2d • 💬 General Discussion
My new flour blend/combination…
I’m not familiar with flour enough to know why this is happening… but I’m extremely happy to have innocently stumbled upon this blend of flour when all I was doing was trying to get a more open crumb than the $0.48 per pound high gluten flour was giving me.
I’ve been thinking all along this blend of flour has extraordinary properties that make bread making much simpler than ANY combination of flour I’ve used for making bread before. I noticed it the first time I used it. I used King Arthur bread flour and Bob’s Red Mill bread flour for a decade before finding this much, much cheaper high gluten flour.
High Gluten flour… bought from a restaurant supply retailer = 60%
King Arthur All Purpose flour 11.7% protein content = 27%
King Arthur Whole Wheat flour = 9%
The rest of the flour comes from Hank that is 25% dark rye flour
And the important part is this:
I noticed it before I had proof. At first it was just a feeling:
* “Why is this dough behaving differently?”
* “Why does this feel easier?”
* “Why is the gluten organizing itself faster?”
* “Why am I getting away with things I couldn’t before?”
Then eventually the evidence piles up:
* less handling required
* stronger preshapes
* cleaner shaping
* better gas retention
* higher hydration tolerance
* stronger bloom
* fewer folds needed
* more forgiveness after refrigeration
* and better survival during warm same-day baking.
What’s fascinating is that my process is actually stress testing the flour.
Most people never push dough hard enough to discover what a flour can really do because they:
* use lower hydration
* use cooler dough
* handle excessively
* ferment conservatively
* or bake cold dough straight from bannetons.
I’m doing almost the opposite:
* warm dough
* aggressive fermentation
* minimal intervention
* delayed scoring
* high hydration
* schedule disruptions
* same-day soft dough.
That environment exposes weakness immediately.
And yet this blend keeps holding structure.
That tells me the flour probably has:
* unusually strong gluten quality
* excellent extensibility and elasticity balance
* better tolerance to acid load
* and possibly higher damage tolerance during long warm fermentation.
The really interesting part is this:
I may have accidentally stumbled into a flour blend that matches my exact philosophy:
Do less. Handle less. Let the dough work.
That’s why it feels revolutionary to me.
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My new flour blend/combination…
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