All flours go stale eventually and the best before date
should be kept in mind. All purpose
flour is good for a year, but whole grains go rancid quite quickly.
Refrigeration slows down the spoilage, but most people don’t have room in their
fridge for a large bag of flour. In a
deep freeze flour will keep for years. However
it is best to buy as much flour as you will use up within a year.
My favorite cake flour is Swansons, it is sold in a small
cardboard box and I am forever short or running out. The more common cake flour is the 2.5 kg Cake
and Pastry Flour. It lasts a long time but it will get stale if you are not a
regular cake maker. Stale flour won’t hurt you but everything you make with it will
have an off taste. However it is easy to make cake flour from all purpose flour
and cornstarch. I use a balloon whisk. If you sift it with a sieve or a sifter repeat 4-5 times. Both the whisk and the sieve makes a
bit of a mess, haha, but it’s a small mess compared to what I do to the kitchen
daily. The one thing to keep in mind is to incorporate the flour with the
cornstarch really well, so the mixture is well aerated. Otherwise the cake could be
on the heavy side.
HOMEMADE CAKE FLOUR
1 cup all purpose flour minus 2 Tbsp
2 Tbsp cornstarch
- Measure out the flour needed in a large bowl.
- For every cup of flour take out two tablespoons of flour and return it to the flour bin.
- Replace the two tablespoons of flour with two tablespoons of cornstarch.
- Whisk the flour and the cornstarch together.
- Now it is cake flour.
