September 11, 2021 - 1:19pm
American recipes for dough & Canadian flour.
Hi, newbie here. I've been noticing over the years that my yeast doughs always take less Canadian all-purpose flour than the American recipes call for. These usually call for volumes not weights. I typically end up having to add water to get a decent dough. Anyone else notice this & is there a quick fix?
Thanks in advance and for your patience! There was an old thread I found which didn't completely answer my question, so I thought I'd give it a shot here. :)
Share
I believe this is because Canadian AP flour is higher in protein that US AP flour.
Adding a bit of extra water seems like the easiest quick fix! You could also try mixing in a bit of a softer flour like cake flour or typo 00 flour instead, but just adding a little extra water (or less flour) seems like the easiest adjustment.
Typical Canadian AP flour is about 11% protein which is good enough to make yeasted bread. You are right that adding more liquids is required when using recipes from other countries, especially when making cakes and pastry.
Thank you for your replies!
When you are first trying a new recipe, do you have any tips for figuring out how much flour to start with? What I recently did was just add until it seemed like a good amount which was way less than what was called for and I ended up having to add water anyway.
Look and feel. If ya don't follow a recipe and go by how it looks and feels, you won't have to worry about using different flours. Enjoy!
is if the cups are the same as the ones used in the recipe. Metric cups could be slightly larger and hold more flour than many USA cups. Cups can vary from one country to the next. Important is to use dry volume cups (flat tops) and not liquid measuring cups (uneven top edge with a spout) for measuring dry ingredients like flour.
Older recipes will often list flour as 3 to 4 cups, for example, meaning start off with 3 cups and use the remaining cup at your discretion, perhaps using part of it for hand kneading. Modern cups recipes are not much different in cups but a good recipe book will state somewhere information about the cup and how to measure it. Could be in the intro to a chapter or in special helps section.
Yep, in my experience, US cups are usually 240 ml and Canadian cups are 250 ml .