[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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