A Sifting Trial

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