February 16, 2016 - 5:19am
Making my own bread flour, cake flour and pastry flour
Hi!
i have a mill and some hard red and hard white wheat berries from bluebird farms and I am ordering some soft white wheat berries from community grains. I also got a flour sifter and another one that is 1/50 For super fine flour.
i want to make my own bread flour, cake flour and pastry flour. I know each of these have different protein contents and consistencies in texture and fineness of grain. Can anyone recommend what i can do to do make my own different flours with what I have? or what I should do in the future? I have a wonder mill at the moment but I am hoping to get a komo grain mill too! So, if anyone wants to reccomend settings or the level of fines used I would appreciate it. Thanks so much
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various sizes of particles but making flour like they do at roller mills using sophisticated techniques of milling, bolting and laboratory testing is another thing entirely. The best thing you can hope for is a general interpretation that gets you somewhere in the ballpark but not on the playing field. Roller mills are at home plate batting. I don't have a Komo, I have a Wonder and a Nutrimill, but I'm guessing a Komo won't likely get you that much closer either....... maybe out of the upper, deck.
I have a Grainmaker No. 99 mill and a variety of Superlasieves from Newark for bolting/sifting. My understanding is that, if you're really going to get into milling and bolting, Grainmaker and Diamant are the two brands to choose from, before you go totally insane and spend thousands on professional equipment. But I digress...
My primary interest is in making early 19th century pastry flour. I do that with soft white wheat berries, tempered to 14% moisture (that I measure with an agraTronix MT-Pro) for 12 hours, which are then milled quite fine (3rd setting on my mill) and then sifted through #70 mesh. The flour it produces is exceptionally fine, silky smooth, and quite white -- visually almost indistinguishable from bagged pastry flour. For what it's worth, I found the #50 mesh to note be quite fine enough. Although debatable, the old millers would have had something close to our #100 mesh, for the finest of fine flour, but once you hit #70 mesh, it's so pure that the marginal utility of anything else isn't great.
My understanding is that AP flour and bread flour would be prepped in just about the same manner, but the tempering times are likely in the 18-24 hour range.
As to how to go about cake flour, I am not sure what to recommend -- whether that is a specific low protein wheat or a certain approach to milling and bolting. Some others here may have input.
Having read too many milling threads here, I'm guessing a number of people may reply to you with, "Why would you mill whole grains and then bother bolting it? That defeats the point!" They don't get the fun of having complete control over your flour. I love that I can mill whatever I want and refine it myself. There are few satisfactions like hand-bolted flour.
Thanks for that wonderful info and 19th century pastry flour sounds amazing. One question is what brand is your 70 mesh? Is it manual or electric? I can not seem to find one just by typing it in.
The mesh is specifically in a round 8" frame, manufactured by Newark Wire and purchased online through Thomas Scientific. It's the "full height" version, and it costs about $100.
It is manual, and I use a little 3" boar bristle brush with it, to pass the milled flour back and forth over the mesh. The mesh is so fine and the flour is so moist (with fat from the wheat germ), that nothing would pass through if it were just shaken. Even the old millers would physically work the flour in their bolting cloth.
I agree with brownman. Some things are best left to the experts, and milling flour is one of them. I've casually looked into flour milling. The experts know how to do proper quality control on the incoming wheat and outgoing flour. Considering all the fuss and bother involved, and the difference it might make to the finished product, I find it much easier to go to the store and pick up a sack of store-bought flour.
Hi, not sure about your goals for bread flour, but you can mill either red or white hard wheat berries and use that for bread flour. You won't get the same lift as you would with white flour, but the taste will be much better, and it is much healthier for you. Nearly everything I make, bread, pizza, pancakes, pasta, etc, is 100% home ground, and I don't do any sifting.