Category Archives: Flours

09/08/11

Corn Meal is Corn Meal

Not! I may be blasé about the differences between cane sugar and beet sugar, between high-end grand cru chocolates and the chocolates you can buy at the supermarket, but when it comes to corn meal I get animated. Simply put, you need the best quality stuff you can find. And when I say “best quality” I mean stone ground, ideally from an old-school grist mill of the kind you find in national parks and those historic restoration villages.

Why am I so particular about corn meal? Because there’s no corn meal like fresh meal ground slowly between stones from whole kernels of dried corn. Though you may not realize it, the corn meal you find in supermarket packages is not only stale, it’s ground from only the endosperm of the kernel, the oily germ having been pinched off by steel rollers.

What difference does that make? A lot. Because the germ contains the oil and the oil is where much of the corn flavor is. So why then do large commercial mills remove it? Preservation. As I mentioned in a previous post, dried corn kernels will keep for years — so long as you don’t grind them. For grinding releases the oil which, being liquid, goes rancid after a few short weeks on the shelf.

This is why even some of the better-quality packaged whole grain corn meals are suspect. Who knows how long they’ve been on the shelf losing precious flavor? Nope, much as I like to make fun of ingredient purists of various types, I am a purist about this. If you want to produce moist, rich-tasting corn breads and puddings of the kind our great-parents enjoyed, you literally have to go back to their sources: old mills. They’re the only places to find the whole kernel, low-volume meals that provide that real, old-school flavor and texture.

Here in Kentucky we’re lucky enough to have a few of the old water-powered grist mills still in operation. Their products can be found in area specialty shops. If you don’t have convenient access to a source like that, fresh-milled corn meal from real live grist mills can be had online. Buy it in a small quantity and either use it right away or store it in a plastic bag in the freezer where it will stay fresh the longest. Oh, and if you’re a fan of whole wheat (whole meal) flours, you’ll want to store them the same way, because the same rules apply. End of communication!

Filed under:  Corn Meal, Pastry | 6 Comments
06/07/10

White Wheat Flour

White wheat flour has only been getting attention for few years in the States. It is, quite simply, a white strain of wheat which when milled yields a whole wheat flour that’s far paler than traditional whole wheat flour. Historically, American agriculture has produced two basic strains of wheat: hard red wheat and soft red wheat (Italian durum was popularized in the middle of the 20th Century, but that’s another discussion). Red wheat is called “red” wheat because of the reddish-brown hue of its seed coat (bran). White wheat has a much lighter, yellow-brown seed coat. Grind it, and it looks almost white.

White wheat is nothing new in Asia, where it’s used to make noodles and breads, nor in Australia where almost all the wheat they produce is hard white. Here in the States, though, it has never grown very well. Hence our confusion when we see “White Whole Wheat Flour” on King Arthur bags. The reason we’re seeing it now is because over the last 12 years or so, new strains of hard white wheat with names like “Argent”, “Wendy”, “Snowbird” and “Lolo” have been introduced. They grow well in our climate and have test weights comparable to those of hard red wheats.

So what’s the difference between hard white wheat and hard red wheat? Other than the color, there are some important differences. In the field it’s fussier, a bit more prone to disease and early sprouting. On the plate, however, it’s far milder tasting than hard red wheat, especially in its “whole wheat” form. Why? It turns out those red pigments in hard red wheat contain phenols and tannins which are responsible for those bitter and astringent flavors that many people (like me) find unpleasant. White wheat offers people who have traditionally been less than enthused by the taste of of whole wheat bread a milder alternative, one we could almost be fooled into thinking was regular white flour if nobody told us.

Of course this week I surely will know, since I made my whole wheat sandwich bread out of it. Darnit! Me and my big fingers. I ruined the surprise!

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07/13/09

American & European Flour Rough Equivalents

I’ve had numerous requests to put up some sort of table comparing American flour types with their French, German and Italian counterparts. And while I’d love to comply, I’m not sure that much real data exists on that, for all the reasons I spelled out last week. However, because there are no lengths I won’t go for my readership (as long as it’s, you know, convenient for me), I spent the weekend scouring available sources for the following information:

American all-purpose = French Type 55 = German Type 550 = Italian 00

American pastry flour = French Type 45 = German Type 405 = Italian 00

American bread flour = French Type 80 = German Type 812 = Italian Type 1

American whole wheat = French Type 150 = German Type 1700 = Italian “Wheat”

Now then, I know I have an increasingly international readership here at joepastry.com, so if anyone wants to correct and/or add to what I’ve started here, by all means, weigh in.

