Mid-19th Century French Flour Recreation?
I'm curious to see if anyone has specific thoughts on how best to recreate the experience of mid-19th century French flour — specifically for use in making period-correct brioche and waffles.
For a few years now, I've been using a ratio of 64% AP flour to 34% WW pastry flour to 2% rye. The rationale for this is that A. the protein content of their wheat would have been somewhere on the continuum of AP to pastry flour B. their bolting technique would have been excellent, though imperfect and C. no matter how well-tended a farmer's field was, crop control would not have been so rigorous as to entirely keep other grains out of the mix.
I've spent countless hours trying to research an even tighter approach than the one I use, and I'd love to hear any thoughts on how I could refine the ratios to better approximate the flour of the time period in question. The AP/pastry flour ratio is my biggest question mark. Especially if you happen to have any reference material or links that address this, I'd be grateful.
Thank you - Mr. Waffles
P.S. - My recipes are also all water (no milk) based and only use ale yeast. They're agonizingly period-specific.