[Sca-cooks] Types of Wheat for Bread

Terry Decker t.d.decker at att.net
Sat Nov 27 06:25:00 PST 2010


Stone milling produces a whole meal.  Roller milling strips the wheat germ and 
produces the low oil flour we commonly use.  Presumably, historicalfoods is 
trying to fake a stone ground flour.  They would be more accurate to bolt whole 
meal.  Personally I would just buy the King Arthur product that comes closest to 
what I want.  The real difference between medieval and modern  flours is more 
likely to be in the protein content which is undeterminable.

Stone milling with quality stones usually extracts 75-80% flour.  Roller milling 
extracts 90% or higher.  Modern bolting uses sieves while period bolting used 
cloths.  Having played with both techniques, I would say that a triple bolting 
through fine cloth produces a finer flour than the sieving process.  In either 
event, if you want to prevent clumping, you need to re-sieve the flour before 
use.  


Roller milling is a modification of stone milling to adapt the milling process 
to the machine age.  Roller milling improves the extraction and relieves the 
miller of the labor of dressing the stones.  It is an evolution of process based 
on a thousand years of stone milling innovation and experience and became a 
commercial success only after we had developed the industrial capacity to create 
effective rollers.  The assumption that because they used stone milling people 
of the day were primitive is ridiculous.  It is like saying the 1960's U.S. was 
too primitive to get things as good as we can get them because they didn't have 
cell phones.  


Bear




________________________________
I have a problem with this site - and would appreciate being corrected.  The 
site says: "...follow the steps below which calls for an 80% Plain (unbleached) 
stoneground flour with a 20% addition of Wholemeal (wholewheat) stoneground 
flour. What we are doing is adding back in the 20% bran that modern milling and 
boulting methods removes but the Medieval and Tudor miller could not."

From Elizabeth David as well as Karen Hess, they state that manchet bread (which 
the questioner is considering attempting) was made from the finest, whitest 
flour.  David particularly mentions using a lava-type millstone which, with the 
grooves cut into it, could be set to grind exceedingly fine and, with bolting, 
produce a very white flour.

It's been my impression that statements such as historicalfoods makes, are 
another of the fallacies and old-wives'-tales about the past.  "They were too 
primitive to get things as good as _we_ can get them."  Am I off base or are 
they?

Alys

-- Elise Fleming



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