Category: Baking Ingredients

Wheat Flour

Plain wheat flour is a go-to thickener in the kitchen, especially where sauces care concerned. In combination with butter or oil it becomes a roux, which is the basis of classic béchamel. White flour, most bakers know, is the ground endosperm of a wheat berry, the endosperm being the energy storehouse of the seed. Moisten the seed and enzymes in the endosperm go about breaking down the long chain starches that are stored there into simple sugars. These sugars fuel the sprout (contained in the germ) as it grows.

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Gelatin

Gelatin is a protein, one that’s derived from a very interesting material called collagen. If you were to think of an animal’s body like a machine, where the bones and joints are the moving parts and the muscles are the motors, collagen is the rope and cabling that connects it all together. In fact collagen molecules are constructed very much like rope: three long protein molecules (individually known as gelatins) woven around each other to form a tight triple-helix. They’re very strong, the perfect material for making things like tendons and other so-called “connective” tissues.

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A Thickener Primer

Most of the time, when we’re talking about thickening in the kitchen, we mean the thickening of watery substances: broth, juice, milk, thin syrups, that sort of thing. Thickening is necessary if we want those substances to have much texture other than…watery. The obvious question here is: why can’t water itself have a more interesting texture? Does it have to be so, well, watery? And what makes it that way? The answer is that water flows because its molecules are so incredibly small. They’re made up of just three atoms: two hydrogens and one oxygen if I recall correctly. Dihydrogen monoxide.

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Salt vs. Salt

Reader Barbara points out that there is no salt post in my ingredients section and asks that I include one. I am vey happy to do that, though I’ll warn you it’ll be short. Why? Because I never use anything other than plain ol’ iodized table salt in my baking. There’s good reason for that: because all baking recipes call for standard table salt or its very near equivalent. Commercial table salts are virtually identical the world over. Those table salts, sea salts (both coarse and fine) and pickling salt all deliver the same amount of salinity by volume. All can be used interchangeably.

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Chinese Golden Syrup

Chinese golden syrup is something of an odd duck in the syrup world. It’s an invert caramel syrup that flows at room temperature, even when undiluted with milk or water. That’s a very odd thing, since in order to get sugar syrup to caramelize you have to heat it well past the point at which it will flow once it cools. So how is this accomplished? Simply put, what you see here is a syrup made on top of a syrup, a dark caramel syrup for color and flavor, and a soft-ball stage syrup for flow. I’ll show you how it’s done.

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What is “Ash Content”?

In the same way that Americans speak of flours in terms of their protein content, Europeans speak of ash content. But what is this mysterious “ash” and why would you want it in your flour? The answer is that the ash isn’t in the flour, it what’s left over after a set quantity of flour (100 grams, I think) is burned — burned in such a way that the starch burns up almost entirely. What’s left are mostly minerals.

So what does this minerally “ash” tell you? More than you’d think. If you consider a wheat berry in the same way you would an onion: a thing made up of many layers. The layers on the outside are the tougher ones that contain less of the starch than the much purer inner layers.

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On Bleaching…and When It’s a Good Thing

Bleaching gets a very bad rap these days. It’s frequently portrayed as a trivial cosmetic process that comes at the steep cost of adding chemicals — chemicals! — to our food. More than that it could be racist. But in fact bleaching is not primarily about a flour’s whiteness, it’s about a flour’s performance.

But first what exactly is “bleaching”? In general, bleaching means exposing flour to a compound like chlorine gas, ascorbic acid (vitamin C) or perhaps an enzyme like lipoxygenase (derived from fava or soy beans). These agents leave no residues or residual flavors, nor do they, contrary to popular myth, diminish the flour’s nutritional value.

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On Gluten

Here in the States we’re used to talking about flours in terms of how much gluten (protein) they contain. Know the gluten percentage of a given flour and you know a fair amount about it: how hard or soft the wheat that it came from, how well it will perform in a cake or a bread, how chewy or tender your finished product will be, and so on.

Europeans gemerally do not talk this way. When they talk flour, they speak of “ash content“, which is also a highly descriptive measure, just very different from gluten content. And while we’re on the subject of Europe, I should point out that European gluten is very different from North American gluten. While ours is stretchy and elastic, theirs is firm and plastic, meaning it doesn’t “snap back” like ours does when it’s stretched. That’s nice, but it’s an advantage that comes with some disadvantages as well. If you’ve ever eaten a French blueberry muffin, you know what I’m talking about.

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Grades of Flour

This applies only to North America I need to emphasize, and really most of this information isn’t terribly relevant to home bakers, but you know I like to be thorough. So here goes.

You’ll perhaps remember from the below post the “fairly coarse, fairly dark” flour you get when you grind the whole endosperm of a wheat berry with the bran and germ removed? Well that’s what we in the States call “straight” flour. We generally don’t bake with it, we sift it, though the French frequently use it for bread flour. Just another reason why replicating French breads in the US is difficult.

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What is an “Extraction Rate”?

And how does that impact the “whiteness” of the flour? That’s what reader Leslie is curious about today. Leslie, it’s a good question. Indeed I’ve received quite a few technical questions about flour since Friday’s post on white bread. My thinking is that I’ll put together a few posts on flour and make a “flour primer” out of them for the ingredients section, since I don’t really have one of those yet.

So then, to answer. The “extraction rate” of a flour is a good indicator of its softness and whiteness, as it measures how much of the total wheat berry the flour contains. The higher the extraction rate, the more of the bran, germ and tougher outer layers of endosperm the flour has in it. A whole wheat flour is by definition 100% extraction, since it contains all the parts of the wheat berry.

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