste (bitter) many, many years ago. But then, in the last couple of years, the price differential was so great that I decided to try the much cheaper Aldi flour.

For artisan breads, I buy a high gluten & whole wheat flours from the natural food store. They buy in bulk & repkg. so I don't know what brand it is. I've also used Aldi AP flour & added gluten with good success.

Although I've not noticed a 'lumpiness factor', I nearly always measure my dry ingredients into a bowl & use a whisk to mix them up. Pre-sifting the flour, unless specifically called for in a recipe, probably isn't a good idea unless you are weighing your flour vs. measuring it.

We are fortunate to have Kansas mills that produce excellent alternatives to, and lower in price than, the National Brands and King Arthur. W-R from McPherson, Kansas and Hudson Cream milled in the Stafford County Flour Mills are popular around here.

Ironically, for this region King Arthur Flour has it's White Whole Wheat Flour milled at a stone mill just outside of town, and I purchase the same wheat 50# for $20 (which mills into 50# of whole wheat flour at 100% extraction). So milling my own grain is really very cost effective.

Our Dillons store (Kroger associated) carries Kroger brand that is also a good choice. I noticed it's on sale for $1.99/5# this week.

-Grainlady

I store bags of flour in closed zip lock bags, this keeps humidity out and might stop lump formation.

I've never bought a name brand flour in my life, so I cannot make comparisons. I always fluff before measuring. And, if I may say so myself, I am an excellent baker of pies, cakes, cookies and more than a few loaves of bread a year. I use the cheapest flour I can find; even the bread flour and whole wheat flour I buy is the cheapest I can find. Maybe my palate is not as sophisticated as others.

I won't buy anything but the name brand flours for my Christmas baking. I couple of years ago I had problems with a cookie recipe and the only thing that was different was the flour. After having to throw out three batches of cookies, the family favorites, I went to the store to buy the brand of flour my grandmother always used. With the change in flour the cookies came out the way they should. That was the last time I used a store brand for important baking.

I remember some budget flour from my childhood that my grandmother got lots of. It was not soft, fluffy and powdery-like the AP flour I have come to know. It was coarse and slightly meal-like. It made good bread but was terrible for anything else.

I buy store brand flour. It seems fine to me. I guess it depends on the store.

I'm a flour snob and lucky enough to have a wholesale account with a company where I buy 50 # bags of KA Sir Galahad for $15.25.

I usually buy 2 bags at a time and they last about 3-4 months.

And I never measure out my flour, ever. I weigh it always and then you have consistency as 1 oz is 1 oz whether you pack it into a cup or sift it into a bowl.

A tamped cup can weigh over 5 oz and a sifted cup closer to 4 so volume weight is very iffy.

Jumping off my soapbox (er flour bin), lol...

Thanks for all of the advice and experiences. I went ahead and used the cheap Walmart flour and fluffed instead of sifting. Then measured by the scale instead of the cup. I baked a bunch of gingerbread houses with it, figuring they might not get eaten anyway.

I'm not taking any chances with my cut out cookies though. After figuring in the butter, sugar and other ingredients plus the time to make them, even the name brand flours are the least expensive ingredient.

Flour isn't where I'll cut corners again!

L2C46, how do you know how much the flour should weigh, in a given recipe?

For Annie's Whole Wheat Flour which calls for 3 cups of whole wheat and 3 cups of white, what would you use for a weight measure? (I've been using 4 cups w.w. and 2 cups white) and it comes out great.

50# in a couple of months, wow!

I've been using store brand for some time, now. They are quite a bit cheaper than name brand. Even on sale, they average $8 for 10 kg bag. Name brand on sale is often $12 for a 10 kg bag.

Jasdip, some recipes are set in weight and some in cups. If your recipe works for you, I'd suggest you keep doing it your way. There's different ways of measuring cups of flour. CI/ATK/CC did a thing about this a while ago and overall suggested you not spoon the flour into a cup and level it as so many do. They said with their measurements and testing the scoop & scrape gave the weight vs volume that is most suggested for most things.

I store my flour in a 1 gal jar that was formerly a pickle jar or a mayo jar or something like that. I always shake the jar before using it. I bought a kitchen scale but haven't had a recipe that requires it yet so it's still in the box.

Cynic, that's the first I've heard that suggested to scoop the flour into the cup. Directly opposite to what I've always heard/learned.

