The Fresh Loaf

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Wet Gluten Content of Flour

Benito's picture
Benito

Wet Gluten Content of Flour

I’ve wanted to do this for sometime and now I finally tested the wet gluten content (WGC) of my stoneground organic whole wheat that I’ve been using a lot lately.  A baker on instagram posted his method and ranges for WGC so I thought I would give it a go.

So the idea is that you hydrate 100 g of your flour with 70 g of water.  Knead it into a nice ball and allow it to autolyse for 1 hour.  After 1 hour, in a large bowl of water, you massage your dough ball, releasing the starch and bran from the ball.  The water gets dumped and replaced by fresh water.  Repeat until the water is clear and all you have left is a web of gluten.  This gluten web is squeezed to try to remove as much water as possible and left to dry for another hour and finally squeezed again and weighed.

His scale for quantity of gluten in flour goes like this:

50+ excellent.

40-50 Good

30-40 medium

20-30 poor

< 20 low grade

My whole wheat ended up measuring 35 g WGC, so by his scale is a medium for gluten content.  I’m thinking that my adding VWG when baking with this flour at 100% is probably a good idea.

Have you guys tried this?  What do you think about his scale and the method?  Do you think it is useful?

Benny 

phaz's picture
phaz

Tried it - no.

Thoughts about scale and method - laughable, and i mean I gotta get up off the floor laughable. 

As the issues with this are more than obvious, and i mean kicked in the face obvious, i wish you luck. Enjoy!

 

happycat's picture
happycat

 

Perhaps a neuro-atypicality is holding you back from expressing yourself clearly, rationally and constructively without sneering or bizarre and violent imagery. Luckily, there are many resources about ADD and other conditions to help with managing a lack of filter or empathy, or strong emotional reactions that result in strange outbursts.

Truly intelligent people can assess needs and scaffold learning in others. Feel free to show us.

Abe's picture
Abe

Chickpeas (or other similar replacements), salt, herbs and spices, or soy sauce, form into a pate, shallow fry and you have vegetarian meat replacement aka seitan.

[Something along those lines]

mariana's picture
mariana

Benny, have you repeated the measurements for the same flour to obtain an average and determine your range of error?

In the lab, wet gluten content is determined after 10min, not one hour, so your results are specific for your chosen method. Someone, who lets the dough rest for two or three hours, will have different numbers from yours as well. For example, Pastry flour which is  freshly mixed compared to a ball of Pastry dough ball three hours later give numbers that differ up to two times in size.

Distilled water in dough and tap water give huge difference n outcomes.

I was washing gluten in the past to compare flours, and as part of learning, to see gluten with my own eyes, how it differs n quality, and in my experience 

≤20% is typical of good quality wholewheat, because a huge proportion of 100g whole wheat is bran, especially if freshly milled where gluten is not strong yet.

20-30% the best bread flour 

30-40% must be kneaded by machine to develop gluten, suitable for bread machine baking

≥40% inedible. Suitable for puff pastry though.

Benito's picture
Benito

Mariana, this was my first try at this so I have only done this once.  I totally see what issues there would be with reproducibility.  Washing the dough to remove the starches and bran is challenging to be consistent in the extent to which one is able to wash each time to the same degree.  Then, of course, trying to get the gluten mesh to the same degree of dryness each time is also impossible.  I totally get that.  However, if you do the same procedure consistently each time it should allow you to compare flours, no?  Yes, one person doing an autolyse for shorter vs longer would get different results.  

For whole grains, it would obviously be beneficial to sift the bran out after measuring the weight and then doing the test.  

Anyhow, I thought that some might be interested in this.  I had seen other bakers post about this before and had never tried this.  Interesting to see the gluten mesh after everything else was washed out.

mariana's picture
mariana

Benny, you could simply divide your big ball of dough into two or more equal portions and determine their gluten content separately, to see the range of values. And presision scales, of course. It's imperative in any experiment, otherwise those numbers have no meaning.

It also took me a while to learn to dry balls of wet gluten thoroughly, so that the only water left in them is bound water. 

Understanding gluten and seeing it with your own eyes is so important. It is good that you washed it and measured. Although sifting bran out of flour is unnecessary and misleading, because depending on bran particles sizes, you will end up with different %of bran sifted out of different whole wheat and whole grain wheat flours.

