Organic AP Flours: closest match for KA AP/Sir Galahad?
I've been using KA Organic AP which I pick up (or have my sister pick up for me) on the way to visit her in Vermont -- it's very attractively priced in 5lb bags at their store. But I'm starting to consume more than this "free shipping" arrangement can handle, and the mail-order price is...not so nice. None of my local groceries carry this flour.
A local bakery supplier will sell me KA Organic Select Artisan in 50# bags qty 1. The price isn't great as he doesn't usually carry this item and is getting it from another supplier -- of course he won't tell me who. But, also, looking at the KA web site I see the specs for Organic Select Artisan are not the same as for the Organic AP -- it looks like the retail Organic AP is formulated to perform as closely to the retail AP (professional Sir Galahad) as possible while the Organic Select Artisan has been tweaked a bit (lower protein, 11.3% vs 11.7%, and all-winter-wheat as opposed to winter/spring blend).
NY Bakers repackages the Sperry Organic Bread (General Mills) flour in 5lb bags and the shipping actually isn't prohibitive if I buy enough. My concern with this flour is that the spec sheet makes it look like the canonical example of what KA's talking about when they say other brands' specifications are loose -- no falling number is specified and the protein content is given as "12% +/- 1%". The specs on the conventional (non-organic) General Mills flours are nice and tight of course -- I assume with the Sperry brand they're keeping prices down by not hunting all over for spot quantities of organic wheat to get the product exactly in-spec to a tight specification...
Has anyone used this flour (Sperry Organic Bread)? Enough to know if it's really more consistent from batch to batch than the spec suggests? How about the KA Organic Select -- before I buy 50# at a so-so price I'd rather know if the difference from the retail-packaged product is even noticeable, much less important.
I can get the Sperry at a decent price locally too but I don't want to risk buying 50# at a time of a product that might vary considerably from batch to batch(!)
Thor, I have used King Arthur Organic Select Artisan flour and actually prefer its slightly lower protein content as compared to King Arthur Sir Galahad flour (same as retail KA AP). I found it hard, however, to justify using the Organic Select because, in my case, of its substantially higher price.
SteveB
www.breadcetera.com
I was driving by the KA store in Vermont last weekend and, on a whim, I went in and picked up a bag of the Organic Artisan Select -- their in-store prices for big bags are a little better than they used to be, though still not terrific.
After I got home and disgorged it into the airtight food-grade buckets I use for flour (this quantity of AP flour should last me about 4-6 months) I looked at the label on the bottom of the bag and was shocked to see that it measured out at 12.43% protein. The KA web site has two inconsistent specs for this flour, 11.3% or 11.7% protein, but, either way, twelve and a half percent is way outside the 0.2% tolerance specified for all KA flours.
I expect it'll be fine for bread, maybe even useful for bagels or pizza crust. But I'm not exactly expecting to be able to use it for cake or pie crust, at that strength, which is unfortunate...
I've sent KA some email, but, does anyone know if this product has changed dramatically in the past year? Has KA loosened their tolerances, or is something else weird going on? Anyone else get a bag of KA flour with a label showing way out-of-spec measurements?
I finally got the right department at KA. The bag is out of spec -- the measurement label is almost certainly right. Given the impracticality of returning 50# of flour... they're sending me a gift certificate, which is very nice of them.
It occurs to me that I had on one prior occasion heard about a problem with this flour revealed/confirmed by the bag label on later examination -- there's a blog post somewhere about a baking seminar with Gerard Rubaud in which he suspects a bag of Organic Artisan is insufficienly aged, looks at the bag label, and sure enough it's just a week or two out of the mill. I guess the lesson is, however nice KA are about replacing product, look at the label *before* dumping 50# of flour out of the bag!
Funny their internal QC didn't catch this. Anyway, no harm done. I was expecting a little more confusion about how to deal with this kind of problem for a retail customer -- as it stands, this would have been much harder to deal with if I'd bought the bag at the local bakery supply.
They also mentioned one useful tidbit: their organic flours are slightly drier than their conventional flours. However, the protein spec and the measurements on the large bags are corrected for this: it is a 14% moisture measurement, not a dry measurement. I had noticed before that dough texture was a little different with the organic artisan; I will try adding just a little extra water and see what happens.