The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

WL Bread Flour

Mel_J's picture
Mel_J

WL Bread Flour

After reading a lot about French flours vs American flours from TFL, I decided to try White Lily's Bread Flour. When I lived in Tennessee, I used to make biscuits with White Lily Self Rising Flour. Its the best (in my opinion) flour to make biscuits. If I'm not mistaken, their flours are made from soft winter wheat, the self rising flour, at least. Since White Lily can only be found in the South, the only way I could get it is by purchasing online. I bought two 5lbs bags of flour, one bread and one self rising (for biscuits). It took a week for it to get here but when I got it, I had to immediately make some biscuits and bread. The biscuits were light and fluffly, the way I like it. As for the bread, I had some issues with my oven, so my first batch of baguette came out very light (crust) but the crumb is wonderful! I decided to try making the baguette again but this time, I bought an oven thermometer to monitor the oven temperature. The crust came out darker than I'd like but the crumb was good. I was soo excited that I had to take a picture of it with my cellphone camera. Its quite blurry, but I hope the picture of the crumb is still somewhat viewable.

 

 

I'm not that good of a baker, so hopefully, this will give me motivation to do better.

Comments

ericb's picture
ericb

I occasionally use White Lilly bread flour, too. It's a little high in protein (13.5%, I think), which is perfect for breads with rye, whole wheat, seeds, etc. I think it does a pretty good job with white breads, too, like Vermont Sourdough. For what it's worth, I find that it's comparable to most other flours labelled "bread flour."

Now, their A/P and self-rising flour is a different story. I haven't used them to bake biscuits, but everyone swears by it.

Don't sell yourself short. From the looks of it, you seem to be quite a good baker. Even more important, though, is your curiosity and willingness to experiment. Keep up the good work!

Mel_J's picture
Mel_J

Thanks for the encouragement Eric. I really like using WL's Bread flour. I just got the flour 5 days ago and I've only got 1/3 of a bag left. The protein content might be high but the flour is rather "delicate" and quite easy to "handle". I don't really know what's the right term for "delicate" or "handle" is but it just seems easier to knead and the dough comes together rather quickly. I can't really compare it to the french T65 or T55 flour because I've never baked with it but I'm hoping that it might have some of the characteristics and properties of the french flours.

If you like biscuits, you should try making biscuits with White Lily's flour. I like to use the self rising flour because I can never get the baking powder and salt proportions correctly.

I'm really trying to experiment with flours and mixing flours to get good bread. I'm also experimenting with water. I saw something on Food Network once about pizzas in New York and why the dough taste so good. Apparently, the water in New York makes the pizza dough taste better. I've been using distilled water to make my dough but I ran out of water while I was in the middle of making bread, so I used filtered tap water instead. The crumb of that particular bread had a really good texture. I told my husband about this and he told me that they have hard water in Paris too. I don't know if its just coincidence that the crumb turned out good that day or if the water did make a difference. I'm still experimenting...  :)

 

mrfrost's picture
mrfrost

I am in Georgia and use mainly WL bf also. Mainly because it is so much less costly than KA. I also have access to Gold Medal bf, but have not tried it yet, because it is also a little more costly than the WL.

Of course, the WL bread flour is made from hard wheat, and has(had, 2006?) a protein count of about 11.7%.

http://home.earthlink.net/~ggda/flour_test.htm

Mel, what recipe did you use for the baguette? I'll have to try it sometime.

Mel_J's picture
Mel_J

Dwight,

The blurry picture of the baguette above is from Phillipe Gosselin's Pain a L'Ancienne recipe that I found from TFL. Be sure to use cold water, I think it makes a difference. Do try it with WL bread flour and let me know. Here's the link...

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/8524/philippe-gosselin039s-pain-%C3%A0-l039ancienne-according-peter-reinhart-interpretted-dmsnyder-m

Its actually expensive for me to get White Lily flour because we don't have it here in California. My best biscuits are made with WL flour. Speaking of biscuits... I think I'll have to make some today. :)