I recently made a couple of loaves with "homemade" T80 flour, made from 3 feedstocks:
- White whole wheat flour, roller milled
- Red whole wheat flour, stoneground
- Home Mockmilled Millers Choice heritage wheat
The plan was to sift all these flours though a #40 sieve and then a #50 sieve, to give a reasonable approximation of a T80 flour. While I was at it, I decided to do a sifting trial to see how the yield from the 3 sources compared.
I took 100g of each flour and sifted it through a #40 sieve, weighed the pass through, then sifted it through a #50 sieve and again weighed the pass through. These are the results I got:
- White WW RM: #40 = 87%; #50 = 81%
- Red WW SG: #40 = 83%; #50 = 77%
- MC MM: #40 = 84%; #50 = 70%
As you might expect, the roller milled flour separated more cleanly and with a final yield of 81% was probably pretty close to T80. The yield on the SG flour was 4% down at both sieves. But the interesting one is the Mockmilled flour - the #40 yield was only 3% down on the roller milled, but the #50 yield was whopping 11% down!
So I then decided to clean the stones on the Mockmill with the standard white rice grinding technique. Then I repeated the sifting and got:
- #40 = 84%; #50 = 78%. This time the #50 passthrough was well up and similar to the commercial SG flour.
So the moral is to keep your stones clean, whatever stone mill you have - otherwise you may have excessive middlings (even if you aren't sifting) and these larger particle sizes could negatively impact on your loaf structure.
Lance
Hi Lance,
I add 10% stone ground whole wheat to my regular sourdough. I have a small electric stone mill. I have found that the white wheat berries are smaller than the larger red wheat berries. I can't mill the red wheat as fine as the white as the mill clogs somewhat. I don't usually sift the flour but I was wondering if the size of the berries affect the sifting results.
Interesting experiment of ours. Thanks for sharing.
Gavin
Certainly, I think grain size will have an impact on bran content - it's the old surface area to volume ratio thing, so smaller berries will have more bran. But it's probably variety related as well, even for the same size berries.
In the past I have used some traditional English varieties like Red Lammas and Old Kent Red, but I found the bread went stale very quickly. I put this down to large amounts of bran in these varieties - certainly the berries wer a lot smaller than more modern varieties.
Lance
You might want to dig out the posts from bwraith and proth5 about sifting and tempering. They each went a fair way down that rabbit hole some years back.
Paul
Ah yes, B. Wraith's milling posts (and Proth5). They did get into it seriously. I seem to recall Mr Wraith buying some complex multi-stage motorised sifting gadget.
I had a dabble with all that stuff when I first got my mill (about 10 years ago), including tempering - once I'd overdone the tempering and clogged my mill up with wet grain, I decided tempering was not for me!
Now I just play the tunes with 2 kitchen sieves and #40 & #50 20cm test sieves.
Lance
Hi Lance,
May I ask at which mesh that T45 flour is produced? I'm interested in milling my own flour, that is equivalent to French' s T45 gruau flour. Thanks Lance
Jay
I don't think it's going to happen, Jay. If you stone mill, you will always get some shattered bran particles in with the white flour. This is more likely with the small diameter stones in a home mill (and it goes faster).
T45 is about 72% extraction. You could maybe try a #70 or #80 sieve, but you would need to work your way through the coarser sieves first, or it will just clog up.
Also your yield is going to be very low - at a guess, I would say maybe 50%? As Paul mentioned, have a look at those old posts - there might be some clues there.
Lance