Is your %wet gluten recalculated to 100g of whole wheat flour , with bran in it, or reported for 100g of bolted flour?

Benito's picture
Benito

I did not sift the bran out, so the wet gluten weight is the gluten and associated water from 100 g of unsighted whole wheat flour.  I took the time to try to really wash the bran out of the gluten mesh.  It was really enlightening to actually handle and see and feel what the gluten is like on its own without the gelatinous storch.

mariana's picture
mariana

.

Abe's picture
Abe

How can a flour, for arguments sake, have 13% protein and end up with 50% gluten? What does that 50 + mean? 

mariana's picture
mariana

Abe, strong flour means not just elastic and fermentation tolerant, but also one that absorbs water well. Strong flours absorb more water than weak flours to obtain the same dough  consistency. 

Wet gluten is two out of four proteins in flour mixed with water. The other two proteins are water soluble, they will be washed out.

The stronger the flour the more wet gluten will form and more water will be trapped in that ball of gluten. If I remember it correctly, the coefficient for North American spring wheats is about 4.2. Meaning 100g of 13% protein bread flour will consistently give 13x4.2=55g wet gluten. These are super strong flours. Manitoba flour.

That is how 13g of protein in flour would give you ≥50g of wet gluten in one flour, in strong flour, and only 10-15 g in another, in weak flour, in cake&pastry flour.

Abe's picture
Abe

that is what i suspected as to why this process might not be so accurate. If a flour has 13% protein, and gluten is protein, then one cannot have 50% gluten so I figured something else is going on. Which you have confirmed! 

So that ball of gluten is not 100% protein. 

But I suppose as long as we're consistently inconsistent then it still tells us something. Like 50% will be better than 20%. However it isn't the full story. 

I think this method is an interesting one but i'd only do it to make my own seitan. 

P.s. it ties in with VWG not being 100% protein either. 

Benito's picture
Benito

Yes totally, if we are consistent in the manner in which we do this test, then it can help compare the gluten in each flour.  We know that the protein listed for each flour isn’t the whole story in terms of the gluten in each flour.

Abe's picture
Abe

comparing one to another I can see how it'll tell us something. Nice experiment. Always good to see a different approach. It's how we learn. 

Nice one, Benny. 

Benito's picture
Benito

Those number ranges are not percentages Abe, they are ranges of the weight of wet gluten derived from 100 g of flour.  

Abe's picture
Abe

But in a way that'll be a % of gluten - be it wet gluten. so it doesn't tell us actual protein/gluten % but wet gluten which includes water. But it can still tell us something when compared to each other. like 50g will be better than 20g without actually giving us the protein %.

Somehow while interesting I feel it's not the whole picture. Does it tell us about the different types of gluten? etc. Still it is cool to see the gluten. 

Benito's picture
Benito

It would be interesting to repeat this for spelt, since it has poor quality gluten.  I’m wondering how that would turn out?

Abe's picture
Abe

Like the extensibility or elasticity in pure gluten state. Does it stretch well or tear? Not sure what it would tell us beyond what we know already or how to apply this knowledge to the dough but for curiosity it should be a good experiment. 

Benito's picture
Benito

Yes you’re right, it would be for curiousity.

JonJ's picture
JonJ

The big question is did you make seitan?

Interesting thing to do though. Would imagine the oven dried weight of the gluten might provide a more accurate measurement than a one hour dry under unspecified conditions.

 

-Jon

Benito's picture
Benito

No I did not make seitan, I’d never heard of it before until you mentioned it Jon.

I wondered about drying it at low temperature in the oven.  But I was trying to be true to this baker’s methods despite their limitations.  I think in general it gave me some confirmation that adding the VWG to a small amount, say to increase the protein by 1% was a good idea for my whole wheat flour I have been using.

Abe's picture
Abe
Benito's picture
Benito

Got it now.

HeiHei29er's picture
HeiHei29er

I agree that to make a much more reproducible test would be to dry it at low temp (225 deg F) for 3-4 hours.  Would take a lot longer, but would eliminate the variability in the squeezing step. 

Benito's picture
Benito

Definitely it would be better, but I’m not looking for precision, just trying to get a general idea and a way to compare flours I use.

HeiHei29er's picture
HeiHei29er

Makes sense, and like you said, if you do it consistently and try and get a feel for the variability, it should give you a good comparison on the various flours.