Gluten In Bread - Choosing The Right Flour For Bread

Excerpt from the Health Book:
How and When to be Your Own Doctor

When I first stated making my own bread from my own at-home-ground flour I was puzzled by variations in the dough. Sometimes the bread rose well and was spongy after baking like I wanted it to be. Sometimes it kneaded stickily and ended up flat and crumbly like a cake. Since I had done everything the same way except that I may have bought my wheat berries from different health food stores.
 

Gluten in bread

I began to investigate the subject of wheat quality. The element in the cereal that forms the rubbery sponge in risen bread so it doesn't crumble and rises high without collapsing, is gluten. The word glue derives from gluten. The gluten content of various wheats varies. Bread bakers use "hard wheat" because of its high gluten content. Gluten is a protein and gluten comprises most of the protein in bread wheat; the protein content and the gluten content are almost identical.

Try this. Ask your health food store buyer or owner what the protein content is of the hard red wheat seeds they're selling. You'll almost certainly get a puzzled look and your answer will almost certainly be, "we have Organic and conventional." Demand that the store buyer ask this question of their distributor/wholesaler and then report back to you. If the distributor deigns to answer, the answer will be the same–I sell Organic or conventional hard red wheat. Period. 

When I got these non-answers I looked further and discovered that hard bread wheat runs from about 12 percent protein to about 19 percent and this difference has everything to do with the soil fertility (and to an extent the amount of rainfall during the season), and almost nothing to do with Organic or conventional. 

This difference also has everything to do with how your dough behaves and how your bread comes out. And how well your bread nourishes you. Thirteen percent wheat will not make a decent loaf– fourteen percent is generally considered #2 quality and comprises the bulk of cheap bread grain. When you hear in the financial news that a bushel of wheat is selling for a certain price, they mean #2. Bakers compete for higher protein lots and pay far higher prices for more protein. 

We prefer our bread about 25% rye, but rye contains no gluten at all. Mix any rye flour into fourteen percent wheat flour and the dough becomes very heavy, won't rise, and after baking, crumbles. So I kept looking for better grain and finally discovered a knowledgeable lady that sold flour mills and who also was a serious baker herself. She had located a source of quality wheat with an assayed protein content and sold it by the 50 pound sack. When I asked her if her wheat was Organic she said it was either sixteen or seventeen percent protein depending on whether you wanted hard red spring wheat or hard white spring wheat. 

Organic Flour or Conventional Flour?

Organic or conventional? I persisted. No, she said. High protein! So, I said to myself, since protein content is a function of soil fertility and since my body needs protein, I figured I am better off eating the best quality wheat, pesticide/herbicide residues (if there are any) be damned. Think about it! The difference between seventeen percent and fourteen percent protein is about 25 percent. That percentage difference is the key threshold of nutritional deficiency that makes teeth fall out. 

We can't afford to accept 25% degradations in our nutritional quality in something that we eat every day and that forms the very basis of our dietary. Please understand here that I am not saying that high protein wheats can't be grown organically. They certainly can.

The founder of Great Harvest Bakery performs a valuable service locating and securing high-protein lots of organically grown wheats for his outlets. But often as not Organic products are no more nourishing than those grown with chemicals. Until the buyers at Organic whole food wholesalers get better educated about grain, obtaining one's personal milling stock from them will be a dicey proposition. Sometimes Organic cereal can be far worse than conventional. To make a cereal Organic is a negative definition; if it hasn't had chemicals, then its Organic. 

Grain is one of the few foods that will still produce economic yields of low quality seed on extremely infertile soil or when half-smothered in weeds because herbicides weren't used for reasons of ideological purity. Vegetables will hardly produce anything under those conditions; carelessly grown fruits and vegetables are inevitably small, misshapen, unmarketable. But seed cleaning equipment can remove the contamination of weed seeds in cereal grains (at a cost.) 

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