[Sca-cooks] Emmer flour as samidh?

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

>On 9/8/13 12:29 PM, lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:
>> When i made some recipes from al-Warraq, i used pastry flour for samidh, 
>> based on Nasrallah's description.
>>
>> Have you tested that yet?

David Friedman wrote:
>I've tried cake flour--I'm not sure if that's the same thing. Using the 
>quantities for crumbly crackers given in Nasrallah's translation, you 
>get something closer to a batter than a dough, hence not kneadable, 
>which is inconsistent with the recipe's instructions.
>
>Did any of your recipes have sufficient information so that you could do 
>that kind of test?

I wanted to make flat bread, based on a mix of things i read - i did not follow any one specific recipe. Because of the lack of clarity and contradictions, i started looking into flours to see which was most suitable. According to what i found:

Cake flour has a 6-8% protein content and is made from soft wheat flour. It is chlorinated to further break down the strength of the gluten and create a smooth velvety texture. This extra process does not seem particularly like what was done in period, so i didn't use cake flour.

Pastry flour has 8.5-9.5% (or 8-10%) protein and is made from soft wheat flour. Apparently it is called "cracker flour" in some places. It is good for cookies, pastries, cakes, etc.

Modern all-purpose flour has 10-12% protein and is made from a blend of hard and soft wheat flours. Bread flour has 12-13% protein and is made of hard wheat and has a high gluten content. Semolina flour also has 12-13% protein and is a type of hard wheat.

Naturally, modern analyses do not include samidh flour... If it is semolina as Charles Perry says, it would be very high in gluten. Whereas if it low in gluten as Nasrallah says then pastry flour is probably close.

Urtatim (that's oor-tah-TEEM)