When it comes to baking, Flour is one of the essential ingredients to make use of.

The most popular type of flour used for baking is wheat flour.

Wheat flour is not only used in baking bread, cakes, and other pastries, some types are used for making pasta, and sometimes, wheat flour is also used as a thickener for soups.

There are so many varieties of wheat cultivated, but the types of wheat used for making flour for baking are cultivars of the common wheat species.

These wheat varieties could be classified based on a quality known as their hardness.

The hardness of wheat is a quality that is based on the texture of its grain. There are hard wheat and soft wheat varieties based on this quality.

Hard wheat is processed to give hard flour, and soft flour is produced from the soft wheat varieties.

These two types of flour differ in density as well as their protein(gluten) content.

In this post, we are going to find out how hard flour is different from soft flour, and also how these two types of flour are used.

HARD FLOUR

An example of hard flour used in baking is bread flour.

Hard flour has a higher gluten content than soft flour. It contains about 14% of gluten.

This type of flour is easier to mix. It is preferred for making bread because it absorbs more moisture, the dough rises faster and higher.

It is also tougher and sturdier than when soft flour is used because of the gluten content

Bread made with hard flour has a chewy texture.

The dough made from hard flour is elastic and holds the desired shape of the bread

Bread can also be made with soft flour, It is just that bread is preferred to be made with hard flour.

SOFT FLOUR

Soft flour is used mostly for pastry and is more flavorful than hard flour.

It has a lower amount of gluten than soft flour. The result Is a Finer texture and baked products that crumble easier than when hard flour is used. they are fluffy. They are not as strong as when bread flour is used

It is especially used to make cookies and other pastries

Examples of soft flour include cake flour, and pastry flour.

ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR

Some wheat flours don’t fall specifically into either hard or soft flour.

These flours may be milled from both hard and soft wheat varieties.

An example of such flour is all-purpose flour.

The protein content of all-purpose flour is somewhere between that of soft and hard flour.

All-purpose flour could be used for a lot of baked products; from cakes to cookies and so on.

DIFFERNCES BETWEEN HARD AND SOFT FLOUR

	Hard flour	Soft flour
Wheat	Produced from hard wheat varieties	Made from soft wheat varieties
Gluten	Has 12 to 14% gluten content	Gluten content about 10% or less
Examples	Bread flour	Cake flour, Pastry flour
Properties	Tough, chewy	Finer and crumbly