I have some hard white wheat berries and wondered if most folks sift the flour before using or just use it as it comes out of the mill. For sandwich bread, do you grind fine, med, coarse? What seems to work best for different types of breads? Is it necessary to remove the bran so the dough can develop good gluten? I would like to use all of the flour and not have to sift out what is maybe “undesirable?”
Bread baking is hard to generalize about because there are so many variables that go into every loaf and a lot of them are invisible. But here come a bunch of generalizations anyway…
All other things equal… the finer you mill your flour, the “nicer” the resulting dough will be for bread baking. People generally desire dough to be smooth, elastic, extensible in order to get a good rise in the oven and an open (non-dense) crumb in their bread. Finer flour yields more elasticity and extensibility in the dough.
Sifting out the bran and (inevitably) some of the germ will also lead to smoother, more extensible, more elastic dough and hence a lighter more open crumb. But the germ and the bran are where most of the nutritional value in wheat live, along with a lot of the specific flavor profile of a given grain, so there is a tradeoff between dough “performance” and bread nutritional value and flavor.
I think the best way to decide what you like best is to treat every loaf of bread as a science experiment. Keep all the parameters that you can directly control exactly the same except for one thing: in this case, the amount of bran and germ in the flour. Try a loaf with 100% whole grain, and try one where you sift out most of the bran and germ (breadtopia sells sifters) using a fine sifter and maybe running the flour through it twice. Compare the properties of each loaf, knowing that in addition to whatever you can see, feel, and taste, the 100% whole grain loaf has much more nutritional value.
Then you can experiment with stuff in the middle of those extremes by sifting out some bran and germ, but not as much as in your first experiment.
Know also that different kinds of wheat will produce drastically different bread results.
I’ve lately been experimenting with double-milling white wheat berries to get finer flour. The results have been encouraging.
Double-milling sounds interesting. What type of grinder can do this? I don’t think that my high speed grinder allows that. It’s a Blendtec Home Mill. It must take a special mill to do the double-milling process.
I used a friend’s Komo mill like this one:
I just took the milled flour that came out from milling the berries and put it back in the hopper to mill it again.
I agree with Paul that different wheat berries give different performing flours but the fun is figuring out how to work with each one. White wheat is my go to because of it is not quite as assertive, but it is enjoyable to experiment with orhers. The double milling technique works well but I wouldn’t have tried it with the high speed mill used before I got my KoMo. Most of the time I regrind just the sifted out bran. Even if I decide to use the bran elsewhere with that technique the extration rate using a 40 mesh sieve is around 95% with Wheat Montana Prairie Gold which is pretty close to whole nutritionally. I hope you enjoy experimenting.
Stu