All Purpose vs Bread Flour

The Experiment: Does using bread flour instead of all purpose flour make a difference in homemade bread buns?

Inspiration: I make bread buns about every other weekend. For the last batch I noticed that the buns were quite dense. I enjoyed that when they were fresh out of the oven but the next day they weren't as enjoyable. I wished they were a little lighter. Some research done by my good friend Scott suggested that using bread flour instead of all purpose could make the buns lighter.

Expected Results: From the website ochef.com... "Bread flour is called for in many bread and pizza crust recipes where you want the loftiness or chewiness that the extra gluten provides." So it seems that in theory the bread flour will yield lighter bread buns.

Actual Results:
The titans go into battle. In the yellow corner we have the challenger, bread flour! And in the blue corner, the reigning champion, all-purpose flour!!!! *crowd goes wild*

The bread recipe starts with scalding a mixture of milk, vegetable oil, and sugar. As no flour is involved in this step I am starting off with everything in one pot.

And that brownie in a pie plate in the background... that became a "peanut butter brownie pie" :)

The milk-oil-sugar mixture has been separated into two bowls and one envelope of yeast added to each bowl.

Here the flour and other ingredients have been added to the mixture and it has been allowed to rise for an hour or so. Already I noticed a significant difference. The dough with all purpose flour was drier and stiffer than the dough with bread flour which was stickier and more moist. I carefully measured the flour and other dry ingredients so the difference in texture was quite surprising.

This is after a second rising. Although the bowls are not identical in size & shape I think it's safe to say that the bread flour dough (on the left) rose more than the AP flour dough.

Time to make the buns. I usually use another method to make buns but it's difficult to get consistently sized buns that way so I rolled out each batch of dough and used a biscuit cutter to get more consistency, which I hoped would make for better comparisons.

The difference between the amount each set rose can clearly be seen here. Just look at the space between the buns in the AP ones (right) compared to the bread flour ones on the left. You can see how much more they expanded with the bread flour.


And here's the final result. The bread flour buns look burned but please trust me that they weren't. They got a little darker on top than the AP buns on the right but the lighting his this pic makes it looks worse than it really was.

The buns were put through a highly scientific taste test with my brother, husband, and myself. The results were as follows...

Husband: the bread flour ones are a little saltier and lighter and just better.

Brother: the bread flour ones are a little sweeter and heavier but in a good way. The all purpose ones tasted bland. NOTE: brother ate this bun while it was warm and he said it may have tasted heavier than it really was because it was fresh out of the oven.

Me: the bread flour ones were definitely lighter and had a slightly crisper crust. They held their shape well, even while warm, without being heavy or "stodgy" inside.

Interesting that there were different opinions on the taste but in the end everyone preferred the bread flour batch over the all purpose flour batch.

So, in general, I would say that the bread flour yielded lighter results. The taste was preferred by all and I would recommend using bread flour for all homemade bread products. There is also whole wheat bread flour for healthier options.