November 18, 2018 - 6:04am
Pumpernickel vs. whole-grain rye vs. home-milled rye
Hi, all,
All of the abovementioned appear to be "whole-grain" to me. What distinguishes pumpernickel flour from whole-grain rye? Its coarseness? When a formula calls for whole-grain rye, can one use pumpernickel flour (from King Arthur specifically)?
Can one mill her own pumpernickel flour at home?
Thank you.
Yippee
Share
You can find his article here.
Paul
Pumpernickel on his chart:-) But I like the rest of it!
Paul:
Thanks for the link. I checked that table and Stan's book, but I didn't get my answer. It still confuses me where pumpernickel flour would fit in. My guess is between rye meal and dark rye, depending on the specs from the miller.
My next question is what makes commercial pumpernickel flour so unique? Can I replace it with home-milled rye flour that includes all parts of rye berries, so I don't have to keep an extra bag of rye flour in my pantry?
Yippee
It's how Stan says - in absence of regulations anyone can call anything anything. If I grab a box of corn meal and sell it as pumpernickel who's gonna stop me? As long as I do not claim it to be whole grain - no one. In reality (assuming you live in the US) your pumpernickel flour will be whole grain rye - just because that's what virtually all rye flour available on store shelves is. The only question is what grind it's going to be. Some mills will use to describe a particularly poor grinds of rye, and other simply throw the word around.
The second answer follows directly from the first - there is nothing unique about it. It's not even one thing.
Do you foresee any problem if I replace (store-bought) pumpernickel flour with my home-milled rye flour? I need to justify paying $4/lb for pumpernickel flour that clutters my pantry. Thanks.
It will probably behave somewhat differently in terms of water absorption but otherwise no, there will be no issues.
I think if you keep hydration around 70%, you should have no problems, and the next batches can be adjusted to make things more to your liking.
gary
I'm in about the same boat you are (it is worth noting that if someone is about in a boat but not in a boat they are all at sea as it were). I'm getting ready to tackle some of the recipes in The Rye Baker and almost every gram of flour, rye or wheat, in my pantry is currently in the form of raw grain. So I suppose we'll just have to 'muddle through'. We really have only two ways to manipulate the flours we produce, sifting out bran and germ and varying the coarseness of our grind. I'm not inclined to do the sifting. There's too much good stuff that would have to be left out. I think Gary and suave are right; hydration will be our primary difference and most other issues will have to do with the aesthetics of the loaves. For me producing a few more exploratory bricks will be of little consequence - my record so far exhibits no tendency to perfection that brick making would mar. Good luck.
I do sift and then grind the "bran and other good stuff" in a spice / coffee grinder to make it very fine (12 sec?). Then it all gets combined back with the flour.
I just tried Breadtopia's 50-50 rye/whole wheat recipe and it turned out so so good. I replaced the white flour with freshly milled ww.
https://breadtopia.com/sourdough-rye-bread/
grain rye - per Wiki - Pumpernickel (English: /ˈpʌmpərnɪkəl/; German: [ˈpʊmpɐˌnɪkl̩]) is a typically heavy, slightly sweet rye bread traditionally made with sourdough starter and coarsely ground rye. It is often made today with a combination of rye flour and whole rye berries.
So if you have the berries and a mill or coffee grinder you are ready to go without keeping extra special ground flour around for it.
Happy Pumper Nickeling Yippee
It is most unhelpful for those of us in the U.S. to have no defined meaning for "pumpernickel" meal or flour.
If you accept the definition of a "coarse" meal that Wikipedia uses, you can see what that looks like in the photo Stan provided. Me? I'd call that cracked rye, crushed rye, kibbled rye, or rye chops.
My own unofficial expectation is that pumpernickel meal would look more like the medium rye meal in Stan's photo. So that's one opinion but not a standard.
Part of the problem is that we are trying to name a meal/flour for a bread, where the bread itself is more variable than we might expect. Some would call vollkornbrot a form of pumpernickel. No milling required; just use the whole rye kernels. Others would point to something made from a more flour-like substance as being pumpernickel.
It would be a lot easier if we had definitions that had widespread agreement, or were legislated.
Paul
Advances in Cereal Science and Technology Vol II (1978) has a Ch. 7 by Seibel, Bruemmer, and Stephan on West German Bread. Pumpernickel is a sliced bread of Westfalia. The rye portion is mostly coarse meal with some medium meal. Both are type 1800, 1.65—2.00 ash.
Thank you, everyone, for your response!
My Vitamix can grind the berries to very fine whole grain flour.
But how can I achieve the coarse and medium grind of the pumpernickel flour?
I have a bag of KA pumpernickel flour. Is it possible to sieve it to get an approximate ratio of coarse to medium meal? What sizes of sieves should I use? Or should I forget about grinding my pumpernickel flour? What do you think? Thanks.
Yippee
P.S. I must grind my rye flour for the Borodinsky because it requires whole grain flour. So far I've improperly used a medium rye (1370 equivalent) to make it.
to produce a meal of the consistency you want, then turn it off. It won’t matter if parts of it are chunky and other parts are fairly fine. Shorter run time equals coarser meal. Processing smaller quantities at a time may give you better control of the particle size. All you are aiming for is to break up the kernels to some degree, not run it so long that you make flour.
Paul