[Sca-cooks] Different flours
Stephen Bloch
sbloch at adelphi.edu
Tue Nov 9 10:31:16 PST 2004
> > The rice flour also doesn't produce the gluten which makes the long protein
>> strands that help with cohesion.
>
>Yeah, that explains the fragility of your cookie. Rice does not
>have gluten, which is pretty much
>essential for making a decent cookie/cake/etc. Not too much gluten
>development, but enough to
>give the item a little body, and bind the ingredients together.
>
>There is glutinous rice, but I have never seen that commercially
>milled into flour. Perhaps it
>could be done at home??
Yes, glutinous rice flour is available commercially; I used to
routinely add a little into my bread dough. Even glutinous rice
doesn't have as much gluten as hard wheat; I felt that it made the
bread somewhat moister and more fine-grained, so I could cut it
thinner. I've most often found the Japanese kind, in a white
cardboard box of about a pound labelled "Mochigome", at ordinary
grocery stores (albeit in large, multi-ethnic cities like San Diego
and New York).
In the past year and a half, I've been making low-carb bread, so the
rice flour is out, and I'm using vast quantities of wheat gluten.
(Many bread recipes suggest adding a few tablespoons to lighten a
whole-grain bread recipe; I use a few cups, in addition to smaller
amounts of several other flours. It's 80% protein, almost no carbs.)
--
John Elys
(the artist formerly known as mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib)
mka Stephen Bloch
sbloch at adelphi.edu
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