Have you ever gone to bake a cake or make a quick batch of pancakes to find you’re out of all-purpose flour? It’s frustrating, and there isn’t much you can do without it! Unless you have one of these 50+ alternative flours on hand, the next best thing would be if you could quickly make your own.
And you know what? It is easier than you might think! Today we are going to talk about two different ways to make all-purpose flour with step-by-step instructions!
What Is The Easiest Way To Make All-Purpose Flour?
While making all-purpose flour from scratch is easy, it is time-consuming. The fastest way to make an all-purpose flour at home is to combine 70 grams of bread flour with 60 grams of cake flour, and this will make one cup of pretty decent all-purpose flour, which is a nice mix of dense bread flour and light cake flour.
But, I am assuming that if you don’t have all-purpose flour on hand, you aren’t likely to have bread or cake flour on hand either, so let’s get into making all-purpose from the bare bones…the grain.
Do I Need Any Special Equipment To Make All-Purpose Flour At Home?
You can make all-purpose flour with a few different things. The most important materials are a grinder of some sort and a fine sieve. For the grinder, you can use a coffee grinder, a food processor, a blender with a small attachment, a flour mill, a Nutribullet, a Vitamix, or a mortar and pestle if you want some exercise. The key thing is that it is powerful and can grind grains into a powder.
Ingredients To Make All-Purpose Flour At Home
To make all-purpose flour at home, you need to have wheat grains. Let me preface this by saying you could have any kind of grains on hand to make flour with, from einkorn to spelt, to durum; all can be blended this way and sifted to make fine flour, just that they will all have different baking properties.
Why is it cool to keep a bunch of grains on hand? Well, they are cheap, you can store them for wayyyyyyy longer than a bag of already ground flour, you can mix up different grains to make cool blends, and it means you can have freshly ground flour ready for recipes whenever you fancy! Grains are usually available in bulk at health food and specialty stores, or you can ask a local baker if they would mind helping you source some to purchase. I get mine from a little artisanal food store that bakes its own bread.
How To Make All-Purpose Flour At Home
So now, let’s get into how to make your all-purpose wheat flour from scratch so you can see how simple it is!
Step one, check your grains and remove any that look discolored. This will give you nicer-looking flour without specs.
Step two, place your grains into your grinding device. I used the small attachment from my blender and did about ¼ cup at a time. You don’t want to make too much, only enough for use within a week.
Step three, blend your grains for around 1 minute until they look like a fine powder.
Step four, pour the grain powder into your sieve and process the mixture. You will be left with the bran and germ from the grain in the sieve and the endosperm in the bowl (which is the all-purpose flour).
Step five is optional but recommended. Take the bran and germ and blend and sift again, just to make sure you have as much flour out as possible. The picture below is the bran after the second blend and sieve.
Step six is also optional, but it will give you finer flour. I then sifted my all-purpose through a fine tea strainer! This left me with a very well-sifted, soft, fine flour which I love for pancakes.
Notes/Tips/Troubleshooting
- The more times you sift the flour, the finer and softer it will become, but keep in mind that it will affect your yield. If you leave a bit of the bran and germ in there, it will make your bake heavier and denser but increase the yield. A second sift is highly recommended.
- In industrial applications, they say they get about 75% of the grain to become all-purpose flour. Doing it at home, I found to be much less, and it will depend on the blender’s strength and how many times you sift it. With a triple sifting this time, including the fine tea strainer, I got a third of a cup of flour out of a cup of grains.
- Your freshly milled all-purpose can last around 30 days if kept in a cool, dry place. Your whole grains can be stored from 1 year to 10 years, depending on the conditions!
Nutritional Facts
- Serving Size 1/4 cup
- Calories 114
- Total Fat 0.31g
- Sodium 1mg
- Total Carbohydrate 23.85g
- Dietary Fiber 0.8g
- Sugars 0.08g
- Protein 3.23g
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How to Make Your Own All-Purpose Flour
Making all-purpose flour at home is as easy as grinding wheat grains to a powder, and sifting out the bran!
Ingredients
Whole wheat grains
A blender, coffee grinder, or food processor
A fine sieve
Instructions
- Step one, check your grains and remove any that look discolored. This will give you nicer-looking flour without specs.
- Step two, place your grains into your grinding device. I used the small attachment from my blender and did about ¼ cup at a time. You don’t want to make too much, only enough for use within a week.
- Step three, blend your grains for around 1 minute until they look like a fine powder.
- Step four, pour the grain powder into your sieve and process the mixture. You will be left with the bran and germ from the grain in the sieve and the endosperm in the bowl (which is the all-purpose flour).
- Step five is optional but recommended. Take the bran and germ and blend and sift again, just to make sure you have as much flour out as possible.
- Step six is also optional, but it will give you finer flour. I then sifted my all-purpose through a fine tea strainer! This left me with a very well-sifted, soft, fine flour which I love for pancakes.
FAQs
If you are out of all-purpose flour, you can use other types of gluten/wheat flour, just be aware the substitution ratios may be different, and they may affect the way the food bakes. Other popular substitutes include almond or coconut flours, which won’t rise as well due to the lack of gluten and may require more binding agents or liquids.
We have an article on all-purpose flour substitutes for any situation if you want to check it out!
The basic answer is you need to grind it to separate the bran, germ, and endosperm (the three parts of the wheat grain) and sift it to separate the fine flour particles from the coarser bran. The process of grinding wheat into flour is known as milling, which can be done using industrial mills or by hand.
If you choose not to sift it, then you have more of a whole grain flour, not an all-purpose.
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