I make bread every week and have never bought 'bread flour'. I know it's higher in gluten but my bread sticks together well without it. Using this higher gluten four in other recipes... not so sure. (This is just a post to suggest it's not necessary to use bread flour for bread. But maybe I'll give it a try.)

Depends on the application. High gluten bread flour: think pizza dough, bagels. Low gluten pastry flour: think biscuits, cakes. AP flour is in between those extremes. Bread flour would make a tough cake, and pastry flour would make a weak bagel.

Here is a link that might be useful: choosing flour for baking

What are you going to use it in?

In general, it's not a good choice because of the high amount of gluten in the flour. I'd certainly avoid using it in anything where you don't want a lot of gluten-development to begin with - cookies, quick breads, pastry, biscuits...

Cookies will be harder, dryer, as well as tough - so choose a cookie that is already crispy, not soft. It will be easy to over-develop gluten in quick breads during mixing, and they will be more tough-than-tender and you may end up with tunnels running through your muffins and quick breads. Pancakes will be tough.

If you do use it (emergency use), keep mixing to a bare minimum.

Adjustments you can make:

-Use 1-2 tablespoon LESS per cup.

-Additional fat will help if you use it for biscuits or pastry, where the fat is mixed into the flour. The fat coats the gluten in the flour. Where the gluten is coated with fat, the liquid will only allow the gluten to form in short strands.

-Use a mixture - 10% low-gluten flour - rye flour or blend oatmeal into a flour in a blender or food processor and use it as 10% of the flour mixture.

All-purpose flour is a blend of hard wheat and soft wheat while bread flour is milled from hard wheat. Soft wheat really makes a huge amount of difference in the blend of all-purpose flour to add tenderness to baked goods, while hard wheat gives enough strong flour to raise a loaf of yeast bread. Hence the term "all-purpose" flour. It was developed for all purposes. The problem is that it's NOT optimum for anything.

-Grainlady

FWIW.....today happened to be "bread day" at our house. Been making mom's recipe bread for many years using King Arthur bread flour. Store was out today so purchased Gold Medal unbleached all-purpose. That was the only change. I could tell the difference as soon as I started mixing. More so when kneading. Rose differently and felt different when working the sponge.

Not to get crazy. The bread turned out just fine. However, not as good as with the "bread flour" I usually use.