January 14, 2013 - 12:00pm
Flour
I purchased 2 organic stoneground flours from a local mill - Hard Wholewheat Bread Flour and Hard Unbleached AP Flour. (I have always assumed AP flour was a soft flour. Am I correct?) Both these flours are made from Western Hard Red Spring Wheat and both have 12½% protein. The AP flour has had some of the coarse bran and germ removed. The bag states that it is ideal both for breadmaking and as an AP flour. Can I assume, disregarding the lesser nutritional value, that this AP flour will have the same result as the bread flour when making bread. I would probably use it in conjuntion with the bread flour. Previously using the bread flour on its own resulted in quite a heavy, dark bread, with a strong flavour.
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Hi Dot. AP flour is not soft flour. Cake flour is the one that is soft. I have never heard of a whole wheat bread flour - so let's just say your mill is not using the term in a generic way. Generally bread flour is a high gluten refined wheat flour. However, if both of your flours have 12.5% protein that is pretty high and perfectly good for bread making. I would think you will have different results from the AP and the Whole Wheat flours you got. From what you are saying, the AP flour sounds like what is frequently called high extraction flour - in other words it is partially but not completely refined - as opposed to a usual AP flour which is refined white flour at a somewhat lower gluten percent. If you mix it with the whole wheat, I guess you would get a fairly dark bread, just not as dark as 100% whole wheat. If you baked with it alone, you would still get something pretty far from white bread. Great that you have access to a local mill, and hopefully you'll have great success baking with their flour. -Varda
Robin Hood makes a 'best for bread' ww flour; I've used it and it is very good for bread, much easier to use than regular ww flour. Unfortunately, it isn't always available in Quebec and when it is, it's very expensive. If you can get unbleached a-p flour, try that in your breads.