Filed under:  American vs. European Flours, Baking Basics, Flours | 13 Comments
07/09/09

High-Gluten Flour

For that matter, what’s gluten? The next time you make a batch of bread or pizza dough, pinch off a little bit and work it between your fingers under the kitchen faucet for a minute. A good proportion of the dough, mostly water-soluble starch, will wash away. Yet a small rubbery ball will remain. That’s it. The non-water-soluble, protein portion of flour: gluten.

Of course if you tried the same thing with just a pile of flour or a simple water-flour paste the whole thing would wash away. That’s because gluten must be both watered and worked in order for it to organize itself into a mass.

What we call gluten is actually a combination of two different proteins: glutenin and gliadin. Both are extremely long-chain proteins, but with different properties. Glutenin molecules are rather fluid, and are capable of forming very strong bonds with one another. When they’re worked they do just that, bonding both end-to-end and side-to-side into a kind of mesh or network. Gliadin molecules by comparison are tightly wound and bond weakly to one another and to glutenin molecules.

The elastic mesh that these molecules form is what allows dough to rise. The gluten mesh catches and holds carbon dioxide bubbles made by yeast, which would otherwise simply evaporate. The gas bubbles thus make small pockets in the dough. As the dough heats in the oven, those pockets begin to expand, partly as a result of heating gas, but mostly as a result of steam. The stretchy gluten mesh expands with the gas and steam until the starch in the dough gelatinizes, fixing the bubbles in place.

Just how big the bubbles get is determined by two things: the protein (gluten) content of the flour and the amount of water in the dough. More gluten provides more elasticity, allowing bubbles to expand, and more water makes a softer dough, allowing those bubbles to more easily combine with one another.

Of course the elasticity of gluten also makes breads chewy. Sometimes this is desirable (bagels and pizza crusts), sometimes it isn’t (cakes and biscuits). Thus we have flours with different proportions of protein for different purposes.

So-called high-gluten flour has the highest protein content of any standard wheat flour (to 14 percent…only durum flour has more), and so has very few uses for most home bakers. So few, in fact, that it’s not worth the time for most commercial flour makers to package and sell it in grocery stores. You either need to order it, or somehow con your local bakery or pizza parlor out of some.

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07/08/09

Italian Flour

People love to make Italian breads — pizza especially. And for that, the serious ones tend to seek out Italian flour, the kind that’s known as Italian “00″ flour. As to what exactly that is, there is quite a bit of confusion. Search around the web a bit and you can find all kinds of animated discourse on the subject:

It’s HIGH-gluten flour specifically made for pizza!

No, it’s LOW-gluten flour that’s used for pastry!

No, it’s flour that’s only used for bread!

No, it’s flour that CAN’T be used for bread!

I’ll do my best to settle some of this, because it is a touch complicated. First off, Italian flour makers (like all flour makers on the Continent) don’t classify flours in terms of their gluten content. Rather, they classify them by ash content and by grind. Italian Type “2″ flour is a coarsely ground high-ash flour (what we in the US might call a “meal”). Types “1″ and “0″ are medium-ash, medium grind flours for hearth breads. Type “00″ is the low-ash fine grind that’s used for many whiter breads (including pizza) and some pastry. In general it’s roughly equivalent to our own all-purpose flour. It’s fairly high in protein (gluten), and good for a lot of things.

So then if it’s high in gluten, why do some pizza makers substitute extremely LOW gluten flour for Italian “00″ flour in their pizza crust recipes? The answer is that not all gluten is created equal. Some varieties of wheat contain gluten that is both hard and springy (like our own hard red wheat), and make very elastic doughs. Other types contain gluten that’s hard but not springy (durum for example) which produce doughs that are firm but not very elastic. Most Italian flours are of the latter variety, which is why most real Italian pizza makers don’t do this with their dough, but instead prefer to stretch their pizzas into shape.

What does it all mean? It means that Italian flour has “bite” but not “chew”. American high-gluten flour has both “bite” and “chew”, but that’s not necessarily a good thing, depending on who you talk to. Some American pizza makers, hoping to more closely approximate a Neapolitan-style pizza, opt to eliminate the “chew” of American flour by employing a low gluten flour, sacrificing the “bite” in the process. It’s a trade-off that some people really like, for instance me, though I definintely opt for the genuine article when I can get it.

