Martin Philip, post author

May 1, 2017 at 8:33am

In reply to by Anne Peacock (not verified)

Hi Anne, Thanks for your feedback, I'm glad you are enjoying the recipe and the approach! Bear with me for a quick technical discussion around white flour, extraction rates, and home milling. The gist of what I would say is that I haven't had much luck milling "white" flour (by "white" I mean a flour with ash content similar to our reliable all-purpose). Our mill in the bakery has very fine screens but, the lightest flour that I can make is tan (and gorgeous!). The extraction rate (which I would define as the sifted flour divided by total mill output) hovers around 80% for us. That means that when milling and sifting we remove about 20% of the bran and coarser material. Following me? In order to make a flour which presents as white we need to get the extraction rate down to about 60% or so but, and here's the trick, we want to be able to select out certain areas of the endosperm (the starchy portion of the wheat berry) which are whitest. This is possible using a roller mill (this is what is used in large commercial mills) but doesn't happen easily with home mills or even our larger stone milling system in the bakery. To my lens this is ok--bran and germ are flavorful and nutritious. Regarding the sifting systems, there are a few options. Fine sieves can be purchased on the internet-I've even seen some bakers using screens developed for small scale mining. Hand sifting can be a slow process-you may want a few good audio books. ; ))) Last, the wheat berries. I like to look for local options-you should try working with some soft wheat berries if you find any, sometimes they mill more easily in the home environment. Let me know how it goes! Martin
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.