Characteristics of bread flour?
Hi,
implementing some of Hamelman's recipes in "Bread" I had to make a lot of adaptions.
Let me explain: the flours I have at disposal in Italy are much less absorbent and elastic than american and canadian flours (that most probably were used by the author for his recipes), as I already imagined beforehand.
Fortunately for me the recipes more or less explain how the dough should look and feel like, permitting me to add flour to have a dough with seemingly the same characteristics.
My curiosity is understanding what are the alveographic characteristics of the "bread flours" you generaly use. At page 372 there's an example of a flour in use: W 335 with P/L 0.75.
Here that flour would be considered high gluten flour with a very high elasticity. Just to make an example "manitoba" flours (specialty high gluten flours to make sweet breads such as panettone and pandoro) have W ~= 350 and P/L 0.6 with an absorbence of at most 60%. Flours with a higher P/L are generally considered to be too elastic, especially for sweet breads. Ordinary flours in our stores almost never drink more than 50-55% when preparing stiff doughs.
Another example: preferments for rye breads are generally called for with an hydratation of 80-83%, but the rye flours I use are so finelly milled (and wholemeal) that with so little water I would get a very stiff dough that I could only "knead" by hand.
I'd like to have some more detail on your bread flours to have a wider picture.
Thanks.