...and a word about gluten.

06/30/09

...and a word about gluten.

Filed under: Blog, Flour Basics— by joe @ 11:10:10 am Permalink

Here in the states, we're used to classifying flours based on how much gluten (protein) they contain, and that's reasonable, since the gluten in our wheat, regardless of the type of wheat, is pretty much all the same. It's elastic and strong, which means the molecules readily link up with each other to form long, stretchy chains that don't pull apart very easily. That's not true of a lot of European flours, which often contain glutens of very different characters. In Italy, for example, most wheat gluten is weak (which is to say, not stretchy), but very, very hard (i.e. firm to the bite). So when we say an Italian flour is "high in gluten" that's technically correct, though that gluten doesn't deliver the same result as an American high gluten flour, if you follow me. And that's why, when American bakers start talking about foreign flours as they relate to baked goods like pizzas and baguettes, things tend to get very confusing very fast.

Italians are far more likely to speak of their flours in terms of the fineness of the grind. The French, how high the "ash" content is. Try talking gluten to bakers in either one of those countries and you're likely to be greeted with a blank stare. It's part of the reason baked goods are so hard to translate from say, France to America. We not only speak different literal languages, we speak different technical languages.

The main thing to remember, the more you get into the finer points of international baking, is that on the far side of the ocean gluten is a highly variable thing. It's not like fructose in an apple or citric acid in a lemon — it's either there or it isn't. Rather, it's more like, oh don't know...coffee or pizza. Wherever you go you're pretty much guaranteed to find it, but it changes (sometimes radically) from place to place.

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