Saturday, 16 January 2010

Battle of the Flours - Which makes the tastiest loaf?



The theory is that buying a better quality flour will result in a better quality loaf, but is it really that big a difference? ASDA sells it's own brand Strong White Bread flour for 61p that's 40.7p/kg, on the other end of the scale you can get a bag of Wessex Mill Strong White Bread flour for £2.15 or 143.3p/kg. That's nearly 4 times as expensive, that better be one awesome bag of flour. Wessex mill claim their milling doesn't heat up the flour as much as other mills would thus preserving nutrients and vitamins in the finished product. Whether or not this will be discernible in the baked bread or not I don't know. Quite possibly it's also down to the quality of the wheat used to make the flour. Although you don't often get details of the wheat used you might assume someone offering a premium product is sourcing higher quality materials. All and more of this could affect the final loaf, I'll just be making the same loaf with each flour and seeing what the end result tastes like. The flours assembled above could be more scientifically collected to assess different possible influencing factors, the main thing I want to see is if there's any discernible difference which I can confidently assign to the flour used between cheaper and more expensive flours.

I'll be making the loaves to the Pain Ordinaire recipe from this book, which goes something like this:
  1. Mix the yeast and about 1/3 of the water
  2. Pour into a well made in the mixed flour and salt
  3. Mix in enough of the flour to make a thin paste and leave for 20 mins
  4. mix, kneed, rise (I'll check all doughs for proper rising rather than relying on timing)
  5. knockback, rest, shape
  6. proove, bake
I'll also be glazing with olive oil before prooving and baking as my primary taste tester doesn't like their bread too crusty (does this invalidate their ability to be a taste tester?).

The first loaf is prooving now, just getting some bangers and mash on for my lunch, I'll start the second this afternoon and try to get at least 3 loaves in total done today.

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