Welcome to Kitchen Queries, where the nigella.com team will answer your cooking or food related questions.  We’d love you to submit some of your recipe problems, dilemmas or queries for us to get our teeth into!

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• Self-Raising Flour

  How do you make self-raising flour at home? Unfortunately it is not available where I live. Thanks!

  Posted by sindhuri. Answered on 10th Feb 2012 at 12.00

  From the nigella team:

  Nigella tends not to use self-raising flour in her more recent books as she doesn't bother to keep both plain (all-purpose) and self-raising flour. Partly as keeping just one type of flour saves on storage space and partly as if you don't use self-raising flour regularly then it will loose its raising power over time.

  It is fairly easy to make your own self-raising flour. Just add 2 teaspoons of baking powder for each 150g/6oz/1 cup plain flour. Sift the flour and baking powder together into a bowl before using, to make sure the baking powder is thoroughly distributed (or you can put both ingredients into a bowl and whisk them together). If you are baking with cocoa, yogurt or buttermilk then add 1/4 teaspoon bicarboante of soda (baking soda) as well as the baking powder as generally these ingredients need a little extra leavening boost.

  Make sure that your baking powder has not passed its "use by" or "best before" date as baking powder also has a finite life and if it is old you may find that your cakes don't rise. 

  In the US self-rising flour also contains added salt - around 1/2 teaspoon per cup.

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