The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [146]
If you have bought some flour that time after time refuses to make bread light enough to suit you, we would like to suggest that you use it along with some other, better bread flour in a recipe like the Scottish Sponge Bread. “Weak” flour often has outstanding flavor and can make splendid bread when used in such a recipe. However, it is possible to strengthen a flour’s rising power by adding gluten flour. One teaspoonful per cup of whole wheat flour will increase the protein content by about 1 percent; a tablespoonful per cup would, for example, make a strong composite bread flour of approximately 15 percent protein out of an all-purpose whole wheat flour of 12 percent protein. Be sure to allow extra kneading and extra fermentation time. This is definitely cheating (but it does work).
Incidentally, another gluten product, vital wheat gluten, is also available in some places. It has a higher protein content and is specially processed to prevent the denaturation of the protein by heat.
Because of its high protein content, some people add gluten to foods as a supplement, but it is severely deficient in the essential amino acid lysine (which is supplied in the bran and germ), so in the rare case where a protein supplement is needed, gluten would be a particularly poor choice.
Milling Your Own
If you have a convenient and dependable source of good-quality whole grain flours, you probably don’t need to invest in a home mill. But if your local sources disappoint you, there are several advantages to preparing your own flours and cracked cereals at home.
For one thing, whole, unbroken grain keeps very well for a long time, even for several years, without exotic storage requirements. It is only after the grain is ground that the oils begin to oxidize and the flavor and nutritional quality deteriorate. When you grind your own flour you can use it at its freshest, getting the best for both taste and health. Wheat is quite a bit less expensive than flour, and often, especially if you buy in reasonable quantities, you can choose what varieties you want.
Wheat flour keeps most of its goodness for a month at cool room temperature, but it is best stored airtight in the refrigerator, especially if you don’t know how old it was when you bought it, or if you don’t bake daily. Whole-grain rye flour is even more perishable, which is why it is so hard to find on the shelf: dark rye flour is fractioned, with some of the more spoilable (and healthful) parts removed.
Home-ground rye flour is really special, flavorful and sweet, but the biggest flavor difference in the home-grinding department is corn. Before we got our mill, we were puzzled by what should have been so obvious: why is cornbread bitter sometimes? We investigated leavening combinations and varieties of corn, called experts, and wrote letters to the big natural foods companies. No one could tell us, though a few actually suggested that people like the bitter taste! When we first ground our own corn and made cornbread, no one could believe the difference in flavor: it was amazingly sweet and delicious, without a trace of bitterness.
Later a nutritionist said, oh yes, corn oil goes rancid very quickly. And shortly thereafter we came across the information that years of breeding corn for high yields have created a grain with elevated levels of polyunsaturated oils—so that all corn products, even commercial products like corn flakes, become rancid quickly. While the food scientists address the problem, if you are a cornbread fan, do contrive to mill your own, and enjoy the incomparable sweetness of it. Keep fresh cornmeal in the refrigerator, for a week or so at most.
Incidentally, brown rice flour also spoils in a short time, and home-ground is vastly superior to store-bought.
With any grain you take the trouble to grind yourself, be sure to check it over and make sure it is clean and free from mold. If you grind fairly small quantities, it is worth the trouble to pick out discolored or moldy grains, rocks, sticks, etc. But to make life