Source for Soft Red Winter Wheat?
My wife's been trying to make various Indian breads using recipes she remembers from decades ago in India. These would have called for Atta flour, which is a finely milled whole wheat flour which (from the hydrations and kneading times and the expected results) must be made from far lower-protein wheat than typical American "whole wheat" flour.
Commonly available "whole wheat pastry flour" is not suitable - it's soft *white* wheat and the color and taste come out wrong. Imported Atta flour can be had easily enough where I live (NYC) but it is always, to my baker's sense of taste anyway, old enough to have rather nasty bitter rancid-red-wheat taste.
I'd like to find some soft red winter wheat to grind fresh in my Nutrimill. I've looked before (to grind, and also to flake, for Irish Soda Bread) and though the statistics claim this is the 3rd most common type of wheat grown in the US I can't seem to find it in berry form.
Has anyone got a source for Soft Red Winter Wheat berries? Smallish quantities preferred, but..
To answer the question you asked, where to get red soft wheat, www.centralmilling.com/store likely has it, though may be temporarily out of stock.
[ Warning: the following may exceed your blather tolerance threshhold. ]
But to respond to your goal, or "need", I'm pretty confident that your wife won't be satisfied with anything made from wheat other than what is grown in India. So many Desis, like all of us, want food just like mom made. Childhood "taste-memories" are ingrained deep.
I'm an aficionado of, bordering on (but not there yet) "connoisseur" of Indian wheat. ("Snob" might fit.)
May I suggest four things:
1) she needs to name the baked goods she wants (chapati, paratha, roti, naan, etc.) and then seek out the flour for it. There is no one-flour-fits-all.
2) You need to seek out a quality Indian or multi-ethnic store that turns over their inventory. The Patel Brothers chain has a good reputation, and i've been impressed by their two very clean and organized stores here in Indianapolis. Westerners would be comfortable shopping there.
3) Indian cuisine has evolved over the last 10-20 years or so. What is now made with atta used to be made with maida. Maybe her parents were ahead of the curve and used stone ground atta (whole wheat) back then. But odds are she won't be happy with whole wheat, or even "high extraction" flour, if her parents used maida. But even if she remembers "atta" being used, there are still two major divisions of "atta": high-extraction (a US term, not their term) and 100% extraction (whole meal).
4) Indian labeling/marketing standards are not pinned down like we would want/expect. Comparable to how In the US, on store shelves, we have "whole wheat bread" which means "at least 51% whole wheat", and we have "100% whole wheat bread."
"Atta" can mean four things:
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It is a rare roller mill that can mill whole wheat flour without separating streams and reconstituting them. Roller mills are designed from the ground up to produce white flour from the endosperm, and then, OPTIONALLY, add back in bran (and maybe germ) when needed.
"Whole milling" is the term used when there are no separate streams or reconstituting going on. Stone mills are by default "whole milling" as long as the flour is not sifted.
"Impact milling" (high speed rotating hammers that smash/pulverize the grain in mid air inside a chamber) is another milling method that is "whole milling" (no separate streams created) and produces 100% whole-meal flour, as long as it is not sifted afterwards.
If you see a package of "atta" but it has the normal "enrichment" vitamins added in, then it is not 100% extraction, because if it was 100% extraction, it would not need to be enriched. This would be #2 or #3 above.
If you see "bran" listed as an ingredient, you can conclude it was reconstituted, either #3 or #4.
"Chapati" flour is _usually_ durum, but not all packages labeled "chapati flour" have "durum" listed in the ingredients. Is that merely a failure to be specific, or does "wheat flour" specifically mean "not durum"? I can't tell.
Ask your wife what color the flour was, if it was yellow, then it was likely durum.
My Patel Brothers carries two types of durum from Sher Brar Mills of Canada: Desi Style, with low ash/bran, and "Fiber Wala" which is higher extraction, but not 100% whole grain. the Fiber Wala package says "whole grain", but the mill would not say it is _100%_ whole grain. (See the game? Just like our retail bread labeling.) I assume this durum is grown in Canada.
