Atta Flour - Yes, You Can!

Atta flour is a general type of flour used in India and other nearby countries for making rotis (aka chapattis, basically similar to flour tortillas).  It is often said that atta flour cannot be used for making bread (TFL has several posts on bread made with atta, but since the term covers a wide range of flours, it's hard to know how comparable they were to the flour used in this post).  Why not, and how true is it?

Atta can be made from different kinds of wheat and with different methods, but two characteristics are consistently emphasized: it is very finely ground, and it has a large amount of damaged starch.  The starch is supposedly what makes it unsuitable for making bread.  The damaged starch is probably a byproduct of the extra-fine milling, which was originally done at home using a small stone mill.  It has the effect of absorbing a lot of water, which helps the rotis be soft and flexible.

Atta is often made from durum wheat, but is also ground from non-durum varieties.  Durum or not, these wheats are usually claimed to have high protein levels. These kinds of atta flour are often labeled as being "whole wheat", and sometimes as having extra bran added as well.

In the US and Canada, atta flours are available made in Canada under the "Golden Temple" brand.  In some Indian or south asian groceries some Indian brands are offered as well.  I was able to buy a 10- lb bag of Sujata "Chakki Atta 100% Whole Wheat" flour. The word "Chakki" is supposed to denote being stone-ground.  I mention the 10-lb size because all the other varieties I could find were sold in 10 kg size, which is way too large for my use.

An interesting factoid is that the Sujata flour is an Indian brand (of General Mills India) but is labeled as being a product of the UAE.

Both the Golden Temple durum and the Sujata flours were indeed very fine.  All the flour except 5% - 10% passed through a #50 screen.  The remaining bran particles were still small enough to go through a #40 screen, so they are much finer than the bran I see in most other stone or roller ground whole wheats.

So enough about the flours - here are picture's of today's bake using 300g total flour, of which 80% is the Sujata Chakki atta, and with a 23% starter inoculation. 

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 So can you make decent bread with atta flour?  What do you think? I think this is about as good a boule as I have baked in a long time.  This loaf is moist and delicious, with a rich wheat flavor enhanced by just a hint of a sour tang. It begs you to cut thick slices and butter them.

As for the flour mix, I planned to have 20% be King Arthur's bread flour.  But I grabbed a container of masa hariña by mistake and started adding it.  When I realized, I scooped out as much as I could, but masa hariña and this atta flour look almost exactly the same and I might have scooped out a little atta too.  Anyway, there were still 30g extra flour which must have been mostly masa hariña.  To get to the target weight of 300g, I could only add 30g (10% baker's percent) of bread flour.

I had also sifted out 8g of that fine bran, and I soaked that in water for a few hours before adding it into the dough during the first stretch and fold session. The flour soaked up a lot of water, and with the addition of the soaker the dough was very wet.  But it improved during bulk ferment, getting less wet and sticky.  I did a total of four S&Fs.

The overall hydration including starter and soaker was 97%

This dough was slow to ferment, and two earlier atta loaves I made using GT atta and a higher percentage of bread flour were also very slow.  I'm guessing that this might be because the atta flour isn't malted.  At any rate, bulk ferment was about done after nine hours and it was too late to continue so I put the dough into the refrigerator overnight.  In the morning I made a preform, rested for only 10 minutes, and shaped the loaf.  The loaf was able to proof free-standing. It seemed to have proofed enough in an hour, and I scored it and baked with initial steam.

After the time I would usually bake a loaf of this size, it looked done but the interior temperature was only 195 deg F/90.6C so I reduced the oven setting from 425 deg F to 375 deg F/190C for another 5 minutes.  The final interior temperature was 209 deg F/98.3C.  The crumb still retained a lot of water, though, and this caused a little softening of the crust.