Pure flours v/s blends what do you prefer? Why?
On this forum, there is no need to explain that not all wheats are same. They vary in flavor, color, protein content/composition and enzymatic activity.
Most flours we can buy are standardized (example the French T65, T80 etc.). And mills achieve this standardization by blending wheat with different characters. For the mills this also helps to economize by blending cheaper wheat with expensive wheat. For most bakers, this is the only kind of flour we have ever baked with.
But for those of you who have used self-milled or small farm grown+milled flours, what is your experience? Are they in general better or worse than standard blended flours? Can you tell the flavor difference between bread made from different wheats? Are non-blended flours hard to work with? Do you have to go through a learning curve for each new flour?
Will be very thankful for sharing your opinion and experience.
"On this forum, there is no need to explain that not all wheats are same. They vary in flavor, color, protein content/composition and enzymatic activity."
Except that new bakers, who do not understand those things, join every week.
"Most flours we can buy are standardized (example the French T65, T80 etc.)."
Except that French flours designated by T numbers are not standardized by protein percent or W rating. The T number designates ash only, not protein, which can vary widely. Not all T65, even from the same miller has the same protein percent, or W rating.
"And mills achieve this standardization by blending wheat with different characters. For the mills this also helps to economize by blending cheaper wheat with expensive wheat."
Yes, that is true. But in the US, a standard only exists within a brand and type, not across brands. GM AP flour has noticeably different specs than KA AP flour.
"But for those of you who have used self-milled or small farm grown+milled flours, what is your experience? Are they in general better or worse than standard blended flours? Can you tell the flavor difference between bread made from different wheats? Are non-blended flours hard to work with?"
It is a very good thing to be in learning mode like that!
The main thing to learn at your current stage of learning is this: There is NO such thing as "overall best". There is only "optimum" for __each particular formula__.
Moreover.... "optimum" also depends on your _locally available choices_. One UK user recently learned that UK all purpose flour cannot be substituted for US all purpose flour, so that US-made youtube video that he followed didn't work for him.
In other words, "words" have different meanings when you cross borders, even in the same language. You have to drill down into technical specs, and if the miller doesn't give tech specs, you have to do detective work by "working backwards" from the marketing ad copy, which is notoriously imprecise, and just guess, and try it and see.
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Change one little thing in your procedures, and POOF, some different flour then becomes the new optimum for that new set of procedures.
The differences are most apparent, and easiest to visualize, in pizza: Depending on the style of pizza, (pan, thin, deep dish, NY, Chicago, Detroit, Sicilian, Neopolitan, etc.) and depending on your _procedures_ and _baking method_ (home oven, commercial oven, brick vault oven), for your chosen style, you may want to use U.S. AP flour, U.S. bread flour, or U.S. high gluten 14% protein flour, Italian 00 flour, malted, unmalted, ad infinitum. You may want it bromated, or you may want it unbromated. It all depends on the final product, AND on the formula/procedures that you use to get there.
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"Can you tell the flavor difference between bread made from different wheats?"
Kinda sorta. Sometimes no, sometimes yes. I cannot tell the different taste between US retail brands of AP or Bread flour. But I can tell a high quality 00 pizza flour from a cheap AP flour pizza.
The guys on the Community Baguette bake just RAVED about the taste of some imported French T65 flour. And they all bought the same brand/type. Was it plant genetics? The soil? The climate? Probably all three.
But especially yes for whole grain wheat, most every variety has its own flavor. The bran and germ is where most of the flavor is. The white stuff, at least in the US, is mostly flavorless starch, at least in the commercial retail grocery market. Exceptions are boutique millers like Central Milling, Giusto's, and their kind.
For white flour, at least in the US retail grocery, the flavors mainly come from fermentation by-products, that's why we love sourdough with its wild yeasts and lactobacillus. Even with commercial dry yeast, long ferments create flavor.
Shop around and experiment, and boom, you become a wheat/flour snob/connoiseur.
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"Do you have to go through a learning curve for each new flour?"
Short answer: Yes.
"Do you have to go through a learning curve for each new flour?"
Look at the guys who experimented with 4 flours on the Community baguette bake:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/64622/community-bake-baguettes-alfanso
AP flour, bread flour, durum flour, T65 flour.
Dry yeast versus sourdough.
Adding Nutritional yeast, versus not.
Ferment/proof timings and temps.
Oven temps, amount and duration of steam.
Over 1500 comments on the thread!
Dan is King, so far, with 35 bakes!
Thank you so much for the detailed thoughts and nice summary of how confusing the flour landscape is for a home baking newbie.
Where we are based (The Netherlands) the problem is same or worse as in USA. In a supermarket you can buy flour (tarwebloem), strong flour (patent bloem) and wholewheat flour (tarwemeel). Wholewheat is just white flour to which some barn in re-added. Typical supermarket flour costs as low as 40 Euro cents a kilogram and tastes just as how it is priced :)
On the other hand, here it is still possible to buy flour milled from a windmill. While some spelt and rye are grown locally, local wheat is not really up for breadmaking. So bread flour sold in mills is typically from French or Italian wheat. It costs about 2-3 EUR per kilogram from a mill. Then again, there is no consistency because the wheat varies and no technical data available. This is frustrating for home bakers.
Just to add some background, I jointly run a small family company that makes a easy breadmaking product called LoafNest (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B7BB4PY) [The product is a bit polarizing in bread making community just like the digital camera was in the photography community. It is because LoafNest designed for users who have no time, patience or inclination to learn the art and craft of breadmaking. On the plus side, it has introduced a lot of newcomers to the joy of breadmaking and uses long fermentation and high-heat high-humidity baking.]
While LoafNest is quite robust for beginning home breadmakers, we are trying to explore how best to advice our users on what flour to use.
This lead us to re-discovering the facts you stated so well that "words change meaning across borders". American bread flour is higher in protein content than European flour but not necessarily stronger.
We are thinking may be selling a standardized flour (in US and EU) next to it would offer the best user experience (and allow an additional revenue channel for us). But to compete in a commodity business like flour, we have to bring something unique and we were thinking about single origin flours. The idea is to provide all technical data for 'promatuer' home bakers while ensuring the right quality (Gluten, W number etc.) for breadmaking. So it will still be a niche offering for enthusiastic home bakers and LoafNest users, but for family company of two, probably interesting enough to do.
So, the background behind my original question was, if the single origin flours worth inevitable additional cost (that comes with small volume operation) in terms of flavor. For coffee, they say 80% of flavor comes from the beans and single origin coffees do quite well. For bread, probably that percentage is lower due to all the things you can do with leavening and baking. So is the price premium worth it?