July 6, 2014 - 12:58pm
Bread from home milled soft wheat berries??
Has anybody ever home milled soft wheat berries and made bread from the resulting flour? I rarely use bread flour as I don't like the chew it imparts to the loaf. I work to develop the starch and gluten in regular AP flour and WW flour with great results.
I will be making Broetchen tomorrow which seems to, ideally, be made from Italian 00 flour-a much "softer" flour than American AP flour. I was going to cut my AP flour with cake flour but found some soft wheat berries in the cupboard and wondered how that would work. Then I wondered if I could make bread from just the soft WW flour, as long as I work to develop the dough.
Thoughts?
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Although, it might be something other than what you want in a bread. The soft wheats are lower in protein and gluten. That makes them great for cakes and pie crusts and biscuits and scones and such, where tenderness is a desired trait. It also makes them a different kind of challenge when making yeasted bread where some degree of strength is required.
At a guess, you will probably add less water to achieve a desired dough consistency than you would with a flour made from hard wheat varieties. You may also have to use a gentler kneading technique that organizes the gluten network without damaging it. And the finished bread might have a cakier consistency that bread made with hard wheat flours, with more of a tendency to crumble.
The best thing to do is try. You won't be out much for ingredient costs. And you'll gain an appreciation for the French bakers who make stellar breads with low-protein flours.
Paul
I would love to read what your results are if you use 100% soft wheat. I have never ventured about 60%.
I read somewhere that to 'make' your own all purpose flour with whole grains you simply use 60% soft wheat with 40% hard wheat. I have done that with great results in breads, cakes and cookies.
Usually when I am using soft wheat I am making rolls or panned loaves so I am curious to read how your loaf holds up if it will be free standing or are Broetchen rolls??? I am thinking they are indeed rolls and that I have made them in the distant past but my mind is foggy…
Have Fun,
Janet
I've not had good luck going above about 20% when I did it. Mine came from a local field that was being harvested. They let me fill a bucket full of wheat. I cleaned it myself. It works great for pancakes and such.
BTW, I got another bucket this year. Looks like the grasshoppers are out in force. Going to be fun cleaning it. I may toss it.
Mike
As I was making hanseata's Weizenbroetchen dough last night (first time-I'll post that separately) I decided to multitask and threw together enough dough to make 1 roll using 100% home milled soft wheat flour. No recipe but the results indicate it would be worth pursuing. This was a straight-thru, not much kneading, very little autolyse for a WW, not as hydrated as I usually make it dough so if it tastes reasonable delicious, I know I can make it very good-tasting using my standard methods for WW.
Here are my pics and comments:
It looked and smelled very good! The crust was a little bit chewy but ttender enough that it wasn't an issue as I don't like chewy,tough crust.
This dough did develop adequate gluten. It definitely was a bread roll and not a biscuit. There was a little of the cake-like crumbs when I sliced. I'm sure if I had a higher hydration dough, let it rest a while and really developed the gluten that was there it would be almost feathery.
As you can see, it is very soft and flexible.
So, to answer my own question,I believe a loaf can be made from home-milled soft wheat berries-with a few caveats!
1. It is whole wheat so you must use techniques that adequately address WW characteristics. Namely, adequate hydration both in amounts of fluid and time to allow the flour to absorb it so a sponge, autolyse, retard, tangzhong,epoxy method,etc,etc.
2. Knead well-even to windowpane. This dough had a definite turning point in the hand knead I did and I did NOT go to windowpane-too many other tasks going on.
3. This dough is sticky-almost bordering on a rye-type sticky. Do NOT add extra flour! Just handle like a sticky dough-wet or oiled hands and a scraper, if necessary.
4. I suspect it may overproof easily. Hard to tell with this roll as to how a bigger loaf would do but I have found easy overproofing to be the case with other flours that had lower gluten. And the difference can be a few minutes time so it needs to be closely watched at this stage.
A quite delicious experiment but I will cut down the salt next time. Hard to judge at this scale.
Thanks for posting your results. I have been tempted to try a 100% soft wheat but just haven't afraid of getting a flat loaf. Now I know otherwise and may do some experimenting myself in the future.
Take Care,
Janet
I found a bag of soft wheat berries in my cupboard that needed to be used . This was a great thread to get some helpful hints
and say that I do know bakers making nice loaves from local whole wheat at 9% protein, so lower protein than what we are used to (especially out on the High Prairie) is certainly doable. The above advice has been applied to those loaves.
But as I have learned in working with triticale, there is triticale and then there is triticale that works better for bread. There is soft wheat and then there is really soft wheat - protein content (at least in wheat - not so much in triticale where it is protein quality) really tells the tale. I wish our suppliers would let us know a bit more about what we are buying than they seem to want to. C'mon, the chopin alveograph only runs $10K. Sigh.
Nice rolls.