You are always full of good ideas Victor. What I like about you Victor is that next to you, I don’t appear as prickly as I really am. It is like a young woman at a bar surrounding herself with ugly women to make herself look better (and yes, men may do the same though I would not know).
Men do, but do not tell you, for a particularly purposed reason. They buy you a drink, to keep you from leaving.
But, you actually DO mean to pee on her parade. Right?
No, I certainly don’t Brandon.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Christine’s OP whatsoever.
My comment was “food for thought” and nothing more.
There is a problem with current refined flour-the kind that has a shelf life of a twinkie barring contamination by insects.
So what the heck is up your arse and what, pray tell, did I do to provoke your asinine substance-less jab at me?
I passed on the 50 pound bag at RD and got the 25 pound bag at Costco I’ve now got a bunch of gallon ziplock bags full of bread flour. I’ve been making a at least two loaves a week for years and this is the first time I couldn’t buy KA BF or WW forever. Made one loaf with AP and no one noticed any different…
He mentioned that he and his wife-an MD internist-both avoided white flower, processed foods, and red meat due
Sounds like a tasting note!
White flowers, red meat, and a long finish.
White flour in general is a high-glycemic food like sugar so it shouldn’t be a major part of your diet. But it’s not so horrible if you’re eating plenty of good things as well.
As to the genetic modification of flour, that’s a whole different thing. Part of it is that you can’t trade grain as a commodity unless it’s all the same. And the huge ranches in Kansas and the Dakotas plant what gives them the best yield and disease resistance, not necessarily what’s the most nutritious. The hard wheat that people use now came Russia and the original plantings are believed to have been farmed by German-Russian Mennonites. But people worked on those wheats and cross bred until we got what we have today. They’re not really the products of genetic modification at the molecular level, they’re from traditional breeding. But there are only a few types in production so it’s nearly monoculture, which is really not a good place for us to be in.
And it’s not necessarily just white flour. The way flour is milled is that it’s broken down into its constituent parts. First the dust is blown off, then the husks are removed, then the wheat berries are smashed into pieces and the bran and other things are blown off. The broken up berries are called middlings and they are then crushed to produce fine flour. If you want white flour, that’s where you stop other than adding the vitamins. But if you want whole wheat flour, you add back some of the bran, etc. Not the germ though, because that shortens the shelf life considerably. So most whole wheat flour is really reconstituted flour unless you get it from some place where they actually do crush the whole berries and bag that.
Just to further add to the conversation (this time nothing about modern bread flour being bad for your health), in the April 13, 2020 issue of New Yorker Magazine there is an amazingly entertaining piece written by Bill Buford entitled “Baking Bread in Lyon”.
Being a subscriber, I don’t know if the piece is protected behind a pay-wall or can be read on a three freebie type basis.
The link is Baking Bread in Lyon | The New Yorker
It is thought provoking.
The conclusion of the author, who apprenticed under one of Lyon’s most loved bakers of baguettes is that without special flour sourced from ancient grains in certain specified locales in France, the making of a truly worthy baguette is impossible.
For the boo-hounds in the bleacher seats with nothing worthy to say, I only wish to add something to the conversation some people might appreciate.
I apologize if it appears I am high jacking the OP.
Greg, you got me on misspelling “flour”. I find in my old age that phonetics overcome my gray matter when I type in a hurry.
Happens to all of us!!!
By the way, that article about the special flour in Lyon is kind of interesting. It’s way to much to get into here, but the advent of mechanical mixers and the standardization of flour in the 1900s both in the US and in Europe, particularly after the WW2, caused a lot of people to be upset. Largely because of the degradation of the baguette, Clavel introduced the concept of the autolyse in 1974. Much of his career was devoted to bringing flavor and texture back to bread.
I’m not sure that you need to get the flour from a place outside of Lyon though, especially since the baguette was introduced by an Austrian.
I see the social distancing thing is working well.
Since we are talking about flour in general, I ordered some 00 flour for the first time and was under the impression that is was super finely ground. I made a dough ball today for pizza, and it actually felt way more course than AP flour. It was almost between cornmeal and flour to me. Is that normal?
To respond is to create further thread drift and potentially piss off Christine, who is among the last on this Board I would want to alienate.
So I will simply say it was a concern of mine and I was tempted to ask him to wait a few months but did not.
I have a neighbor who has five young children. He knocked on my door on Sunday asking for help repairing his daughter’s bicycle.
As I worked on it, I had he and three of his kids within two feet of my face watching.
We all have our own risk-aversion levels. I could have said something. I chose not to.
Ahhh but we should listen to your guidance on the safety of our flour sources. Got it.
Mitch, it’s less about the substance of your post and more about how you started it. Don’t type, “I don’t mean to pee on your parade…” when that’s precisely what you did, and intended to do. Christine was simply making a nice, light-hearted post that was essentially, “Woo hoo! Great find for inexpensive flour!” You chose to post about how flour like that she purchased should be avoided. Parade peed upon. Pontificate elsewhere…I’m sure you could get a great discussion going in its own thread if you wanted to.
No, it should not feel like cornmeal. Perhaps you did not knead it enough? Not sure what else it could be unless its not really 00 flour which seems unlikely.
For those who are interested in staying away from tradition AP or white flour, I would suggest looking for artisan flour millers. We have a great one in Pasadena and the products are exceptional. They do all their own milling onsite. Well worth a visit to their website if you are serious about baking. Gristandtoll.com
![[thumbs-up.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f84c5acc11486ee4baba6dee6cf61dbd133abb18.gif "[thumbs-up.gif]"){kind=small}
I use local millers quite a bit, but I’ve found I need to use a scale for measurement rather than volume measurements, since the density of the flour varies quite a bit more than commercial product.
Good call
This is what I bought
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WQ75O2Y/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
and it felt kind of course right out of the bag. ![[scratch.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/4/42a16863a8714da3c1604419e3eb9206bb87aa50.gif "scratch"){kind=small}