Wheat, milled







I need flour. I found this. This works for now. But only just.

Obviously it is 100% whole wheat and there is only so much I can do with that. It plays well with others but by itself for bread it is a bit heavy although delicious.  At the microscopic level, the milled bran does not contribute to the glutenous network and instead will be dead weight that must be lifted by it, but worse, it tends to slash the network like a billion tiny knives so it's difficult to get to form pockets of air as breads must do.

This grain was milled fine as the machine can go and on the fingertips it does feel fine as talc, but lurking within alongside the pulverized germ and endosperm are are those tiny knives. Great fiber, though. Every now and then I give it another try to see if can land on the magic combination of factors that makes 100% whole wheat sourdough loaves possible because I tell you the flavor of that is simply remarkable and it comes as much from the wheat as it does from the sourdough culture. You know what? Maybe I'll try it with regular yeast.

These seeds are old. Very old. They smell funny. They might not work. I'm using the flour to feed the levaine which has become like a little pet that keeps maxing out its crock container even though it is not being used to produce bread. I already have too much bread, so there is no urgency to any of this.

This looks to me to be a white wheat, a soft wheat, a spring wheat. A soft white spring wheat, that's my guess. Which would explain why it languished. My preference is for hard red winter wheat but we're conservationists over here so we make do with what we have.

Make dew with what we have.
Make due with what we have.
Make doo with what we have.
Make deux with what we have.

Okay forget about making do, we use what we have.

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