29Flour

Nearly every item a baker turns out has flour in it. Flour is the main building block of breads, of pastries and of most cakes, and the kind a baker picks shapes how the finished product turns out. The first thing to learn is the gap between hard wheat and soft wheat, because it tells you which flour suits which job.

Ingredients give every baked product its structure and its flavor. When a baker knows what each one is made of and how it behaves alongside the others, a formula can be changed, with one ingredient added or swapped for another, and still come out close to the original. Wheat, corn, rice and oats as grains for the table, and the three parts of a kernel, are covered earlier. see chapter 16: What a grain is

29.1 Baking's dry ingredients

A bakeshop works with a fairly short list of ingredient groups.

• grains and flours
• fats and oils
• sweeteners
• eggs
• dairy products
• leavening agents, which make things rise
• thickening agents
• fruit
• nuts and seeds
• chocolate and other cocoa products
• spices and flavorings

Salt and water play a part as well.

Next to flour, the dry shelves hold several other staples.

• white and brown sugars
• yeast
• baking soda and baking powder
• cocoa powder
• vanilla

Each does its own job in a formula. Flour comes first because almost every formula starts with it.

Hard wheat and soft wheat

Wheat is sorted as hard or soft. Hard wheat carries more protein, and more protein means stronger gluten, the stretchy network that holds a dough together. Soft wheat carries less, so its gluten is weaker and the crumb is more tender. see chapter 7: Flour

North America grows six types of wheat. Their protein ranges and uses are:

• Hard red winter: 10 to 15% protein. An all-round wheat, good for all-purpose flour, hard rolls, flatbreads and Asian-style noodles.
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• Hard red spring: 12 to 18% protein. On its own its gluten is so strong that bread is hard to shape, so it is mostly blended in to strengthen bread flours. It goes into high-end breads such as artisan loaves, pizza crust, croissants and rolls.
• Soft red: 8 to 11% protein. The weak gluten suits cookies, crackers and pastries.
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• Soft white: 8 to 11% protein and low moisture. It gives a whiter product, so it suits cakes, pastries and some Middle Eastern flatbreads.
• Hard white: a newer wheat grown in the United States, used for whiter wheat breads, Asian noodles and flatbreads.
• Durum: the hardest wheat of all, with 14 to 16% protein and a high gluten content. It goes mainly into pasta, couscous and Mediterranean breads.
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Inside the kernel

A wheat kernel has three parts: the bran outside, the germ, and the endosperm in the middle. Milling breaks the kernel apart and each part finds a use. see chapter 16: What a grain is

• Bran is darker than the inside of the kernel. The brown specks you see in some flour are milled bran; white flour has it taken out. It is rich in fiber, vitamins, minerals, protein and fat.
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• Germ is the part a new wheat plant grows from. It is very high in fat and goes rancid fast, so any flour that keeps the germ has a short shelf life.
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• Endosperm is about 83% of the kernel and is 68 to 76% starch. White flour comes from it. It also holds protein, B vitamins, iron, minerals and soluble fiber.
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Milling in brief

The point of milling is to pull the endosperm away from the bran and germ, since the endosperm is what becomes baking flour. All three parts can be bought.

The first mills crushed or rolled kernels between two big stones. The grind was coarse, but the parts could then be sifted apart, and the work was hard. A few European markets still sell stone-ground flour; in the United States most flour is no longer made that way, and stone-ground grits and cornmeal are the usual stone-ground products. Modern mills use the break system, set out under the next heading.

Strong flours and weak flours

• Bread flour is a strong flour from hard wheat, sold bleached or unbleached, and mostly used by commercial bakeries.
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• High-gluten flour has high protein and forms good gluten.
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• Cake flour is a weak flour from soft wheat. It is usually pure white and feels soft and silky. Its low gluten makes it right for delicate pastries.
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• Pastry flour is weak and low in protein too, but stronger than cake flour. It is a creamy, yellowish color.
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• All-purpose flour is the general flour and the usual choice of home bakers. It can stand in for any of the flours above. Its protein is lower, yet still enough to build good gluten for bread.
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• Self-rising flour comes with leavener already in it: baking powder and salt. Professional kitchens do not use it. Leaveners lose strength with time, and since most formulas already have their own leavener in differing amounts, a scaled recipe could end up with too little and fail.
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Meals

A meal is a coarser grind than flour. Cornmeal is ground from the starchy endosperm of corn, is sold in several styles, and has no gluten. Nut meals are nuts ground fine enough to use like flour; almond and hazelnut are the two most often seen. With no wheat in them, they have no gluten either.

29.2 Wheat, milling and the kinds of flour

Wheat through history

Grains of wheat, millet and rye about 10,000 years old have been dug up where lake dwellers once lived in Switzerland. The Romans perfected the rotary mill for grinding wheat. By the time of Christ the city of Rome had over 300 bakeries, and Roman soldiers carried wheat across the empire. Milling stayed rough for a long time: even flour milled twice and bolted, meaning sifted through silk gauze, came out yellowish, uneven and spotted with bran and germ.

The big change came in the second half of the 1800s. Edmund LaCroix, an American inventor, added a purifier that took the middlings (bran, germ and other coarse bits) away from the fine particles that make smooth white flour. More recently, whole grain flour has come back into demand because whole grain foods have proved more nutritious than white-flour ones.

