Other bleached Southern All-Purpose Flours you may be able to find locally for a low-gluten pastry-type flour along with White Lily are Gladiola, Martha White, and Red Band.

Personally, I purchase soft white wheat and mill my own pastry flour, or mix hard wheat with low-protein (gluten) grains like spelt, oats, barley, rye, etc. When I mill wholegrain "cake flour" I use a 3:1 ratio of soft white wheat and spelt or oats.

King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour is really not a good choice for pastry, and sometimes not a good choice for cookies and quick breads as well, and definitely not a good choice for cake, because it's milled from hard wheat and it's even higher in protein (gluten) than national brands of all-purpose flour (Gold Medal and Pillsbury - 11 grams per cup or 9.5 to 12% protein). King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose comes in around 13 grams per cup (or 11.7% protein) - which is closer to bread flour (13-14 grams per cup or 11.5-12.5% protein).

National Brands of all-purpose flour are generally milled from a mix of soft and hard wheat so it will serve "all" purposes. Enough hard wheat to form gluten for making yeast breads, and enough soft wheat to give quick breads and cakes a tender crumb. My opinion of all-purpose flour is that it's not the optimum choice for anything, but just good enough for most things.

Hard wheat can have a wide variety of protein levels, so technically, it is possible to mill "pastry flour" from hard wheat varieties. But once you've milled your own flour, you'll see a great deal of difference between soft and hard wheat varieties - the feel of the flour as well as performance.

Another tip if you would like less gluten-development for making pastry (or biscuits) - no matter what flour you use - is to add a little more fat and keep mixing to a bare minimum. Where fat coats the flour, the water can't penetrate and develop gluten - so a little extra fat will help that. When it comes to pastry, biscuits and quick breads, keeping gluten development to a bare minimum is your goal. The easiest way to achieve that is to start with a low-gluten (or protein) flour to begin with.

-Grainlady

Its confusing to talk percentages of protein when the bag lists grams.

Here's a link to a list of protein percentages from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Pie and Pastry Bible. Very useful, assuming the proportions haven't changed in the past few years. Good discussion too.

I have to say I don't like King Arthur's pastry flour. Not sure why, but the result was not as good as Pillsbury bleached all-purpose. I use that for pies, cookies, and some cakes , and use KA AP for most yeast breads.

Here is a link that might be useful: protein % in various floours - RLB

Something caught my eye in the link cloudy christine provided -- about "strong" flour -- which might need a little more explanation.

Strong vs weak wheat is an interesting study and information we don't generally get when it comes to a bag of flour. But we may have noticed it if we purchased an inexpensive bag of flour somewhere along the line and it didn't perform as well as good old ___________ (fill in the blank) flour. When I teach bread classes I advise people NOT to purchase off-brands of flour from discount places like the Dollar General Store, Aldi, etc., because it can be an inferior flour product that can lack enough gluten for making good bread - or a weak flour in other words.

Professional bakers use the terms strong and weak to indicate a wheat or flour's "baking strength", or whether it's suitable for specific baked goods.

Hard and soft wheats are terms primarily of interest to the fine folks who mill the flour and it describes the texture of the endosperm and how it breaks down in milling - but we also attribute these names to the protein/gluten levels. If I forget whether I have soft wheat or hard wheat milled into flour, all I have to do is take a pinch of the flour and rub it between my fingers. Soft wheat is just that, soft, like a fine silky powder, while hard wheat is grittier.

Soft wheat kernels are usually plumper and have a larger endosperm - and appear more transparant than hard wheat. The commercial uses for flour from soft wheat is often used for crackers, cookies, cakes, doughnuts, pancakes, waffles, muffins, soft noodles, ice cream cones, flaked breakfast cereals, granola, soup thickeners, gravy thickeners and wheat germ (according to one source).

Strong wheats are generally in the hard wheat variety, small and wrinkled in appearance with a small endosperm, and the dominate protein in the gluten group are glutenins - so they are best used for yeast breads. Weak wheats have a deficiency of glutenins - but can also be milled from hard wheat varieties. So it's not just the amount of protein, but the type of protein in the flour. Weak flours can be milled from hard wheat varieties, and this happens around here to the wheat crop when we have too much rain during the growing season. This is why you don't see wheat being irrigated like you do corn. Too much moisture is a bad thing for producing high-gluten, high-protein wheat that makes great bread.

To add to the confusion, there is also durum wheat - which has the highest amount of protein of all wheat varieties, but the dominant protein in the gluten group are gliadins - which is what you want for making pasta, and generally what durum wheat is used for.

You can find a mix of strong and weak wheat in most fields. If there is an area shaded by trees, or a low-lying area where water tends to pool, the protein in the wheat in those areas will tend to be "weak" (lacking quality gluten levels) due to the growing conditions.

FYI - White (bleached and unbleached) bread flour is milled from medium-strength wheats. Too much gluten in flour will make your bread tough and it takes a LOT longer to knead and develop the gluten. That's why adding a lot of vital wheat gluten to recipes isn't a good thing - unless you like rubbery bread.

Another interesting point, all wheat used for making flour were soft wheat varieties until the mid- to late-1800's with the advent of hard wheat varieties. Especially Turkey Red Wheat, which became the source of many new varieties of hard wheat we grow today. Turkey Red was hand-picked and carried to Kansas in 1874 by Mennonites from Crimea, Russia. Turkey Red wheat once covered over 90 percent of wheat acreage in the Great Plains - now it's considered an heirloom wheat variety and I've only seen it entered at the Kansas State Fair as an heirloom variety. It's still available, if you know who to ask, but you probably won't like the bitter-tasting flour it produces due to the dark bran color. It has three genes that determine bran color, while most of today's varieties of red wheat only have 1 or 2 genes for bran color. Contrast that to white wheat that is the "albino" of wheat, which has none of the genes that determine bran color.

-Grainlady