For a high quality true whole grain, there is "sharbati" flour, smooth and sweet, by Aashirvaad brand, more expensive, but I can tell it is quality.
As far as I remember, flour products imported from India that I have seen all had date(at least year) of harvest or production on them.
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Bottom line: It's going to take some experimenting/taste-testing to find something close to what your MIL made a generation ago in India. Because of shipping from western US to NY, I would think it's going to be cheaper to buy various flours in 10 and 20 pound bags from a local store than have 5/25/50 pound bags shipped from the west or midwest.
Net-Net: Patel Brothers.
For what it's worth, when I've bought atta flour in the past it's been at Patel Brothers in Edison. My wife's quite sure her family didn't use maida for roti when she was a kid - in fact, they were in a small town in Punjab and mostly ate makki ki roti, but when it was wheat flour it was atta, not maida.
I loathe the taste of whole grain flour from red wheat that's more than a few days old, unless it's been vacuum sealed and stored cold or frozen (which poses its own problems). There's just a nasty bitterness to it that is absent from flour milled from fresh whole grains.
My Nutrimill has the interesting (and often troublesome) property that a considerable amount of bran separates to the sides of the output bin by static electricity so it is surprisingly easy to approximate "high extraction" flour by simply discarding some bran before stirring everything back together. We have managed to make a good, though not great, approximation of the roti my wife remembers by adjusting the hydration of the dough and the degree of enrichment with oil, and by kneading much less than her memory (or other people's recipes) show, but I think if I simply had a source of red wheat at a lower protein content than what's commonly available on the US market, that'd do the trick right there. Interestingly, over in another thread, an Indian baker trying to make French style whole wheat loaves reports that he's having difficulty because his atta flour is only 6% protein - which would be an extraordinarily low protein level for a hard red wheat flour and again suggests that the input grain for at least some atta is actually soft red wheat, not hard.
I'm going to experiment with 50% hard red wheat and 50% spelt. I suspect the poor quality of the gluten in the spelt will control the excessive dough strength that's been troubling us, but of course I will also lose 50% of that lovely fresh red wheat flavor...which is still, from my point of view, better than picking up the flavor of rancid red wheat from commercially ground whole wheat flour.
https://centralmilling.com/product/organic-whole-soft-red-wheat/ (But it's out of stock.)
[insert standard blather warning here.]
Centrall Milling is both a grower and a miller. They mill their own product, and purchase grain to mill... , so when they are out of stock, I assume they won't get any more until next harvest. Soft red winter is coming up for harvest now or soon. Soft red spring will come this fall.
Central Milling has soft white listed as a product, but I didn't openthe page to see if it was in stock.
www.CLNF.org has hard red winter, hard red spring, hard white spring, and soft white listed, but I did not check individual pages for availability. They are a wholesaler/retailer, not a miller. They purchase by the 50 pound bag, then sell both 50 pound bags and smaller "re-packs."
www.montanaflour.com _had_ whole berries, but to catch up, they only open their web site from 1pm to 5pm mountain time. I forget if they had soft red.
(There is a farmer in Northern Indiana who grows soft red winter, google : indiana wheat soft red winter : and you can get his name, and look him up in online phone book, and write/call him to see if he is willing to sell/ship retail. I don't know if he has bagging capability, or only transfers grain by truckload. )
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All the home-millers and preppers really slammed the suppliers of wheat berries, so it's going to be after 2020 spring harvest (of winter wheat) before much product is available. Spring 2020 harvest is fixed, as it was planted last fall. It will get here, but there's nothing that can be done to increase it, except pray for a high yield harvest.
I don't know how quickly, or even if, growers can add acres at this point for planting of spring wheat for fall 2020 harvest.
So, realistically speaking, it won't be until spring harvest 2021 (of winter-wheat planted in fall 2020) that things could even possibly get back to normal.
Add in the locust plagues currently going on in East Africa and the Middle East, and the world also needs to feed those people, which will spend down world reserves of wheat and other grain.
Preppers were right: you need to stock up before the emergency presents itself. That gives growers years to resupply the pipeline.
Oops, I blathered again. ;-)