Submitted by pumpkinpapa on January 30, 2008 - 8:30am
I was on the Alvarado bakery site and saw Cultured Wheat listed as an ingredient. Google listed many technical pages but no easy answers.
Has anyone ever used cultured wheat flour before, or seen it for sale?
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I went with a cultured wheat
to the opera once.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist...Mini O
A Brainy Grain?
Here is a link to a definition of Cultured Wheat:
http://www.naturebake.com/faq.htm#26
Hope this helps
Yes I saw that definition
Yes I saw that definition too. Now I have dairy free cultures similar to yogurt. It's kefir actually but I would have to experiment a lot with such a process.
Sorry
I'm sorry, I answered a bit too fast.
This seems to be an ingredient used in commercial products. All of my paths ran to very large distributors of commecial baking products and equipment.
www.bakemarkusa.com is listed as a supplier of this product, but asks you to contact your sales representative to discuss it.
Also try this definition:
Cultured whole wheat flour is created by
combining whole wheat flour and distilled vinegar and then dehydrating
this mixture back to flour form. This process is proprietary, but the
only ingredients are whole wheat flour, distilled vinegar and
water.
From the following website:
http://www.vegsource.com/talk/veganism/messages/10101.html
What is your objective for wanting to produce this? It just seems like a curious thing.
Curiosity is what is driving
Curiosity is what is driving me proth5.
I'm sprouting a lot of grains right now and exploring companies that do this for breads, pizzas etc. So upon finding fermented flour, well I just have to ask :)
It's like the differences in soaking grains or flour in kefir over doing the same in water, I need to ask.
Now I'm also asking brewers of oatmeal stout for spent grain too :)
Speculation
When I see the applications for which this cultured wheat flour is used, it seems like it is being used by industrial organic bakeries who need to enhance keeping qualities by purely organic means.
When one sees that Rudi's is adding acetic acid to the flour, it almost seems like they are trying to obtain the benefits of acidulating flour without doing a preferment with levain, for as you well know a levain usually brings some acetic acid to the table.
Also, as you well know, most of us preferment a portion of flour when baking and levain certainly adds keeping qualities as well a flavor. I think this flour is strictly for the big boys - who want those benefits without spending process time to get them.
Other than my own curiosity and research to answer your question, in all of my adventures with flour and baking I have not heard of cultured wheat flour.
It seems like Rudi's will actually answer questions based on the info in the second link, so you might want to ask them directly.
One more comment
I changed some of my search parameters and found the folowing
American Casein markets cultured wheat flour under the trademarked name Mold-Out
You can go to their website www.americancasein.com and download specification sheets and maybe even buy some.
It just seems that even this concept is not one for the small scale baker who can take the time to properly ferment their flour in the breadmaking process rather than buying a prefermented flour.