Flour for Pies, Tarts, and Pastries

The flours I use for pies and pastry are pastry flour or bleached all-purpose flour. Pastry flour, as the name implies, contains the ideal protein content to produce a good balance of flakiness and tenderness. The major advantage of using commercial pastry flour, such as Bessie or King Arthur, is that its protein content is fairly standard from batch to batch, but you can also approximate the same protein content by blending together a national brand of bleached all-purpose flour and cake flour as described.