[Sca-cooks] Queston on Flours

[Terry Decker]

I find that I get a better texture with WW when allowing the bread a
third rise.  WW flour doesn't have much gluten inherently, and you want
to give those poor little proteins all the time they need to form every
connection they can.  You could try adding some extra gluten to the mix.

Whole wheat flour has as much gluten as the wheat it was made from.  Soft
wheats are low in gluten.  Hard wheats are high in gluten.   You can add
gluten to help improve the rise but it is generally less expensive to find
high gluten flour.


Does anybody know of a
website that delineates the amount of gluten in different commercial
brands of flour?  I'm particularly trying to prove to him that whole
wheat flour is lower in gluten than white.  Commercial WW breads have
the gluten seriously boosted to make them more palatable to the Wonder
Bread generation, so they are a big no-no for him.  But, he doesn't want
to take chances with home-made WW bread unless I can prove to him that
it's low gluten.

-Magdalena

There are just too many brands and grades of flour to find the information
on a website.  If you are buying commercially, you can get flour blended to
your specifications of fineness, density and percentage of gluten, which is
cheaper than boosting the gluten.  For the rest of us, the quick and dirty
way to determine the amount of gluten in flour is to divide the weight of
the protein in a serving by the weight of a serving.

As for making the assumption that whole wheat flour contains less gluten
than white flour, 'taint necessarily so.  A good pastry flour will have less
gluten than the average whole wheat flour and I think you will find White
Lily all-purpose flour has less gluten that most whole wheat flours.  You
might check out King Arthur Cake Flour.  I seem to remember it has about 6-7
percent protein.

Bear