November 25, 2020 - 6:55pm
Proper refined bread flour at home?
I am willing to get creative: multistep milling, fancy sifting, invent/build something, etc.. Is there a way a home baker without spending a fortune can create commercial quality bread flour? And other refined flours? without having to add commercial additives?
Ideally, I would only need the proper equipment and the right mixture of wheat berries? Having to add conditioners, gluten, and such are off the table, because I figure as soon as I have to add things like that, why not just buy the flour commercially. The goal being to produce a variety of refined flours from scratch. Who knows, maybe one day I will also plant and harvest a field of wheat.
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"commercial quality bread flour".
If by that you mean .55% or less ash, such as white AP or bread flour, then the answer is "no."
It takes expensive roller mills to do that, along with other procedures such as tempering.
However, .85% ash flour, such as is sold by Central Milling, is often used for bread. And you might achieve that by sifting.
Pardon my ignorance. But...
What is ash with regards to flour?
What is tempering?
And, why could not someone invent a small scale version of the expensive machines?
EDIT 1: Well this article very clearly answered my Ash question.
http://www.baystatemilling.com/technical-support/flour-ash-what-it-is-and-what-it-is-not/
EDIT 2: Found a good thefreshloaf post about Tempering and Bolting.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/16879/home-tempering-and-bolting-wheat-get-high-extraction-flour
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tempering+wheat
(In post 16879) He claimed 84-89% extraction. Commercial AP and bread flour, at .52 to .55% ash is 72% to 75% extraction as per http://www.theartisan.net/Flours_One.htm
That page at theartisan.net is my main go-to page for flour tech.
Happy exploring, amigo.
DanAyo described his multi-pass sifting and re-milling experiments in this series of commenfs (not in the original post):
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/447178#comment-447178
Be sure to scroll and read the thread as it spans many comments.
Wow... That is a lot of experimenting and work between DanAyo and "Our Crumb". Pretty much crushed my dream of inventing a machine that consumes a wheat berry mixture on one end and spits out high extraction flour through one tube and bran through another tube.