[Sca-cooks] Types of Wheat for Bread

Holly Stockley hollyvandenberg at hotmail.com
Fri Nov 26 18:19:49 PST 2010


I'd say it's a myth.  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.
I've played with a number of period flours.  And somewhere had run into some info on white v. red wheat as well as spring v. winter wheats.  Which, naturally, I can't find at the moment.  
Still, it might help to google through for various assize of bread laws, which sometimes get pretty specific about what flours are used in which breads.
This is also some interesting experimental info on non-wheat breads:http://seventrees.blogspot.com/2009/08/pease-porridgebread.html
I had a long conversation with Mistress Helewyse, Baroness Red Spears, on the topic at RUM last Fall, and she'd be another good contact on the subject.  Personally, I've experimented a LITTLE - but much more with yeasts than with flours.
Femke



> Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2010 20:48:34 -0500
> From: alysk at ix.netcom.com
> To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
> Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Types of Wheat for Bread
> 
> Johnnae wrote:
> 
>  >Have you looked at the print editions of C. Anne Wilson or Peter
>  >Brear's All the Kings Cooks?
>  >How about Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery?
> 
> Yes.  I looked through those and got some information.
> 
>  >Otherwise
>  >http://historicalfoods.com/5098/medieval-and-tudor-flour/
> 
> 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
> alysk at ix.netcom.com
> alyskatharine at gmail.com
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/8311418@N08/sets/
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