Everything You Need to Know About White Lily Flour

White Lily Flour

White Lily Flour

Southerners like to think back nostalgically to the “good old days,” and many of us are convinced that our mothers or grandmothers or Great-Aunt Tilly made the best cakes, pies, and biscuits in the world. It might surprise some to learn that these revered ladies all used the same secret ingredient to make their cakes tender, their piecrusts flaky, and their biscuits melt in your mouth.

The White Lily brand was created in 1883 when J. Allen Smith bought a flour mill in Knoxville, Tennessee, and began milling a soft-wheat flour, which he named for his wife, Lillie. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Sunday dinner was considered a special occasion and only the best ingredients were used to prepare it, White Lily became known as the Sunday flour.

What sets White Lily Flour apart from other brands of all-purpose flour? It’s the only major brand in the United States that is milled entirely from soft winter wheat, which contains less gluten than hard wheat. Less gluten means flakier biscuits and piecrusts, and that difference has made it the best-selling flour in the southeastern United States-a favorite among home cooks and professional chefs alike for more than 128 years.

4 COMMENTS

  1. I have trouble with the cinnamon oatmeal drops. They flatten out and do not look anything like the picture. I have tried every thing I can think of; but nothing works….still flat paper thin cookies. Anything you could suggest I would appreciate .
    Thank you.
    Patricia Henward

  2. Where does this ‘soft winter wheat’ come from? Is it grown in the U.S. at all? Is it grown outside the U.S. & then milled in our country? I have yet to see this info anywhere.

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