How much vital wheat gluten?
I bought some vital wheat gluten at my health-food co-op today and now I'm trying to figure how to add it to the brown rice flour I was given and want to use up.
My sourdough bread recipe, from Peter Reinhart, starts with a biga of 2/3 cup ww flour, 1 cup + 2 tablespoons white bread flour, 2/3 cup starter (which I make with ww flour), and 2/3 cup water. I'm not planning on changing any of that.
After the biga has risen overnight, I add the salt, water, dry yeast for extra oomph, and 3-1/2 cups white bread flour. I want to replace some of the white bread flour with brown rice flour and vital wheat gluten.
I am guessing that 1/4 cup vwg and 3/4 cup brown rice flour would be equivalent to 1 cup white bread flour (trying to make 0% gluten and 75% gluten add up to 14% gluten). So I could make the bread with I cup of the brown rice flour mix and 2-1/2 cups white bread flour. Yes? No?
(No, I can't do this by weight because I'm too poor to afford a scale.)
I'm worried that this is too much vwg, which previous Fresh Loaf posters have said makes the bread rubbery. Please advise.
VWG usually comes in a range from 55% to 65% gluten. Never seen any 75% gluten around here But if 7/8 C of a cupof rice flour weighs 120 G then I would use 7/8 C of rice flour less 1T and 1/8 cup of VWG plus 1T of VWG if it is 75% Gluten.
The vwg is Bob's Red Mill, packed in a smaller bag by the co-op. The larger bag, the manufacturer bag, says 75% protein ... Ahah! Protein content is not all of it gluten. So you would guess that it is actually 55-65%? In which case, of one cup total of flour, how much should be brown rice and how much vwg?
I think 2-1/2 cups bread flour to 1 cup of the mix will probably result in a better loaf than trying to up the rice flour ratio. But I could be wrong ...
Felila,
To know exactly how much VWG you need, you can use some math to figure it out. First, determine how much gluten everything already has. Rice Flour = Zero gluten. VWG = 65% gluten. Then, decide how much gluten you want/need for your recipe. Let's say you want 14% gluten. You may want a lot less, as this is at the high end for bread. From there, you can use alligation math to figure out the exact amounts of each (rice flour and VWG) to use.
Thanks for the link, David. The math works out beautifully, if I decide to go for 13% gluten. 20% vwg, 80% brown rice flour.
Well, it would work out beautifully if I had a scale. Differences in the weight of the flours, and the fact that there are 16 tablespoons in a cup -- not divisible evenly by 5 -- make this hard to calculate and measure. But I can probably get close. 3 tablespoons of vwg in the cup and fill up the rest with rice flour.
You could get true accuracy using weights, but with no scale, that's a no-go. But, like you said, you can get close enough. Nothing else, it will at least give you a good starting place to tweak it to exactly what you need, instead of totally guessing. Bread is so forgiving anyway, I think you can at least nail it on the second try if not the first.