I’ve been posting recently about white stoneground flour I’ve bought from Anne in Felin Ganol watermill in Wales and the first flour I tried was this amaretto from a 2010 harvest which yielded a low protein flour of 10.5%, too low for making bread on its own it was believed, but I proved in this post here it can indeed make good sourdough loaves successfully if handled right.
Why am I returning back to this flour again?
Because I am at the end of this particular sack and 3 months on I can not believe it’s the same flour, it handles so differently. If someone had told me it was the same flour I would not believe them.
I’ve read about the natural ageing process of flour and how oxygen is a powerful strengthener of protein but to actually experience it myself is something quite different. The same sack of flour 3 months on has transformed into a typical strong white stoneground flour which doesn’t require special handling.
Green Flour – Freshly Milled Flour
The first time I experienced green flour was with Roland in the village of Cucugnan in France here, he uses his flour often hours after milling. The idea of using freshly milled flour is to keep as many nutrients in the flour as possible, it’s a practice Roland told me is carried out in Austria and Anne tells me the German’s also do it.
It occurred to me this morning, (thinking about flour when brushing my teeth because as you’ve gathered by now I don’t do anything else but think about flour) that the tradition of using green flour for health benefits...was it as a consequence of long harsh winters with deprived fresh produce?
Natural Ageing of Flour
Fresh flour is tricky to use, it’s not a baker’s best friend. Flour left and exposed to air is whiten because oxygen oxidises the carotenoid pigments in the flour, a chemical reaction occurs making flour appear brighter and lighter.
The other reaction oxygen has is with the gluten-forming proteins, strengthening them. When gluten forms stronger bonds the dough is easier to handle, absorbs more water, less sticky and can be stretched and manipulated without tearing.
Roland used his fresh flour with a powerful stiff levain and kept the dough cold, I could feel how fragile his dough was.
To give some idea of how much this flour had changed over the course of 3 months living in my little baking room; I mixed the dough the night before and folded it twice over a period of about 2hrs then shaped it put in the fridge overnight, took it out, left it at room temperature for 5 hours before baking it. I couldn’t have done this when I first received it.
Anne had milled the Amaretto 2 weeks prior to sending it to me. Below is a photo of the crumb of the second loaf I made using that fresh flour, good tasting crumb, but being low protein I had to watch how long I left it to rise and then as you can see, the crumb itself once baked can suffer from some tearing where the gases have expanded the air pockets but there wasn’t enough extensibility in the protein to cope with this.
Crumb of Amaretto flour 2 weeks after milling, end November 2011
The photo below is of yesterday’s loaf, same flour but with 3 months worth of oxidisation. The crumb you could feel was stronger, bouncier, held together really well even after the long proving time, no signs of tearing.
The other noticeable differences on making the dough was how much more water it absorbed.
For 500g flour:
280g water – 2 weeks old flour
315g water – 3 months old flour
Yesterday I pushed it to 315g of water but I could comfortably added another 10-15grms of water I think.
Maturing Agents
From what I’ve read if a flour needs strengthening some mills will add ascorbic acid (identical to vitamin C ). A very powerful ageing agent is potassium bromate which is no longer permitted in the EU or countries like Canada and China but is used in small quantities in the US.
Supposedly the advantage of maturing agents over oxidisation is mills not having to store flour taking up valuable space along with possible risk of mold growth. There’s also the disadvantage with any natural process of inconstancy, and the millers’ job is to provide consistently good flour to bakeries, that’s how they have a viable business.
The mills that chose not to add any maturing agents have the choice of blending varieties of flours, each adding its own characteristic and strength in order to compensate for a particular variety’s weakness.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Does this mean that all flour changes in storage? If I’m buying retail flour, should I go by the sell by date? Just had some spelt delivered from Doves Farm, with a use by of sep. 2012. Checked my white bread flour retail pack from Aldi, (yes, it works pretty well, 12% tastes ok, and is 69p for 1.5 kg) exactly the same print, similar batch numbers, same date… Do Doves Farm have their flours packed at the same company who supply Aldi? My Waitrose wholemeal flour is due by March 2012, purchased in November, so maybe 6 months is the limit. interesting….
