[Sca-cooks] Grinding Flour:Bran-Starch

Holly Stockley hollyvandenberg at hotmail.com
Sat Nov 27 07:28:57 PST 2010




Possibly I'm being less than clear, here (and even mis-spoke a bit).  It depends on what effect you are after.
If you want to replicate whole meal stone ground flour (Well, I'd just buy whole meal stone ground flour - it's available), adding whole grain flour to AP flour isn't quite going to cut it.  The math doesn't work.  And if you read through the comments, the author doesn't understand the math either - and is just going by what a modern miller told her.
Thing is, when you grind wheat, you tend to also lose a little of the starch that sticks to the very large bits of bran that gets sieved out.  Which also affects your extraction rate, somewhat.  Rollers are better at popping these bits out and making sure they don't get sifted out with the large bits of bran.  It conserves more of the starches.  (My hand mill is REALLY terrible at this, and I lose a heck of a lot of the starch when I sift out the bran.  Conversely, it leaves the bran in much larger pieces so that more of it is easily sifted out.  The flour:middlings:bran ratio is entirely altered).
In my little pea brain, it probably makes a greater difference if you're dealing with red wheat, white wheat, spring wheat, winter wheat, hard wheat, soft wheat....  Soft red or white winter wheats are used in pastry flours.  Hard wheat flours are used in bread flours.  Spring wheats (in general) contain more gluten than winter wheats.  (Well, most AP flours in the North and Midwest are also made of hard wheat flours, but have a little less protein).  Thing is, we plant by the result we want.  In period, likely the choice was made by what naturally grew better in that area.  And you CAN make bread out of any "type" of wheat flour you want.  Some if it is just "better" than others.  Red. vs. White is more of a taste/color issue than a protein or starch issue.
What isn't processing for ME in the Historical Foods discussion is why there is an assumption that modern stone ground wheat achieves a different extraction than period stone ground wheat?  There is a mill in Argentine, MI that still makes stone ground flours.  I've toured the mill, and I really think that the way they do things produces a product as similar to period flours as we're likely to get short of planting period varieties.  
Hence and therefore, when I'm doing period baking, I get my flours here:http://www.westwindmilling.com/index.htmland don't worry too much about mixing.  
Femke




> Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2010 09:30:00 -0500
> From: alysk at ix.netcom.com
> To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
> Subject: [Sca-cooks] Grinding Flour:Bran-Starch
> 
> Greetings!  Thank you all for the links and information you've sent on 
> grains, flours, milling and bolting.  My puppy nose is now questioning 
> two things.
> But Holly Stockley just posted:
> "I've bolted hand-ground flour and come up with a product every bit as 
> fine as commercial AP flour.  I suspect somebody mis-interpreted the 
> data:  stoneground flour manages about an 80% extraction rate.  Modern 
> roller mills do rather better.  This isn't a measure of how much bran is 
> in the flour, but rather how much of the starch of the grain ends up in 
> the flour portion.  Adding bran back doesn't match an extraction rate, 
> but I can see where it could get confusing."
> 
> So, Bear, has your research in the intervening 12+ years modified to 
> agree with what Holly is saying?  I don't see that you are both saying 
> the same thing.  Is one correct and one incorrect?  Are both correct?
> 
> I sort of thought that using unbleached white flour was closer to what 
> was available to the king's cooks than adding in some wholemeal flour.

 		 	   		  


More information about the Sca-cooks mailing list