Flour mixing - High gluten and pastry flour vs AP flour

The text below is not my creation nor is the drawing, and I won't comment on the characteristics or results of doing this for anyone else.  I have followed this to approximate First Clear flour and the results for me were just what I anticipated.

You can create any flour blend/protein percentage that you wish by following these instructions.  Substitute any categories of flour for your own needs where the text specifies "bread flour" and "VWG" (vital wheat gluten).   The results will tell you what percent of each flour is required to meet your desired protein percentage. Or, you can just wing it and hope for the best!

Pearson's Square was developed to help ranchers create protein blends for their livestock, but the principle is the same for we bakers.

First Clear Flour and Pearson’s Square

 You can easily make your own.  Basically, you need to boost the protein content of bread flour (12.5% usually) in order to create clear flour of about 15.3% protein, by adding vital wheat gluten. I went ahead and did the calculation for you. However much clear flour you need, use 96% bread flour sifted together with 4% vital wheat gluten. You can find VWG in the bulk bin section of any natural foods store. Pre-packaged VWG tends to be lower in protein than that in bulk.

High-gluten, or high-protein flour (HPF) has a protein content of 14-14.5%. Unfortunately, it tends to be available only from large distributors in 50-pound bags. The good news is that you can effectively create your own high protein flour.

How can know the protein content of any flour?  Another good question.  Let’s look at the nutrition label of a bag of bread flour.

You need two pieces of information from it:  the number of grams of protein per serving, and the number of total grams of flour per serving.  In this case, the numbers are 5 and 40, respectively.  To learn the protein percentage, we’ll divide 5 by 40:  5 ÷ 40 = .125, or 12.5%.  So we know we have bread flour, or flour that contains enough protein in the form of gluten to dependably yield a good loaf of bread.

So how do we create high protein flour?  Are you familiar with vital wheat gluten (VWG)?  It isn’t pure protein, but it’s darn close.  I buy mine from a bulk bin at my nearby natural foods store.  The grams of protein per serving are 23 (!!), and the total grams of VWG are 30 per serving.  Let’s do the math:  23 ÷ 30 = .766666666666.  Rounding up, let’s call it 77%.

We need to know how much to add to our bread flour in order to create high protein flour.  We’re going to use a tool called a Pearson’s Square.  It simply allows anyone to start with two known quantities and calculate the amounts needed of each in order to create a third known quantity.  

Take out a piece of paper, draw a square in the center, and do this with me.  On the left side of the square, the smaller amount goes at the top and the larger on the bottom:  12.5 (the protein % of bread flour, BF) and 77 (the protein % of vital wheat gluten, VWG).  In the center goes our target % for high-gluten flour:  14.5%.

The arrows inside the square tell you in which directions to subtract on the diagonals.  We’re only concerned with integers here (it’s easier for me to calculate a Pearson’s Square than to figure out how long it’s been since I used the word “integer”), no negative numbers.  The difference between 12.5 and 14.5 is 2.  Write that at the bottom right corner.  The difference between 77 and 14.5 is 62.5.  Write that at the upper right corner.  Now add the two numbers on the right together:  62.5 + 2 = 64.5.  Are you with me?

There is one last step.  In order to know how much of each kind of flour we need to mix together to make high protein flour, we need to know what percentage 62.5 and 2 are of the total 64.5.  Because right now, the information is just in “parts”.  Parts are not as useful as percentages.

So, 62.5 ÷ 64.5 = .97, or 97%

2 ÷ 64.5 = .03, or 3%

97% + 3% = 100%, so we know our numbers are accurate

In the end, I like to look at the ratios in terms of reasonableness.  We’re increasing the protein content of our BF, 12.5%, to 14.5%, the protein content of HPF.  We’re doing that using VWG, whose protein content is 77%.  I would reasonably expect that we would need a much larger amount of BF than VWG in order to create HPF.  Our calculations not only confirmed that, but also told us exactly how much of each flour we need.

Great information Alfanso! I have been working on this on my own for some time (with mixed results), and this will simplify and cut down my experimenting a great deal. Really appreciate it!!!

USFDA requirement for protein labeling produce rounded result on the label, thus 5g of protein can mean anywhere between 4.5g and 5.5g, and for calories per serving the rounding is to the nearest 5g for 50g or less. So the indicated protein percentage is actually somewhere between 10.6% and 14.7% which is not very precise.

Only the numbers are suspect. Once you have a blend you like you can repeat it with the same constituent brands and be pretty close but perhaps not exact.  I am not good enough to tell the difference from bag to bag or season to season.

Don't compare a commercial flour for which you have a spec sheet with a blend you mix up to have the same gluten and ash content.  Gluten quality is more than just protein level as well. Consumer flours seem pretty consistent but they can vary a lot without changing the labeling.  Commercial spec flours are much more consistent because they don't have the same flexibility to deviate. And their customers are more demanding of consistency (and often do their own tests to verify that they are getting what they are paying for).  I understand that some big commercial bakeries require lot certification from the miller.

If you have the time and interest, you might want to read the Flour Treatise, which will tell you more about different kinds of flour. It's not just protein content, but which part of the wheat berry is used and the characteristics of the types.