SC - Sharpening Fine Points or Will Adamantius Tell All?

[Decker, Terry D.]

>2. What modern flours most closely correspond to the sorts of flours
>referred to in period sources?

Here's a little lecturey commentary on what I've tried.

Bear

The Wheat

The original European wheat was emmer and has been used since Antiquity.
 This was later joined by German wheat (spelt), which appears to have
been popular in Rome and was spread across Europe by the Vandals.  These
were displaced by club wheat.  There are now some 30,000 varieties of
wheat developed from these basic stocks.

Medieval wheats were white-skinned and soft (low in gluten).  Modern
wheats, especially those grown in North America are red, amber or
yellow-skinned and are hard (high in gluten).  Spelt was popular in
bread making because it was harder than the other wheat available at the
time. 

Modern flours tend to be mixtures of flours with all-purpose or bread
flour being high in gluten and cake flour being low in gluten.

In practice, I ignore the difference between hard and soft flours and
use what is readily available.  Unless you can get it through a bakery
supply, soft flour tends to come in small packages with a very high
price.



The Milling

Medieval flour was stone milled.  Most modern flour is roller milled, a
process developed in the 19th Century.

Roller milling breaks the wheat germ loose from the endosperm early in
the milling process, yielding wheat germ and bran as a salable products
and high extraction flour.  Because of the minimal wheat germ, roller
milled flour has an indefinite storage life and is drier than a
comparable stone milled flour.  The germ is used to make semolina and
other wheat germ products. 

In Medieval milling, the fineness of the meal depended on the quality of
the stones.  Wheat would normally have been ground on the hardest,
closest tolerance stones available to achieve the finest average meal.  

Stone ground wheat comes very close to the fineness of roller milling.
The chief difference is in the level of extraction.  Stone grinding
reaches a maximum of about 80% extraction.  Roller milling goes above
90% extraction.

There are 4 layers of skin on a wheat berry.  This is the bran.
Apparently in parts of England, the coarser fragments of the skin were
referred to as bran and the finer fragments were referred to as chisel.
After milling, flour was boulted (sieved) through fabric to remove the
bran and establish the fineness of the flour.  The bran removed during
the boulting would be used by the miller to feed his livestock or be
sold to others as feed.

Boulting cloths were made of linen, canvas, or wool, being joined by
silk in the mid-18th Century.

The lowest grade of flour would be that straight from the mill.  A
prudent farmer might take his meal this way to ensure the maximum return
and boult the flour immediately before use.

Once boulted flour would remove the largest pieces of the bran, but
there would still be pieces of bran and chisel and a fairly coarse
flour.  This flour would be used for rough breads, possibly trenchers.
I've used a Hodgson Mill 50/50 Wheat and White Flour, which I believe
would fall between once boulted and twice boulted flour.

Twice boulted flour is called for in The Good Huswife's Handmaide for
the Kitchen (1594) for the making of fine manchet.  This flour is used
for making fine breads and general pastries.  To approximate it, I use a
stone ground whole wheat flour with graham and unbleached white flour
mixed between 1:1 and 2:1.  This is probably the flour called for when a
recipe speaks of "fine flour" or "fair flour".

I've seen finer flour mentioned, but I can't remember the reference.  In
this circumstance, I would use a whole wheat pastry flour I am able to
purchase in bulk or a 1:1 mix of the pastry flour and unbleached white
flour.  This particular whole wheat flour is about the same color as the
unbleached white flour and may be what is being referred to by "finest
white flour".


Some Thoughts

Modern high extraction flour has a lower moisture content than its
Medieval counter part.  It will probably require more liquid than called
for in a recipe.

While recipes call for "white" flour, they say nothing about the color
of the end product.  Some of the manchets I made with a 1:1 mix of whole
wheat pastry flour and unbleached white flour produced a lovely golden
brown loaf, whose color resembles that of the breads in Medieval
paintings.

Would a 1:1 mix of HM 50/50 and whole wheat pastry flour be closer to a
Medieval twice boulted flour than what I currently use?

Did a miller user different kinds of cloth for different boultings?

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