welcome friends today on the show we are going to talk about the difference
between self rising flour and self raising flour two similar yet
different products born out of the same patent in the 1840s one is a uk-based
thing self raising so any of the Commonwealth countries will probably say
self raising and they mean one thing and the us-south its self rising and it
means something different so at the core both of these are flour and baking
powder now almost all of the conversions are going to tell you to use all-purpose
flour or plain flour depending on where the recipe was written and that is fine
so here I have the two variations the first one I'm gonna talk about is self
rising flour and you're gonna see this mostly in u.s. recipes from the American
South and in its most simplified version it is one cup of all-purpose flour one
and a half teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt and you just
whisk that together now you can sift it together two or
three times whisking is going to get you 99% of the way there and since you'll
probably already have a whisk in your hand whisking it is just fine so there
we have at its most basic the American self rising flour this is how we make
British UK Commonwealth self raising flour again one cup of all-purpose or
plain flour and two teaspoons of baking powder same thing just get in there with
a whisk and whisk it together now self raising flour was invented by a British
Baker he patented it in 1845 and he tried to sell this to the British
Admiralty something about giving sailors fresh bread or fresh quick bread on the
ships while they were out fighting their Wars
he then took out a patent in the United States in the late 1850s and it just
seems to be hit and miss as to whether it is available to you and it is used
regularly or not where we are we can buy a self-raising flour in the grocery
store but it only comes in a really small bag you don't see it too often
most people don't have it in their pantries and it just wasn't marketed
here and that really is what it comes down to in the u.s. South it was
marketed heavily there were few flour mills that made it regularly and it
really sort of grabbed ahold and stuck on part of the impetus for this video is
the series that we're doing on Sunday mornings where we're going back through
really old cookbooks and it sort of brought to the forefront of my brain
that there was a time that people who wrote recipes were trained recipe
writers and there was a certain flow to the way that they put things on the page
and they were very careful about how they wrote their recipes for the
audience that they were going to reach cookbooks were fairly regional and so if
you saw cookbooks that said self raising flour it was probably because you could
only get self raising or self rising there wasn't a lot of cross talk but now
with the internet you've you're able to look at recipes from all over the globe
and I think it's very important to get consistent results and in order to get
those consistent results you need to know what the ingredients are and you
have to be very careful when you're looking at what's written in the recipe
the other side of that of course is that now you've got a lot of people who
aren't trained in writing recipes and they're gonna make mistakes because they
might not know that there's a difference between these two products so if you
were expecting to get a really high loft on a cake and you used this product
self-rising flour instead what you're gonna get is a lower cake and it's going
to be too salty because this has salt in it and vice versa so there's one other
thing to talk about with self rising and self raising flour some brands for both
of these don't use all-purpose flour they use cake and pastry flour and it
has a lower protein content which makes sense because in most cases you're going
to use this in a cake or a scone or a biscuit and cake flour might be the way
to go so if you really love the brand in this self-raising is Brodie's it is a
cake and pastry flour if you're using white lily in the u.s. south it also is
a softer flour more akin to a cake or pastry flour so I don't know if I've
actually helped you I may have confused you more than when I started out but I
will leave the relative conversions in the info section below the video thanks
for stopping by hope to see you again soon