I have some of their magazines......they have a very large magazine format. I'll have to read through carefully and see if it specifies that. There's a roll recipe I want to try.

"Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" book suggest using the scoop and sweep method for measuring flour, although you can also find their recipe "by weight".

Because the moisture and protein levels of flour differ from brand to brand, and bag to bag, measurements (cup or weight) are just good (or bad) guesses - a guideline at best. Bread needs to be made by "feel", not an exact measurement.

My first sourdough bread recipe I made was very cryptic and given to me by a friend in her 90's and it had NO measurements for flour and was made only by "feel".

You can make just as good, or bad, a loaf of bread with an exact measure of the flour with a scale as you can measuring the flour with a cup. There are too many other variables that determine the finished loaf. Years as a foods judge at fairs has proven that....

-Grainlady

If you're talking about using 30 pounds of flour I recommend finding a bakery supply house. A couple years ago I bought a 50 pound bag of Sir Lancelot flour for $20; that same flour is currently on sale $6 for 3 pounds direct from King Arthur. So I got it at one-fifth of the sale price.

Another option is ask a local bakery to sell you a 50 pound bag. One here sold me a bag for the same $20. Even if they had tacked on a bit for profit I would have been ahead of the game. (Only problem was when I got home I realized it they hadn't given me the right flour - it was bromated so I didn't use it.)

I've always just scooped the flour out and then leveled with a knife until I started reading books like the King Arthur Cookbook which says you are supposed to spoon the flour into the cup then level...ACK...what's a person supposed to do...too many contradictions all the time! I never had problems before using the scoop and sweep method and it's way easier so I'm thinking I'm going to just go back to my old simpler way!

I agree that yeast bread baking by "feel" is perhaps the best approach. For 50 years I have used the fluff/scoop/sweep way of measuring flour into a 1 cup measure, only sifting for cakes when the directions dictated sifting. A couple of years ago I bought a new electronic food scale because I wanted to make yeast dough by weighing. Well, the scale quickly conked out and a new battery did not revive it, so I'm back to the scoop method.

Very seldom, if ever, do I have a baking failure so I will stick with this method learned in my first Home Ec class. The baking bread by "feel" comes with experience - so you new bread bakers - just hang in there!

Teresa

A woman on a local group list was asking where to buy sifters. She mentioned that she always sifts her flour.

I wrote, stating that I thought sifting wasn't needed anymore, not like in the "old days". She stated that she does a lot of baking, breads and cakes and sifts everything. She said it makes a huge difference.

I've been meaning to try it once (just using a strainer) and see if it makes a difference to me.

CI/ATK/CC did a thing about this a while ago and overall suggested you not spoon the flour into a cup and level it as so many do. They said with their measurements and testing the scoop & scrape gave the weight vs volume that is most suggested for most things.

Cynic - It's worth noting that they consider a cup of flour to weigh 5oz. Of course there's never going to be agreement on what a cup of flour weighs, but 5oz is on the high end of the equivalencies I've seen. KAF seems to think a cup of AP weighs about 4.25 oz. It would seem logical that the scoop and scrape method packs the flour denser in order to hit that 5oz mark.

My ancient sifter fell apart recently, and after looking at new sifters to replace it, I now grab one of the many wire mesh strainers hanging nested nicely in my cabinet. I can choose from coarse to fine - as needed. They are much quicker than my old-style flour sifter and I can wash and store them easier. I have several ingredients I use on a regular basis that I need to sift before measuring/using, such as powdered eggs, cocoa and coconut flour, which tend to clump during storage. I also like to run my measured baking powder and baking soda through a small wire mesh strainer to make sure any clumps are broken up when I add it to the dry ingredients.

FYI moment....

Occasionally in older recipes you will notice it calls for 10X confectioners' (aka powdered or icing) sugar. The numbers 10X, 6X and 4X indicates the size of the mesh used to sift it. A mesh with 10X is small and sifts finer than a 6 or 4 mesh.

