Soft flours

Several sorts of flour are normally made from soft wheat. Some are high value products made to tight specification while others are not. 

1 Plain Flour. This product is the ordinary flour used for most home baking. The equivalent product in the USA is general purpose flour, although one will not necessarily substitute for the other. This type of flour is sometimes called household flour. 

British plain flour is made to a very wide specification that guarantees that it is white, unbleached and untreated. The Hagberg Falling number should not be too low. 

A common grist would be mainly soft wheat with possibly some hard wheat added at up to 20% to encourage flowability and good mixing. Hard wheat that has failed a quality control for bead making can end up in plain flour. 

While plain flour is intended as a domestic product it does find its way into some bakeries for some uses. 

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Pizza is, because of its history, one of the more variable bakery products. Pizzas made from Italian soft flour are never going to be the same as an American pizza made from American flour. 

Traditional Sponge Cakes. An old fashioned recipe would be referred to as pint, pound, pound, i.e. a pint (571 mL) of egg, a pound (454 g) of sugar and a pound (454 g) of flour. The sugar would be caster sugar and the flour soft flour. 

An obvious use of bake testing is to compare the performance of two different batches of flour. In this exercise it is suggested that the control batch is a bread flour while the test should be a non-bread-making soft flour such as an English plain flour. 

Wheat flour (soft flour) 0.53 Spinach (boiled) 0.13... 

Enrichment and Fortification of Flours. People around the world have strived for thousands of years to produce white, soft flours. Hence, the present dominance of flour production by white flours is not the outcome of a recent conspiracy by the flour industry rather, it is the response to an age old public demand. Nevertheless, it is important that appropriate measures be taken to offset the nutritional shortcomings of highly refined flours, particularly in circumstances where these items are relied upon to furnish much of the caloric and protein requirements. The most widely employed measures have been enrichment and fortification. 

Extra eggs may be added to most baked products, providing that a soft flour is used. Too many eggs toughen doughs. 

Refined soft wheat flours treated with chlorine. Chlorination breaks disulfide bonds, weakens the gluten, lowers pH, and bleaches the flour. Hours usually contain from 7.5% to 10% protein and, upon hydration and mixing, yield weaker gluten doughs compared to regular soft flours. 

Soft red winter (SRW), which is grown in the eastern third of the United States, is a high yielding wheat, but relatively low in protein, usually about 10%. SRW best provides flour for cakes, pastries, quick breads, crackers, and snack foods. This fall-seeded wheat constitutes about one-quarter of U.S. wheat exports. 

Fine grinding and air classification make possible the production of some cake flour from hard wheat and some bread flour or high-protein fractions from soft wheat. AppHcation of the process theoretically frees the miller from dependence on different wheats, either hard or soft, that change each crop year. The problem is how to market the larger volume of low protein or starch fractions at prices adequate to justify the installation and operation of the special equipment (46). 

Soft-wheat flours are sold for general family use, as biscuit or cake flours, and for the commercial production of crackers, pretzels, cakes, cookies, and pastry. The protein in soft wheat flour mns from 7 to 10%. There are differences in appearance, texture, and absorption capacity between hard- and soft-wheat flour subjected to the same milling procedures. Hard-wheat flour falls into separate particles if shaken in the hand whereas, soft-wheat flour tends to clump and hold its shape if pressed together. Hard-wheat flour feels slightly coarse and granular when mbbed between the fingers soft-wheat flour feels soft and smooth. Hard-wheat flour absorbs more Hquid than does soft-wheat flour. Consequently, many recipes recommend a variable measure of either flour or Hquid to achieve a desired consistency. 

Agents That Result in Soft or Semifluid Stool in 6-12 Flours ... 

It should be appreciated that a high level of starch damage is not essential in bread. French bread is made from soft wheat flour with a low starch damage. Starch damage is generally undesirable in biscuits. In biscuits the product is cooked to a very low moisture content so binding in water is undesirable. 

Self Raising Flour. This product is a soft wheat flour with a chemical raising agent, also known as leavening agent, added. It can always be substituted by a mixture of plain flour and baking powder. 

Some bread flour mills have difficulty in making a low starch damage soft wheat flour, a job that the mill was not intended for. This is probably why some millers do not make biscuit flours, leaving them as a niche product for the smaller milling companies. 

Wafer Flour. Wafer flour is a type of biscuit flour with the same basic specification of low protein soft wheat flour with a low starch damage. Once again the required dough property is extensibility. The only differences are that if the protein is too low the wafer will be too soft to handle, and if the protein is too high the wafer will be too hard. The other important property is a resistance to gluten separation. Wafer flours are likely to be brown. 

All of these loaves will have been made from French soft wheat flour without the use of fat or soy flour. This flour will have been milled with a low starch damage from varieties of French soft wheat grown for bead making. 

A dough consists of 83-85% water on a flour basis, with 2% sugar, 1.5% salt, 5 8% yeast with 0.5-0.7% calcium propionate. The problem with this formulation is that it must be soft enough to flow into the cups but to prevent it sticking it must be handled cold around 20°C. 

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