For that matter, what’s gluten? The next time you make a batch of bread or pizza dough, pinch off a little bit and work it between your fingers under the kitchen faucet for a minute. A good proportion of the dough, mostly water-soluble starch, will wash away. Yet a small rubbery ball will remain. That’s […]
READ ONPeople love to make Italian breads — pizza especially. And for that, the serious ones tend to seek out Italian flour, the kind that’s known as Italian “00” flour. As to what exactly that is, there is quite a bit of confusion. Search around the web a bit and you can find all kinds of […]
READ ONThe thing that most Americans want to know when they talk about French flour is: what can they do to approximate French “Type 55” flour? That’s the kind that’s most commonly used for baguettes and even many pastries (it’s akin to an American all-purpose). That’s an extremely difficult thing to do for reasons I discussed […]
READ ONPumpernickel flour is a bit of a one-trick pony in the kitchen, though I’ve seen it used for crackers and even cookies at times. As you’d expect, it’s a very coarse blend of whole grain rye and wheat flours, designed to create dense loaves of that splendid ethnic delicacy known as pumpernickel bread. How dense […]
READ ONRye isn’t a wheat at all, though it is a grass (Secale cereale) that produces a grain. That grain is useful in many of the same ways that wheat is useful, but truth be told, you’ve really gotta love rye if you want to make things out of it. Why? Because unlike rye’s housebroken cousin, […]
READ ONInvented by the Reverend Sylvester Graham in the mid-1800’s, graham flour has all the base components of whole wheat flour in it: germ, bran and endosperm. What makes it different is the way it’s ground. Graham believed that in order to be properly absorbed by the body, the endosperm of the wheat berry must be […]
READ ONDurum is a unique species of wheat, the hardest of all the species we eat (up to 17% protein). The word itself means “hard” in Latin, and in fact not only is it chock full of protein (gluten), the character of that protein is extremely firm. No wonder, then, that it’s so good for making […]
READ ONInstant flours (like Wondra) are very interesting things, low-gluten wheat flours that are extremely handy for thickening sauces (especially gravy before a turkey dinner!). What makes them “instant”? Simply the fact that they’re cooked ahead of time so as to cause the starch granules to swell and gelatinize. Then they’re dried again. The process is […]
READ ONSelf-rising flours are generally cake or pasty flours that have leavening and salt already formulated into them. Other than that, they’re the same as other flours. I tend not to buy them very much unless I’m certain I’m getting them from a store with high turnover, since the chemical leavening loses its potency over time. […]
READ ONPastry flour is something you’ll almost never see in stores, though quite a few cookbooks call for it. Which, you know, is aggravating. The idea is that it’s not so low in protein (gluten) that it can’t stand up or rise, but not so high in protein that it will make your biscuits or pastry […]
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