New Flour

I've begun to experiment with a new flour called Wheat Montana, which is available mail order and also at a local grocery store near my home. I purchased a 10 pound bag of Natural White Premium Flour, which is a high protein flour designed for "superior" bread baking. One thing that interests me about this flour is the additionn of a small amount of malted barley. This is something recommended by the inestimable Peter Reinhart in Crust & Crumb. According to Simon Quellen Field's web page on ingredients:

Malted barley flour is often added to bread because it gives the yeast more nutrients (primarily sugars), and gives the bread a different taste. Malting a grain is the process of letting the grain soak in water until it starts to sprout. The young sprouting barley plant converts some of the starch in the barley endosperm into sugars. The barley is then cooked or ground into flour, which stops the sprout from eating the sugars, leaving them available to the yeast.

I paid about $6.00 for ten pounds but it sells for $3.97 by mail. The shipping cost might kill the discount, although I expect the 50 pound bag at $17.50 -- even with shipping -- would result in some savings. Of course, this all assumes that the product warrants it.

To date, I have been a pretty strict advocate of King Arthur unbleached bread flour. It runs around $2.70 for 5 pounds locally and is consistently excellent to work with. I am not exactly eager to abandon King Arthur but would like to experiment some to see how other flours effect texture and taste. If I can get a cheaper product that is equal to or better than King Arthur, I'll probably make the substitution permanent.

I made a batch of Peter Reinhart's neo-neopolitain pizza dough, my standard, out of the Wheat Montana. It turned out very nicely. Of course, its hard to know how much is attributable to the flour and how much might be attributable to the stars aligning -- i.e. just the right mix of retained heat and refractive heat from the fire. I also made a batch of sour dough bread using my starter. It was a wet dough -- high hydration -- and the end result was a little curious. Very large air bubbles and a somewhat translucent chewy crumb. Very tasty but a little on the eccentric side as far as texture goes. Still too early to say whether the malted barley did anything.

Experimentation to continue.