Before you start baking the product, you must purchase baking flour. But it’s not enough to buy the first packaging that comes across - you need to know what kind of result you want to get at the final stage of preparing a culinary work.
The fact is that flour is not just a product obtained as a result of grinding grains of various cereal crops. It has its own characteristics and differences. Most often, we use baked goods from wheat flour, but there are other varieties of grinding cereals. Wheat flour is divided into soft and hard varieties. Knowing all this, how to understand which flour is better for baking?
Varieties of flour
Any nutritionist will tell you with confidence that the use of flour products should be in moderation. The thing is that flour contains fast carbohydrates, which are very quickly absorbed by the body, causing it to feel hunger ahead of time. Another feature of such carbohydrates is that they are able to be deposited in the layers of subcutaneous fat and accumulate there. This leads to undesirable fullness of a person. Consider below several varieties of baking flour, of which we do not know everything:
- Rye flour contains many amino acids that are necessary for metabolic processes in the body. Also, a large number of dietary fiber are complete proteins that are so important for humans. It is rich in B vitamins, phosphorus, complex carbohydrates and calcium. People with gastrointestinal problems need to use small quantities of rye flour products.
- Rice flour. The peculiarity of this cereal is that it has almost no gluten. It is useful for all ages and contains 1% fiber, biotin, zinc, amylopectin.
- Buckwheat flour is used in the diet menu for people suffering from a reduced amount of hemoglobin, with liver diseases, hypertension and atherosclerosis. It is popular due to the presence of a large number of trace elements, lysine and leucine.
- Oatmeal has a small amount of starch, is easily digested. Helps normalize blood sugar and regulates fat metabolism.
- Corn flour. It contains more sugar than wheat flour. As well as B vitamins, magnesium, calcium, iron, phosphorus. Recommended cereals and its grinding for people with cardiovascular diseases and ailments of the biliary tract.
Wheat Flour Varieties
As we already know, wheat flour is made from hard and soft varieties. Consider how they differ from each other.
- Soft wheat is a cereal grinding called flour 00 or type 00. This is the simplest flour among the other varieties. Soft wheat flour is suitable for almost all culinary dishes; it is widely used in cooking. Marking “00” indicates very fine grinding. A flour product on such a grinding is very quickly digested in the human digestive tract.
- Durum wheat is used for pasta and breading of fish, meat or other products. This flour contains more protein and fiber, unlike soft wheat varieties. And it is indispensable for baking bread.
But what kind of flour is better, only you can answer, based on your goals and wishes.
Soft wheat flour products
For professional bakers, wheat flour Manitoba is of particular importance. It is made from soft wheat varieties that were grown in Canada in the province of Manitoba. But since it has been widely used in Italian cuisine, many consider it to be an Italian product. Of course, that they produce it in many European countries, including Italy, but Canada is its homeland.
Many professionals call mannitoba flour “strong”, since it contains a large amount of protein (up to 18%, when ordinary soft flour has no more than 11.5%) and has strong water absorption (up to 80% of its weight). Thus, a significantly larger amount of dough can be obtained from a small amount of flour.
Feature of baking flour
We already know that mannitoba flour is strong flour. It is this characteristic that provides bakery products with good qualities. For example, Italian bakers use this variety of flour to make high-level muffins. Even a slight addition of this grinding to ordinary flour of soft grades - and bakery creations become real masterpieces of cooking.
Upon contact with water, mannitoba forms a lot of gluten, due to the presence of gluten and gliadin in its composition. For this reason, the fermentation process starts: on its surface you can see the formation of small bubbles in large numbers. Due to this feature, the dough is ideal for baking bread, pizza or other products where a fermentation process is necessary.
What is cooked on flour manitoba
This flour is ideal for baking bread and pizza. And where else did she find her culinary application? First of all, this is the path of the confectionery. Sweet lush buns, sweet cakes (for example, panettone is a Milanese Christmas cake, Pandoro is a Christmas cake with icing sugar), donuts, croissants, muffins, muffins, tortillas and much more.
If you knead the dough on flour with a weak gluten level, the fermentation process will be longer and the dough will rise for a long time. Some bakers use mannitoba as a supplement to weak grades of flour, with the addition of a small amount of yeast. This slows down the speed of raising the dough (up to 2 days) and makes baking more crispy and soft. This technique is used in the process of creating pizza. This is why Italians use manitoba so often.
Finally
Manitoba flour from soft wheat varieties undergoes the strictest quality control at each stage of its production. From the moment of sowing wheat to its production. But this is precisely what ensures high-quality baking on your table!
She has excellent taste, she has the right color and consistency. It is for this reason that the dough from this type of flour can rise so high and provide splendor to the bakery product. Whatever you cook on the flour of Manitoba, your pastries will be worthy of the highest praise, have amazing taste and quality.