-Grainlady

I don't remember where I saw this advice about measuring flour. It might have been on this forum, or it might have been in a cookbook. The advice was to measure flour for a recipe the way that's indicated in the recipe. So, if the recipe says to spoon the flour into the cup and level off, measure it that way. If it says to scoop the measuring cup into the flour and then level off, follow that advice. Usually in the beginning of a cookbook, they'll tell how they measure the flour, if they don't say in the recipe. I grew up doing the spoon into the cup method, because that's what I read somewhere, and thought it was the way it was supposed to be done, until a few years ago when I read otherwise in a different cookbook. Now, if I have recipes that call for weights, I use my scale. Partly because it's accurate, and partly, because it's fun to use the gadget. Otherwise, I check in the cookbook and measure the way they say to. If there's no indication of how to measure, I'll do the scoop and level method. I use a whisk to fluff up the flour before scooping.

Back to the original topic, these cheap flours y'all buy - are they bleached, or are you finding unbleached flours at discount prices?

Sally

I was just at Walmart yesterday and they had cheap Great Value all-purpose flour, probably bleached, for 2.12 a bag, and unbleached all-purpose Gold Medal flour for 2.38. No bags felt lumpy to me. I got the unbleached Gold Medal this time, even though the cheap bleached stuff worked perfectly well before.

Much depends on what I'm making but I'll sometimes use a whisk in a bowl to faux "sift" the flour, otherwise I grab a mesh strainer. So much quicker and easier. If I'm really concerned about the outcome I'll run it through the strainer a couple times even though a shakeup in the jar, assuming fresh flour, is usually enough.

One point that I think is important is that recipes are guidelines rather than hard and fast rules. Much cooking and baking are done by sight and feel to say nothing of taste. My cooking is going that way more and more and I tend to give an extra splash of vanilla or an extra pinch of brown sugar or something even in baking recipes where recipes were traditionally thought to be so critical. But logic tells you that moisture gets into things, even in the same place at different times of the year so to be too anal about measuring a certain way won't be consistent.

Then there's the other thing, called "luck".

I haven't sifted in years but almost always whisk in the flour bucket before measuring.
The Wal Mart Great Value Ap was the last flour I sifted and it had to be sifted to get rid of lumps. It was strange, I didn't know flour ever came like that.

Bumblebeez, that's exactly what I found. I never saw flour like that before. It didn't feel lumpy in the bag, it just poured out of the bag in small lumps. There was such a big price difference at my Walmart between their's and Gold Medal/Pillsbury that I was hoping it would be the same but it wasn't.

Now, with sugar, I buy the cheapest as long as the bag doesn't feel like it's hard and lumpy. I got big bags from Costco once that had little hard lumps in it that never did go away. I guess we can always wind up with a bag or two that has had too much humidity no matter what the brand.

I haven't had trouble with store brand flour but have never purchased Walmart flour. I always use cane sugar and I rarely find cane sugar in a store brand so I buy C&H.

I recently stopped buying WM cheap flour because of the way it smells. I haven't had trouble with lumps, but it smells like insecticide when you open the bag. That may be part of the bleaching process,and I would rather have unbleached anyway. Our Aldi has just opened again after the Joplin tornado, and I bought flour there for the first time. It was cheap, worked just fine, and didn't have that terrible smell. I just bought the pack that the store receives it in which I think was eight 5 pound bags in a heavy shrink wrap pack.

I didn't like going to Aldi at first, but in the last couple of years their promotional items have drawn me in.

soonergrandmom, I agree, the WM flour smells odd, I don't like it. I have used other store brands, including the local Spartan brand, and it's been fine. I did get one "off brand" that seemed a different texture, heavier, if that makes sense, but not lumpy.

Gold Medal is on sale here for $1.98 for 5 lbs, and that's not much more than any of the store brands are. I didn't buy any because I got 2 bags of King Arthur all purpose yesterday on sale for $2.79 each.

As Grainlady mentioned, you can weigh, measure, sift, whatever when you are making bread, and each time it will be different. The hydration level depends on so many factors so what works today probably won't work tomorrow. I always check the dough in my bread machine because it is seldom "right" when I go by the measurements in recipes.

I never sift. (shrug) And I just dip the measuring cup into the canister of flour and make sure it's kind of even. I'm more careful with things like leavening, but my cooking and baking has always been based on the way the batter or dough looks or feels. It works for me and like Teresa, I seldom have a failure (as long as I pay attention and don't overproof the bread, LOL).

Like cynic, I tend to add more of some things, less of others, depending on the way I like things to taste or the texture I'm trying to achieve. And like others I tend to mix dry ingredients with a whisk to be sure they are evenly distributed. Nothing quite like getting a bite of baking soda in your muffin....

Annie