Brilliant results but just too expensive! (Homepride Self Raising Flour)

Member Name: sakura8

Product:	Homepride Self Raising Flour
Date:	22/07/09 (85 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Light and fluffy pancakes

Disadvantages: Too expensive

I absolutely love baking so we get through quite a lot of flour at home and we usually just use the Tesco Value Plain and Self Raising flour, which is a bargain at 43p for 1.5kg. This is incredibly cheap compared to the Homepride flour which is £1.19 for the same amount.

It's been so long since I've used a branded flour, that I thought there wasn't any difference in the results from using the value stuff. However, my fiancé's Mum bought some Homepride Self Raising Flour recently because that is the only brand they had in stock and I made American style pancakes with it.

The pancake batter is normally quite thick, but using the Homepride flour made the batter even thicker and I thought I'd made a mistake in weighing it out! I cooked them as normal and the end result was amazing. The pancakes were even lighter and fluffier than normal and they didn't have such a starchy flavour.

I was really amazed at the difference, so I compared the ingredients of both types of flour:
* The Tesco one contains: Unbleached Wheat Flour, Raising Agents (Calcium Phosphate, Sodium Bicarbonate).

* The Homepride one contains: Unbleached Wheat Flour, Raising Agents (Sodium Hydrogen Carbonate, Disodium Diphosphate, Monocalcium Phosphate).

As you can see, there are a lot more scary named chemicals in the Homepride flour, but really they are just raising/leavening agents you find in most cakes and baked goods. So this explains why my pancakes were so light and fluffy. I already add baking powder to my pancake batter, but Sodium Hydrogen Carbonate is more commonly known as Bicarbonate of Soda, so I think I will try adding that to the Tesco Value flour as it is so much cheaper!

It would be nice to be able to afford the Homepride flour all the time, but to be honest it is hard to justify paying so much more for it. Although my pancakes were twice as good when using Homepride, we will stick with the Tesco value flour and I'll just experiment with adding chemicals!

Summary: I'll stick to Tesco Value.