Thank you for this – I’ve occasionally wondered about home-aged green flour and whether it would develop a mould or mandate very careful storage. Your experience is instructive and interesting.
Spot on looking bread….and as usual, intuitive observant baker!
Simon like I said different mills go by different means of conditioning their flours, the only way to know which they use is to ask them and then to trust what they’re saying.
hmmm – I think I wrote before I tried this experiment with our Brockwell Bake flour that we normally use totally fresh and noticed less difference than you report here. Its possible my storage conditions are just too cold for oxidization to happen or maybe ageing affects different wheats differently or even degrees of aeration during sieving varies between mills and has an effect? Did you notice any change in flavour though? Do we know if nutritionally as good as fresh even if easier on the baker?
What I did notice this season was that grain that I rejected as too weak to bake with as fresh flour straight after harvest was OK two months later. Co-incidentally when doing a fertility test straight after harvest this grain did not germinate well (an advantage to the farmer as less chance of sprouting in the ear before reaping) but OK later and this change could be related to protein development?
I would be extremely sceptical of keeping wholemeal flour (with entire germ in it) for six months, here http://www.fabflour.co.uk/content/1/264/how-to-store-flour.html (which is in any case from a big mills’ organization who I would expect to exaggerate shelf life) they give three months, elsewhere I have read just a few weeks.
Some sources (including Wikepedia) seem to think oxidization of white flour only takes 8 to 10 days.
Interesting. I didn’t realise that aging it changes the flour and was nervous of weevils hatching if I kept it too long – I’ve never had them but know people who have. We visited Daniels Mill at Bridgenorth last year and I bought flour there. It’s rather exciting to see flour ground and then take some home to use. Website is http://www.danielsmill.co.uk/
Andy – no there wasn’t any noticeable difference in flavour just the handling and performance of it.
Busy researching what we can do with bran when we increase milling at Brockwell Bake – phytic acid concentrated in it so could be a problem if we feed a lot to the wrong animals (human or other).
Came across this http://www.naturalnews.com/031696_phytic_acid_whole_grains.html – last two paras of article of particular of interest – gives a reasoning for sourdough baking, adding rye and using fresh flour around this nutrition question.
ps
the article I linked to before would seem to be a precis by the author of much longer article here http://www.westonaprice.org/food-features/living-with-phytic-acid
Also a paragraph on “ADVANTAGES OF FRESH FLOUR” here http://eap.mcgill.ca/publications/EAP35.htm
Perhaps the answer is that if you want to use aged wheat flour good to add some rye – though this might militate against some of the handling advantages you have found Azelia. Clearly phytic acid is less of a problem the more bran is sifted from one’s flour, the whiter – but in turn more of a problem for the miller what to with what is is sifted out.
I should maybe point out that just avoiding wholemeal flour is not really a meaningful solution to avoiding phytic acid (phytate) as those things that it prevents one from digesting, phosphorus, zinc, iron and calcium are themselves concentrated in the bran and aleurone layer directly under bran (which in single pass stone-milling is susceptible to being at least partially sieved out) along with the unlocking mechanism – the enzyme phytase.
There is plenty of experimental proof for the importance of phytase and that of giving it time and a slightly acidic environment to go to work on hydrolysing the phytic acid i.e. sourdough baking and also addition of malted products where these have been gently kilned, plus much related stuff for nutrition of animals other than humans. In particular industrially farmed pigs fed on grain are commonly fed fungal produced phytase supplement in order to stop their manure being so concentrated with undigested phosphorus as to lead to water course pollution and battery hens are similarly given phytase supplement in order to avoid bone formation problems. A transgenic pig has even been created – the “Enviropig” – that has been genetically modified to produce its own phytase (as ruminants naturally do). The particularly high level of phytase in rye is also clear.
What is not so clear is whether it’s true wheat phytase degrades in flour storage i.e. best to use fresh flour for this reason. It seems generally accepted but really only scientifically based on one study – Mollgaard 1946 – that I can find a trace of. However anecdotal evidence that where wholemeal wheat and rye bread is traditionally preferred e.g. Germany then fresh milled flour is preferred I think might lend weight to this reasoning. The manufacturers of phytase animal feed supplements also seem to have gone fungal production root partly due to instability of plant sourced phytases.