Recent flour purchase
Hi All,
I hope everyone is staying safe and keeping themselves occupied during these times.
I should start by saying that if I've put this in the wrong area of the forum, do please feel free to tell me and i'll move it to the correct place.
I found this forum whilst looking for someone to help me with some pretty basic flour questions. Simplistically, I've been baking bread for about a year now and have typically stayed pretty central RE flour, ordering from a place in the UK called Shipton Mill and going normally for some '00' flour to make pasta with, and some Canadian Strong White Bread Flour for my Sourdoughs.
Since COVID hit, it's been incredibly hard to source flour and I ended up buying a 12kg sack from a heritage miller close to my house. When I bought it, it was confirmed as being 'stoneground wholemeal bread flour' and I asked what protein content, which came back as 13.3%.
Perhaps naively, I didn't ask any further questions but now I've used the final bit of my Tipton flour, and have just gone to open the sack I bought, I've found it's a very different consistency to that i've normally used.
Further, when I mix this flour as I normally would (420g with ~370ml water and 100g starter), the dough doesn't come together at all - it tears and is tacky/sticky/mealy..
Am I right in saying that I need to sieve the larger 'bran-like' flecks out of the flour before using it to bake bread, or is there something else I should do..?
Any help appreciated!