January 24, 2019 - 2:34am
French flour
Hi and thank you for an encellet site.
Living in asia make it hard to find quality flour for my sourdough bread. Got hold of some German flour 405, but that kill my starter and I hade to start from scratch again. I also found German bread flour 550 and that looks ok.
Recently I found a company that importing French flour Moul-Bie. I was able to by a 25kg bag of Flour Tradition T65, but not very happy with it. My starter really dont like it. It turn very "dead".
They have several types the. One is Farine De Muele T80 (grindstone). Anyone have any knowledge of this flour?
I dont find much info online about this T80 flour
Normally I use 30-40% coarse whole grain wheat and little spelt that I got hold of.
Thank you in advanced :)
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... some truly terrible flour, to kill your starter? It sounds like you're saying there was poison in there - but surely you didn't buy poisoned flour.
is comparable to high-extraction flour, meaning that a good bit of the bran and germ have been removed, although it tends to have a lower percentage of protein than north american flour. If you want French whole wheat, see if your supplier has T150. Or try whole rye? T130. My starter lives it. T170 is whole grain rye, which you might like better, but it's hard to find.
Good luck and keep us posted.
Carole
Thanks Carole.
Help me a lot.
They have hole wheat - Pain Special Complet, but I dont find any number on it.
Can this be T150?
Wholemeal wheat flour - Wheat gluten - Barley malt - Emulsifier: E471 - Flour treatment agent: E300 - Enzymes* (Xylanase - α-amylase - Cellulase).
So its not pure flour. Thanks for info :)
Thanks to David for the ingredient list. You can also see on the pack shot that it says 'mix'. What we need is flour.
Where are you located? And how is your starter faring?
Carole
I am currently working in Bangkok, Thailand and its really limited selection of flour here.
Only company I found is this one. They normally selling to bakery etc.
Link shows their selection
https://aepthailand.com/product-bakery/category/flour
but just in case: I Googled 'bread flour thailand' and turned up a bunch of stuff, the first of which was this: https://forum.thaivisa.com/topic/616697-yeast-bread-flour/
Is that of any help at all?
Carole
is still an all purpose flour. 700 to 950 is more of a bread flour.
what exactly makes you think the starter is "killed?"
The starter become more and more inactive and in the end (8 month old) it didn't rose anymore. I tried everything, changes type of water (bottled), jars, flour. Also tried to refresh a dried one I had.
The only reasonable to think about was the flour. I have a new starter now, but still young. With Berman BF 550 it looks ok, but when I use the French T65 it seems to slow down again
...NOT an expert - please don't rely on what I say - but I think the flour selections you're trying are too tricky, too fancy, and most of all just too many changes. If it's possible, I'd suggest that you find a decent quality but cheaper and simpler flour, and use only that one cheap simple flour for your starter. Because a starter doesn't need special flour - what it needs is to work, and to stay alive.
If the problem is that there IS no simple cheap flour available in your area, then I am wrong, and I understand.
I'm no expert, either, and certainly not about where to find flour in Bangkok! He's right. though -- the best solution would be the simplest.
Here's an old discussion that mentions brands and shops. It's an old link, so things may have changed since then, but you never know; https://forum.thaivisa.com/topic/979080-home-baking/
And here's a post from a fellow TFLer: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/37560/my-quest-flour-bread-bangkok
Here's a link to UFM Food Center: http://www.ufmfc.com/English/products_list.php?category_sub_id=1
And a couple of other links that turned up:
Apologies if you've already made the rounds on all these!
Happy hunting!
:). Maybe we can help prevent the decline from happening again. The more detail, the better.
Flour won't kill the starter. could it be that you're overfeeding (feeding before it's fermented) and thus diluting it to death? How do you maintain your starter, even better if you could provide pics of it in various stages?
... enzymes and dough improvers added, might conceivably cause a problem. Plain flour (at the right times and amounts) won't cause any problems.
As a local, but newbie in bread making, I’ll put in my two cents here in this old thread in case someone else do stumble upon it layer.
For wheat flour, the two local brands which sell cheap, common flour are White Swan from UFM and Space Shuttle from TFM. White Swan seems to be more widely available in almost any supermarket but they are bleached. Space Shuttle on the other hand, are unbleached (including all TFM other line of flours, except their cake flour) but they aren’t readily available in majority of supermarket, and those which do, jack up its price to the double of White Swan’s without any apparent reason IMO. Space Shuttle are better be bought from bakery supply shop where their price will be in the same range as White Swan, and a bit to the cheaper side even.
As for rye flour, that is indeed very hard to find here. In fact, I stumble upon this topic exactly becase I was researching the T170 from Moul-bie that a very few bakery supply shops here have available. They are definitely not cheap though, imo. Not sure how the price of wheat vs rye compare in other places, but here in BKK, form what I can find so far, rye price is about 3 times of wheat on average since they’re imported.