“Advanced Bread and Pastry” by Michel Suas is a professional tome on bread-baking. Whether a hobbyist, or even an avid blogger, would want to consider this tome is a divisive question. Reading it makes the truth clear that professionally trained French bakers know as much about dough as doctors know about medicine, and in both cases they still have much to learn.
There’s an issue with freshly ground flour that Suas addresses: Flour doesn’t behave as expected until it has aged several weeks. Freshly ground flour that hasn’t aged is called “green” flour. Uncorrected, a free form boule made from green flour will sprawl outward like a flying saucer. Yet we don’t want to age our freshly ground flour; it would be inconvenient, and the germ can spoil.
Suas proposes a simple fix, that I’ve applied for years: Add 40 parts per million Ascorbic Acid. How? Thoroughly mix 1 part AA to 20 parts flour, by sieving back and forth between bowls many times. Now mix that mixture 1 part to 20 parts flour. One ends up with a 1:440 mixture that can be measured with a gram scale. For example, I add 9 grams of 1:440 AA to make up 500 grams of total flour. I use a spreadsheet to do the arithmetic, which is much easier to figure out for oneself than to follow when someone else does it.
(9/441) x (1000000/500) = 40.8
I’ve seen farmers market bread from 100% freshly ground flour that came out quite respectably, from bakers unaware of this green flour issue. I’ve learned not to raise the issue; it quickly begins to feel like discussing politics. Any reasonably attentive and well-adjusted person will figure out an approach that pleases them. “I’m happy with how I do it!” is never a reliable data point for making comparisons.
My bread from freshly ground flour improved dramatically by adopting this Suas fix.
