Corduroy Orange

Hola Jesse,

To the untrained cook, breads and flours come in two different types: white bread and not white bread. Here at our house we keep two types of flour around, white flour and whole wheat flour. When baking with the whole wheat flour, the result is much less sweet and a little more firm than with white flour. Why is this? What is the process to take whole wheat and turn it into white flour? What happens to all the stuff that is removed from whole wheat flour to turn it into white flour?
Thanks!

–Patrick

Patrick–

Flour can come from any grain. If you look in the right places, you can find rye flour, barley flour, spelt flour, buckwheat flour, and more. For the most part, the only type of flour most of us use is wheat flour. Whether it’s whole or white depends on how the wheat is handled after it’s been ground into flour.

The whole wheat berry, as it’s called, very closely resembles a piece of barley. it’s about the size of a grain of rice and is split lengthwise along the grain. This tiny seed has three basic parts to it: the bran, the germ, and the endosperm. The bran is at the outside of the grain; the germ is a small corner of it; and the endosperm is at the center of it. White flour (generally referred to as all-purpose) consists of only the endosperm, whereas whole wheat is, well, the whole of the wheat: germ, bran, and endosperm all together. the different parts of the wheat berry can’t be separated until they’ve been broken apart from each other. Once ground, the resulting flour is sifted and separated to achieve the desired results.

The end result depends on a variety of factors, including: the type of wheat used, how much the flour is ground, the degree to which it is sifted, and whether it is treated with chlorine (bleached for better whiteness), bromine (bromated to decrease the amount of time it must be aged befoe it can be sold), or enzymes (diastase helps convert some of the starches into sugar). Additionally, any endosperm-only flour must be fortified (”enriched”) with thiamin, niacin, riboflavin, folic acid (aka folate), and iron to make up for nutrients lost when the bran and the germ are taken away.

The reason that baked goods made with whole wheat flour have more body to them is because it still contains these parts of the wheat berry. The bran is high in fiber and the germ contains most of the nutrients and a small amount of fat. These parts, when removed from flour, are used for other purposes (think bran cereals). Wheat germ is comercially available as a health food product, though it does not enjoy the popularity of bran. Bread baked with entirely whole wheat flour tends to be fairly dense; though not necessarily a bad quality, many people prefer the texture of breads baked with 50% whole wheat flour and 50% all-purpose.

Have a question for corduroy orange? Email me!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 24th, 2006 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Advice Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.