Baking – Do I really need pastry flour in the molasses cookie recipe

The only difference between regular whole wheat flour and white whole wheat flour is the variety of wheat from which it is ground. Regular whole wheat flour is ground from red wheat while white whole wheat is from a lighter pigmented wheat and thus the lighter color. In both cases the germ is still intact and thus as Jonathan Campbell stated, it will go rancid more quickly than white flour.

Keep it in a cool dark place and use up quickly if you can't refrigerate or freeze it.

When you keep it in the refrigerator or freezer and plan to use it for yeast breads, remember to allow it to warm to room temperature before using for best results with your yeast.

I don't know why About.com warns that "additional protein will increase toughness" when the whole purpose of adding corn starch is to reduce the protein.

All purpose flour should have around 10% protein and 90% starch. Pastry flour has 8% protein and 92% starch. Cornstarch has 0% protein. You only have to mix cornstarch and all-purpose flour in the mathematically correct ratio to get a mixture which behaves like pastry flour in terms of protein toughening.

The numbers above are rounded, but then, different manufacturers will produce flours with different percentage of proteins, and some wheat proteins also get tougher than others depending on the cultivar, and recipes still work with that kind of tolerance. So I use them and mix 80 g AP flour and 20 g cornstarch for every 100 g pastry flour I need, which results in a flour mixture with roughly 8% protein content. I use it primarily for flaky crusts, and it works quite well there.