new flour test

I've been talking to a potential supplier who's up in the hard wheat belt and produces only certified organic flours. he was nice enough to send me a few samples, one of which is organic high gluten, milled from hard red spring wheat, about 13.5% protein. we were going to have a NY smoked fish brunch this morning, so i decided to whip up a batch of bialys using the flour.

i would love to stock this flour, but i need to know if there's enough demand to justify ordering a couple of thousand pounds of the stuff. can you folks let me know? i promise you this: it will be attractively priced.

it's interesting stuff. first, the color is rather more beige than, say, All Trumps (which i compared side by side) ... very creamy. also, the grind was slightly coarser than AT, both to the touch and to the tongue. taste-wise, the raw flour was slightly sweeter and nuttier than AT, without a trace of that bitterness you sometimes get with raw flours.

the mix was also interesting. i had to increase my hydration by about 2% in order to get the consistency i was looking for. the gluten formed relatively slowly, but came together almost immediately at about 9 minutes under the dough hook, very, very elastic and not very extensible because of all the work it had been getting.

i used a relatively small amount of fresh compressed yeast, and got doubling in about an hour, then divided the dough into a dozen boules and put them in my proofing box. they reached near full-proof after about another hour and i formed the bialys.

i was amazed at how extensible the dough was at that point. the gluten was amazingly well formed and very very smooth, and didn't fight back at all when i stretched the boules into the bialy shape.

at that point, they went immediately into the oven, and since the photo upload isn't working for me here, you can see what they looked like on this link:

http://www.nybakers.com/images/bialys10-4-09a.jpg

the bialys tasted wonderful; the flour itself gave a nice moderately chewy crumb and the color of the flour lightened in the baking, but still had that lovely creamy beige tone to it.

i have to say that this is probably the best batch of bialys i've ever made!

Stan Ginsberg
www.nybakers.com

PS, i'd give recipes, etc., but Norm (nbicomputers) and I just signed a contract to do a Jewish baking book, so I'm afraid our publisher now has first call on all our intellectual property!