Flour

4 May 2010

I'm not far from heading over to the restaurant - we are very quiet tonite which never exactly thrills me, but it will allow Rick and I to sit down and do some work on menus for a couple of functions that we have coming up, and it will also mean that I should be able to get back over to the house to watch 'The Good Wife', which has become compulsory weekly viewing for me. So not all bad..

One of the subjects that comes up for discussion in cookschools, and which I'm conscious that I still haven't quite got my head around is flour. Different flours ( assuming normal wheat flours here), impact on the end product, and our flour in NZ is different to European flours, meaning that interpreting some of the recipes from Europe or America, is the equivalent of guesswork sometimes.

We have added to our library on baking quite considerably over the last couple of years, and one book in particular : Bakewise - the hows and whys of successful baking, by Shirley 0. Corriher, gives an extremely literate breakdown on why various chemical reactions take place, and what you can do and use, to control those reactions in the direction that you want. But it was another cookbook which I can't find right at the moment ( story of my life!), that gave one of the most lucid descriptions of the different types of flour, and what they should be used for. I'll add a postscript when I finally dig it out.

Within reason, in the restaurant kitchen we try to stay true to ingredients and use what is stipulated, rather than jumping around too much. But experimentation borne out of necessity, -ie I don't have any of that so I'll try using some of this - can occasionally give rise to a whole new discovery - that sometimes can be a very pleasant surprise.

But it can become a logistical nightmare for an operation like ours, where a wide range of foodstuffs are made from scratch - to use a hugely variable range of subsets of ingredients. So out of necessity and practicalities, a certain amount of standardisation happens, and flour is a classic example. We use strong flour, which is high in protein, and which is intended for bread - but which we use for all our baking and pasta making as well.

Sometimes specialisation makes all the difference to the end result - using kecap manis, Indonesion soy, rather than Tamari which is a Japanese soy, means a totally different flavour, becos, while once, in our ignorance, we may have thought that all soy sauce was soy sauce and therefore by definition, the same thing, we now know that that is far from the case, and different Asian countries have quite unique soy sauces, that don't cross over.

But with flour we have discovered that we are getting the kind of results that we like using strong flour, so the one fit is working. Although next time I try and make a sponge I may source some flour with less protein in it, becos cake flour is supposed to be lighter than strong flour, and that would be a useful excuse to blame my distinct lack of impressive results in the sponge making department all these years!

Rick is making fresh pasta in the current cookschool series, - and we feel quite strongly that normal strong flour will make perfectly good pasta. Its simply not necessary to buy Italian durum flour.

This link is to a blog written by Dan Lepard, an extremely good UK baker, discussing the different types of flour available, and I thought it broke down a subject matter that I've had several goes at trying to get my head around, in a logical fashion.

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