What happens if you use a different kind of flour in baking?

Question

I'm thinking to try to make chocolate chip cookies for the first time today since I moved to India from the US. I have all the ingredients except "all purpose flour". I have "atta" - a flour we use to make rotis...which I think is more wheat based. What will happen if I use that instead of "all purpose"?

Answer 1

All purpose flour is wheat based.  

This might be something that you will have to try to find out what the results will be.  

Don't they make chocolate cookies in India?

Good luck and have fun experimenting.

Answer 2

The different types of flour all have different levels of gluten. Gluten is the bond that helps pull all the ingredients together in a recipe. If you use a high-gluten flour in a recipe that calls for a light flour, your product will be heavy, thick, and could taste very grainy. All-purpose flour is usually the way to go as most recipes in commercial cookbooks are printed towards this product. Otherwise, follow what the recipe calls for and you should be just fine.

Answer 3

You don't use wheat based Atta for making cookies in India but wheat based Maida, get a kilo of Maida from grocery shop. By the way I was waiting for your call & meeting me, what happened?

Answer 4

Atta flour

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Atta is the Hindi word for a kind of wheat flour commonly used in South Asian cooking. It is a whole wheat flour made from hard wheat. Hard wheats have a high protein content, so doughs made out of atta flour are strong and can be rolled out very thin. Breads made from atta flour include chapati, roti, and puri.

It is obtained when the complete wheat grains are ground to get flour from which nothing is removed. It is creamy/brown in colour and relatively coarse compared with flour. Since there are no removals from atta, all the constituents of the wheat grain are preserved.

Traditionally, atta is made by stone grinding, a process that imparts a characteristic aroma and taste to the bread. High bran content of Atta makes it a fiber-rich food. The high temperatures of friction reached in a "chakki" (stone grinder) are of the order of 110-125 deg C. At such high temperatures the carotenes present in the bran tend to give out the characteristic roasty smell of atta and contribute to the sweetness of the atta.

The various quality control parameters for the atta industry are Ash Content, Moisture Content, Acid Insoluble Ash, Water Absorption, Alcoholic Acidity, Granulation Profile, Damaged Starch and Gluten Content.