Baking With Third Class Flour

I enjoy baking. Biscuits, brownies, cakes.

Baking at home isn't as popular here in Philippines as it is in the U.S. and locating a store that sells wheat flour isn't easy in Dumaguete. I can't recall ever seeing whole wheat flour. Fortunately, there is a grocery store here that usually has white flour in kilo bags.

At Lee Plaza grocery, I can normally find all purpose flour, cake flour and something called third class flour. I prefer to buy the cake flour for all my baking, though I will substitute the all purpose flour if the store is temporarily out of the cake flour. I've stayed away from the third class flour until a few days ago.

Because of the quarantine, I've been unable to buy either the cake flour or the all purpose. As an experiment, I bought 2 kilos of the third class flour. We all wanted biscuits a day or so ago and I used the third class flour for the first time. Actually, I was very surprised. The biscuits were as good - if not better - than the biscuits made with the other two flours.

Pancakes made from the third class flour, however were another matter entirely. I could not manage to make pancakes with this flour. The pancakes were an absolute disaster.

The only explanation that made sense to me was that the heating process involved in making pancakes is very different than baking in an oven.

To test this idea, I decided to bake banana bread (AKA banana cake in Philippines).

As can be seen in these two photos, the banana bread looks wonderful. The texture of the bread was perfection. The only problem was that in my haste, I had neglected to add sugar to the batter. Still, the banana bread tasted very good. It would have been better had I put in the proper amount of sugar, but in my mind the experiment was a success. Next time, I'll pay attention to what I'm going and put in all the ingredients.