November 13, 2023 - 8:34pm
Extraction
Hi there, I am having a hard time understanding what it means when flour is a certain percentage extracted. For example, a flour milled from hard red spring wheat that is 80% extraction, what does this mean exactly? Is it that the flour was entirely sifted and then 80% of the bran was added back in? Thanks
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Extraction is the amount that's left after sifting. In other words, it's the amount of sifted flour that was extracted from the grains. If you start with 100g of unsifted, unground grains, mill and sift them, and after sifting you have 90g remaining, that's 90% extraction. You will have removed 10% of the original weight as bran and other larger particles.
In practice most people seem to use it as a percentage of the milled, unsifted whole grain flour. After all, if you never had your hands on the berries you can't know how much got lost in milling so all you can do is to figure it based on the starting flour you have. Presumably if it's stone-ground you will have most of the original grain.