Separating meal into flour
Hi.
I have recently started volunteering at Mostert's Mill, the only working traditional windmill in Africa.
I would like to separate the meal produced by the mill into the various flour types (bread, cake etc)- is it as simple as just sifting it through sieves with a smaller and smaller grid?
So I would take the meal, and sift that through a coarse sieve. That would give me "brown" bread flour (and bran)
If I sieve that, through a less coarse sieve, I should get "white" bread flour, and then through a fine sieve, cake flour.
The point is to reduce the protein content at each stage, as cake flour should have a lower protein percentage than bread flour. But does simple sifting achieve this?
One difficulty is that the mill operates as a museum, and the millers demonstrate the machinery to interested visitors. This includes lifting the stones and employing the brake, both of which ensure that the meal is never ground to the same fineness. I'd need to separate the flours manually.
flour for bread and cake wouldn't be in the sifting but the grain being used. Stronger gluten for bread flour and weaker gluten for cake flour. For bread flour you can have wholemeal which would be the wholegrain ground or white flour (commonly called bread flour) with the bran removed. There will be varying degrees of how much bran is removed. In fact what is often sold as wholegrain is actually separated when ground and then the bran is added back in.
Ah - thanks.
We don't really have any control over what type of wheat is supplied - it is donated. I guess I'll just stick to recipes that use wholemeal or bread flour.