Hydration varies per batch of flour - how to deal with this?
So, I can imagine a professional baker buying flour in very large quantities knows exactly how the flour of a particular batch will behave, and maybe does a test bake to see what hydration is needed, et cetera.
Me however, I buy 50kg of flour every two weeks and do not have the time to do a test bake. The organic mill however also doesn't specify protein content and cannot tell me how the flour behaves beforehand. This leads to unwanted situations like the one last I had last week. The flour simply wound't absorb as much water as I had gotten used to from the last few batches of flour. On the contrary, far from it. At 70% hydration (mostly plain wheat flour), the dough was way too sticky to handle (at 10kg of dough there's no way to do slap&folds). I tried to save my bake, but messed up and my Rofco was totally covered in dough.
Fortunately I have a lot of credits with my the people buying my bread and so it wasn't a huge problem, but I'm struggling with this.
I don't want to go to a different source of flour, because this is as organic and as local I can get and I don't want to make any compromises on that.
Does anybody have any tips and tricks how to deal with this? How do I deal with different flour qualities from time to time?
Thanks!
Alef
This subject came up on the Bread Bakers Guild of America forum a few days ago and the responses were consistent.
Larger bakeries purchase flour by the ton and they pay particular attention to the lot identification. If the flour is from the same lot they are not too concerned about any real changes in absorption. If the lot number changes they prepare for hydration adjustment. Most posters said that they hold back water and then begin to introduce it after they begin the final mix. Once the consistency appears the same as previous batches they run with the new water value.
The fact that your miller cannot provide you with the flour's specification is a little sad because it isn't that difficult to discover the information. This is one of the reasons large bakeries deal with big commercial millers. The bakeries are highly-dependent on a flour's performance and the millers act accordingly.
One suggestion might be to purchase larger quantities of a given flour. If the flour's environment remains constant their should be no perceptible degradation over a few month, and you will be chasing the changes less often.
Your customers might have to accept the trade-off between consistency and locally-source flour.
Jim
Thanks Jim, I think I will take up your suggestion and purchase larger quantities at a time.
The mill is a small wind powered mill, one of those traditional Dutch ones... I'll ask them once more if they have more info on the flour, but if they don't, I'll have to deal with it....
Ah and the customers don't have a problem with changing quality at all so far. It's a small 20-bread per week operation so they perfectly understand. It's better than what their baker gives them anyway is what they say.
I've worked in bakeries where the flour qualities could vary quite dramatically from lot to lot. And we never did test bakes. Whenever we'd start a new lot of flour I'd always just go conservative when adding water. If the dough looked like it needed more water to get to the correct consistency then I'd add more water. But for that first mix with the new lot, I just preferred to err on the side of stiffer -- better to have dough that's too stiff than dough that's too wet. Usually by the second or third mix I'd have the correct hydration down. This was just part of the process, and we'd have to go through it every month or two when we started a new lot.
On a side note, I find that trying to proactively adjust hydration and mixing time based on the numbers or suggestions provided by the mill is a less effective strategy than just observing for yourself how the dough behaves during and after that first mix. There's too much uncertainty in basing your decisions on secondhand information. Best just take the plunge and see for yourself how the dough behaves. That way you have a very clear comparison from lot to lot and a strong baseline from which to make your adjustments. For that reason, I just ignored whatever info the miller would provide with each lot -- I didn't want to know.
I wish I could give you a better suggestion. Maybe someone else can. But in my experience, this is just part and parcel of the baking life.
Trevor
Thanks Trevor, this helps!