The flour dilemma.
Most Sunday mornings PFMan makes the family blueberry pancakes. This has been going on for some time now. Several months ago, in the process to use more natural and organic ingredients, I started buying unbleached flour. I didn’t understand using a product that used chemicals to bleach something simply for aesthetics. I mostly think things look better in their natural form anyway. Well, the pancakes were different. The taste was there, but the consistency was denser and it seemed as though they weren’t cooking all the way through. He started changing up the amounts of ingredients, cooking them longer, went back to the recipe to make sure he wasn’t messing something up. So I finally delved into the differences between bleached and unbleached flour, seeing as how this is the only thing that had changed.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
Both bleached and unbleached flour goes through a bleaching process. Bleached flour has bleaching agents such as benzoyl peroxide or chlorine gas added to aid the process along more quickly, where as unbleached flour will, over a period of weeks, undergo a natural chemical process in much the same way in which a sliced apple turns brown.
The agents which are used in bleached flour also alter the protein content, making it less than that in unbleached flour making bleached flour best for baking cookies, pancakes (aha), pie crusts and waffles. Unbleached is better for yeast breads, Yorkshire puddings, cream puffs, Danish pastries, and popovers.
So I guess I’ll give into bleached flour for some things now and use unbleached on others:-)
There is a lot more information to be found about different flours at this link by Cooks Illustrated. And another good reference here!
Mangia!
Filed Under: Earth LOVE, Food LOVE, More LOVE
