Low ash content flours
I’ve come across a Japanese flour made by the company Nissin, called their ‘Violet’ low protein cake flour. Their website claims that the flour is not bleached, has an ash content of 0.33% and has a protein content of 8%. I know there's no correlation between bleached flour and its protein and ash content. But from using this flour, it’s a bright white colour as though it’s been bleached and I’ve never seen a flour with such a low ash content before. My questions therefore are:
Is it possible to obtain such a low ash content in flour from just the milling process alone? Or has something been done to the flour?
How would you go about making flour with such a low ash content? Most flour I’ve seen go as low as 0.50% but nothing lower.
Are there wheat flours in the English speaking world that have ash content that low?
Is there a way to make cake flour that acts like bleached flour in terms of texture and whiteness without going through the bleaching process?
Any other insight would be very appreciated thank you!
Yes, of course you can obtain such ash just by milling. Even 100 and 200 years ago that was possible and was done. Whole wheat ash content ranges from 1.09% ash to 2.28% ash depending on how it was grown, on dry land or on irrigated land, the same can be said about ash content of wheat endosperm - of the white portion of the wheat kernel, it varies wildly.
50 years ago most white flours and bread flours were 0.4%ash, meaning they were 0.35--0.45% ash. Today they are 0.5 ash. It's a commercial trend, to use cheaper, less white, flours in white bread baking, it has nothing to do with the technology of milling. To this day you can buy flour type 400/typ40 in Europe, which is 0.4%ash, and all cake and pastry flour in North America is milled to have less than 0.4% ash, both bleached and unbleached.
- Is there a way to make cake flour that acts like bleached flour in terms of texture and whiteness without going through the bleaching process?
- Yes. Rose Levy Beranbaum wrote about how to substitute bleached with unbleached by adding starches and by adjusting baking powder amounts here:
https://www.realbakingwithrose.com/blog/2019/2/23/the-power-of-flour-revisited