Hope than makes sense.

Filed under:  Baking Basics, Flours, Italian Flour | 2 Comments
07/08/09

French Flour

The thing that most Americans want to know when they talk about French flour is: what can they do to approximate French “Type 55″ flour? That’s the kind that’s most commonly used for baguettes and even many pastries (it’s akin to an American all-purpose). That’s an extremely difficult thing to do for reasons I discussed below in the post “What’s the deal with ash content?”. However there several other important differences between American and French flour that make a direct equivalent an all-but-impossible to thing to formulate using commonly available components.

But Joe, flour is just ground-up wheat, how different can the two really be? The answer might surprise you. For one, French flour is milled and mixed to different standards compared to American flour. Typical French bread flours, as I mentioned at the beginning of this long series of posts, are what are known as “straight” flours. A straight flour is what you get when you grind a wheat berry, remove most of the bran and germ and a) don’t sift it into lots of different grades and b) don’t mix it together with other grades from other batches (as American millers usually do). The result is a flour that’s coarser than a normal American bread or all-purpose flour.

The character of the protein (gluten) is also quite different in a French flour, not nearly as elastic as the kind you find in American flour. Though French Type 55 flours routinely list a protein content of around 11.5 percent, they perform more like a medium-protein American flour, around 9.5 percent. That puts them on par, as I mentioned before, with American all-purpose flours. Plenty of bakers try to replicate baguettes or other French breads with high-gluten flours (or mixtures of low and high gluten flours) but the experts are mostly in agreement that too much American gluten is bad for a good French bread.

So when you get right down to it, there’s not much about American and French flours that are the same, other than the fact that they’re all flours. They’re different types of wheat grown in different places, under different conditions, then processed differently and milled differently. The end result is that they behave differently from one another in the same types of applications. Does that mean it’s a hopeless task to try to make a good baguette out of American flour? By no means. Simply select a good, hard all-purpose flour (preferably a Northern one made from a hard red winter wheat) and you’re at as good a starting point as any baker on this continent.

Filed under:  Baking Basics, Flours, French Flour | 4 Comments
07/08/09

What’s the deal with “ash content”?

In the same way that Americans talk of flours in terms of their protein content, Europeans talk of ash content. But what is this mysterious “ash” and why would you want it in your flour? The answer is that the ash isn’t in the flour, it what’s left over after a set quantity of flour (100 grams, I think) is burned — burned in such a way that all the starch, bran and germ is eliminated, leaving only the charred remains of the non-flour matter behind. The ash is then measured to determine how much of this non-flour matter the original batch of flour contained.

But just what is this “non-flour matter”? “Mineral content” some sources will tell you, “material related to fiber” others say. Both of those terms are essentially true, if non-specific. “Ash” is really a catch-all term for all sorts of non-harmful, non-starch items and/or impurities in the flour, which range from the naturally-occurring minerals in the tissue of the wheat itself to pieces of wheat stalk, bits of dirt and flecks of stone, right up to things like insect parts and rodent hairs.

What…disgusted? Don’t be, because American flours have all those things too (if you don’t believe me, read this sometime…just do yourself a favor and do it on an empty stomach). We just don’t like to talk about it, which — at least I theorize — is the reason we talk about things like protein levels and extraction rates instead.

What can you learn from the ash content of flour? Quite a lot, really. If you consider a wheat berry as you might, oh say, an onion or an egg — it’s a thing that’s made up of layers. Since wheat is grown outdoors, it stands to reason that the outer layers of that berry will contain more impurities than the inner ones (also most of the naturally occurring minerals are found in the outer bran of the berry). Grinding and sifting is a process by which those outer layers are removed, so the more you refine a flour — the more you purify it down to only the very inner, starchy endosperm — the fewer non-flour items you’re going to have in the finished product.

And so it is with European flours, where a high ash content (say, around 1.5 percent) is going to be a whole grain flour and a low ash content (0.3 percent or less) is going to be a cake flour. If this sounds a lot like what we know in America as an “extraction rate”, it is. However because different wheats naturally accumulate more minerals and “non-flour matter” than others according to what type they are and where they’re grown, it’s not a perfect comparison. But it’s close enough for jazz.

