Why buy plain flour?

[starkadder]

My MIL tells me that you can make everything which requires flour (including pastry, white sauce, etc) with self raising flour, and that there is no point having plain flour in the cupboard at all.

She says the only people who still use plain flour use it because they are romantics nostalgic for bygone days.

I am not too sure about this. I have plain flour and add baking powder when necessary, firstly because I live in Spain where self raising is hard to come by and secondly because my kitchen is quite small and I don't want to use up all the cupboard space with 2 types of flour.

Opinions please!

and i use flour a lot. I make tortillas and sopapillas regularly

My great grandfather was a blacksmith.

That would explain my mum having an anvil on the hearth then.

Snort. She's got it the wrong way round or is just talking bollocks. I bake a lot of biscuits and fairy cakes with my boys and we rarely use SR flour. That's only for Proper Cakes.

I had to throw out a bag of self raising the other day as it had gone out of date, That takes aaaages!
I just add baking powder to plain flour and always forgot it was in teh cupboard. She is being a weirdo, and I certainly wouldn't eat ehr cooking

I hardly ever buy self raising. In fat, almost all of my cake recipes call for plain with adding the agents yourself rather than self raising....

I only ever use self-raising for cakes, and I hardly ever make cakes.

Plain flour rules!

ahh, you are all brilliant.

Riven - the bygone days were the days before the invention of new fangled self raising flour. i.e. people who use plain flour are Luddites.

Maybe next time she comes to stay I will make her delicious self raising pancakes.

hehehe it is a bit mean of me to seek reassurance like this because I KNEW I was right, just wanted everyone to say so

She is wrong. SR flour is for people who are either too thick and/or too lazy to add baking powder to plain flour.

You can't make Yorkshire puddings with s/r flour.

I discovered by accident that crumble made with SR flour is quite nice! But you definitely need plain for sauces, batters, biscuits etc.