In your recipe for croissants you call for "all-purpose flour." Is this plain, self-raising, or bread flour?

 American all-purpose flour and British plain flour are roughly equivalent. We have received comments that recipes prepared on one side of the Atlantic with plain flour came out differently prepared on the other side with all-purpose flour, so we are quite open to the possibility that the two flours are somewhat different.

Various European flours are a bit different from the Canadian/American hard-wheat flours produced here, but in the general context of flour nomenclature plain flour is all-purpose flour.

To avoid needless confusion in the future, we'll include here a modest American-British dictionary of flour terms. The chart can be read from left to right or from right to left, depending on your continent of origin:

• Cake & pastry flour = soft flour
• All-purpose flour = plain flour
• Bread flour = strong flour, hard flour, bread flour
• Self-rising flour = self-raising flour
• Whole-wheat flour = wholemeal flour, wholewheat flour

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