Why can’t American flours simply be graded this way as well to make things easier on all of us internationally-minded bakers? It’s been tried. However it turns out that there are fundamental differences in the way Americans harvest and store wheat compared to Europeans. For example, we dry our wheat to a greater degree than Continentals do, which is one of the factors that throws the calculations off.

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07/07/09

Pumpernickel Flour

Pumpernickel flour is a bit of a one-trick pony in the kitchen, though I’ve seen it used for crackers and even cookies at times. As you’d expect, it’s a very coarse blend of whole grain rye and wheat flours, designed to create dense loaves of that splendid ethnic delicacy known as pumpernickel bread. How dense is pumpernickel flour? Up to four times denser than a standard whole wheat flour, if that gives you a feel for it. The coarse grind approximates the rough-and-tumble milling of the peasantry in the East European countryside of old. Just remember when buying pumpernickel flour that they don’t call it “pumpernickel” for nothing.

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07/07/09

Rye Flour

Rye isn’t a wheat at all, though it is a grass (Secale cereale) that produces a grain. That grain is useful in many of the same ways that wheat is useful, but truth be told, you’ve really gotta love rye if you want to make things out of it.

Why? Because unlike rye’s housebroken cousin, wheat, it resists coming to heel. For one, rye grain has the nasty habit of germinating (sprouting) before it can even be harvested, which means that the enzymes stored in the germ of the seed have already become activated. Why is this a problem? Because enzymes digest starch. Their job is to break down the long-chain starch molecules stored in the endosperm into energy-giving sugars that the sprout can use to grow. This isn’t a big deal from the standpoint of endosperm consumption, since there’s still plenty left for us humans when we finally get around to harvesting it. However it does mean that the flour that’s eventually made from the grain contains copious amounts of those same active enzymes. Mix that flour with water, and the enzymes continue their work, digesting starch at an accelerated rate, undermining a dough’s ability to rise.

Rye bread’s rising ability is further compromised by the fact that rye’s protein profile is different from ordinary wheat. Whereas wheat contains ample amounts of both gliadin and glutenin (the two components of gluten), rye flour has gliadin and glutelin, a protein that lacks glutenin’s ability to form end-to-end bonds. No end-to-end bonding means no long, stretchy gluten networks, no stretchy gluten networks means no (or limited) bubble-holding ability, no bubble-holding ability means all the gas and steam escapes, and well…you get the idea. This is why most rye breads are made from both rye and wheat flour, a mixture known as maslin.

All is not lost in the dicey world of rye, however, for rye grain does contain one unique ace-in-the-hole: a gummy cell wall goo called pentosan gum. And while one of pentosan gum’s effects is to even further undermine gluten formation, the gum itself traps and holds gas bubbles, contributing to rise. Pentosan gum also traps and holds water molecules, creating a bread that is at once moist and less inclined to staling. Thus even oddballs have their virtues (ask my mother, she’ll tell you).

One word of warning about pentosan gum: if you knead a rye dough for too long the gum leaches out of the rye granules and turns the whole dough into a giant sticky mess. No matter how much more flour you add you can never un-stick it, because more rye flour is just more fuel for the proverbial fire, as it were.

Look for rye flour in light, medium and dark varieties. As with wheat flours, the darker the shade, the more of the bran and germ that’s been left in it. Organic rye flour is rare, but can be found, and is excellent for getting bread starters going. The reason has to do with the premature germinating that rye is famous for. Sprouted grain is a magnet for yeasts, mold and bacteria (all of which are seeking a place at the table for endosperm banquet), and are very handy when it comes to beginning a culture.

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07/07/09

Graham Flour

Invented by the Reverend Sylvester Graham in the mid-1800′s, graham flour has all the base components of whole wheat flour in it: germ, bran and endosperm. What makes it different is the way it’s ground. Graham believed that in order to be properly absorbed by the body, the endosperm of the wheat berry must be very, very finely ground. So, like conventional millers he separated it out and ground it to a powder-like consistency. But because he also believed that wheat germ and bran were most healthful when consumed in relatively large pieces, he ground them separately and only slightly. The result, when he mixed the whole mess back together, was a coarse meal that journalists of the day compared favorably to sawdust.

It made heavy bread (because the big bran pieces kept gluten strands from forming) and still heavier crackers. Just the tonic, so Graham believed, for quashing our unhealthful desires for white flour, meat, sugar, spices and sex.

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