Large-scale wheat farming in Canada began only after settlers moved onto the Prairies in the 1800s. Hard wheats such as Red Fife, Marquis and Selkirk made Canada a granary for Britain and much of Europe. Most wheat in Western Canada today is hard red spring; soft red and soft white wheats grow mainly in Quebec and Ontario.

Across North America, wheat grows mostly on the Canadian Prairies and on the Great Plains of the United States. Winter wheat grows from Nebraska southward; northward through Saskatchewan, spring wheat takes over. Kansas, home of the American Institute of Baking, sits at the heart of American wheat country, and Saskatchewan is its Canadian match.

What the miller is after

Milling turns whole grain into flour. A miller wants three things: flour that is the same every time, a range of flours for different jobs, and flours that behave predictably in the bakery.

The first step is to analyze the incoming grain, for example its gluten content and its amylase (a starch-digesting enzyme) activity. That analysis decides how grains will be blended. Milling then runs in three stages: cleaning and conditioning, breaking, and reduction.

Stage 1: cleaning and conditioning

Wheat arrives carrying weeds, seeds, chaff and other matter.

• An aspirator blows strong air through the grain to lift out light rubbish.
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• A disc separator removes barley, oats and other unwanted grains.
• Scourers use metal beaters to throw the wheat hard against perforated steel. This knocks loose the dirt packed in the crease of each kernel, and a blast of air carries it off.
• A magnetic separator pulls out any iron or steel.
• The wheat is dampened, and machines called whizzers spin off the wet on the surface.
• The grain is tempered: left damp in bins for a short while so the bran toughens and can be peeled away cleanly from the part that makes flour.
• Last, the wheat is warmed to an even temperature, ready for breaking.

Stage 2: breaking

Breaking has two aims: get as much bran and germ as possible away from the endosperm, and get as much flour as possible from that endosperm. A home grain mill does the job in one pass. A commercial mill works in many small steps, so very little bran or germ ends up mixed into the endosperm.

The stage is called crushing, but large steel rollers actually crack the wheat. The first rollers are ridged, or corrugated, and split the grain into coarse pieces. These pass through screens that get finer and finer, while moving air draws off impurities. The coarse pieces of endosperm, between semolina and flour in size, are the middlings. The bran and germ are sifted off, and the coarse stock goes round again: more rolling, sifting and purifying.

Taking out the bran and germ gives a flour that makes better dough and has a better color. It also helps the flour keep, since the oil in the germ can spoil it.

Stage 3: reduction

Now the coarse particles pass through finer sieves and rollers. Once the first crushing is done, the stock is split into five or six streams. The machines that do this are plansifters: stacks of sieves, each with a different mesh, the finest as fine as finished flour. Some flour is already made at this early point.

Each stream then goes through purifiers, rows of flat sieves set at a slight slope with air blowing upward to clear the dust. The stock is crushed a little more and sifted into many more parts. Perfectly smooth steel rollers make the last crushings, turning middlings into flour.

The new flour is bleached and held in bulk storage. It is then enriched with thiamine, niacin, riboflavin and iron, and either bagged for homes and bakeries or loaded for bulk delivery.

Extraction rate

Flour streams

A modern mill makes about 25 separate streams of flour, each a little different in quality and make-up. These are combined into four kinds of flour people eat, plus streams sold as animal feed.

One measure used to grade them is ash: the minerals, such as phosphorus, left behind when flour is burned. The more refined the flour, the lower its ash.

Kinds of wheat flour

Each edible stream yields several flours, each with its own character and uses.

A miller's specification sheet tells a baker what is in a flour. One Canadian bread flour, for example, lists these ingredients:

• wheat flour
• amylase
• ascorbic acid
• the vitamins niacin, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin and folic acid
• iron
• azodicarbonamide

That flour has 14.2% moisture, 0.54% ash and 13.00% protein. The sheet also carries microbe test results and an allergen statement. The protein figure is worked out in the laboratory from the flour's nitrogen.

Semolina, triticale and no-time flour

Semolina is the gritty product made of small bits of endosperm from durum wheat. The same bits from other hard wheats are called farina. The best-known semolina on store shelves is a hot wheat breakfast cereal. Semolina as the flour for dried pasta is covered with pasta. see chapter 16: Italian-style pasta

Triticale is a cross between wheat and rye that brings together the best of both. It was the world's first new grain and is now a commercial crop in Manitoba.

Bakers have always wanted to save time and money without losing quality, flavor or structure. No-time flour is the millers' answer: flour treated with additives (ascorbic acid, bromate and cysteine, for example) that does away with bulk fermentation, for both the sponge method and the straight dough method. It saves time, labor and floor space, and a baker can keep their own formulas with small changes.

Blending flours

Weather changes the grain from year to year. If harvest time is damp, for instance, grain can start to sprout, which leads to damaged starch. Mills test and test-bake their flours and blend them to make up for this, so the flour a baker receives stays fairly constant. When something goes wrong with a bake, the flour is seldom to blame; the baker usually is.

Bakers blend too. Some soft flour mixed into bread flour makes a Danish pastry or a sweet dough less tough. Gluten flour is added to multigrain bread to help it rise.

Bleached, enriched and pre-sifted

Freshly milled flour, even fine flour, runs from yellow to cream in color, and its doughs tend to be sticky and hard to handle. Kept well, flour gets better in color and quality as it ages, for up to a year.

Storing flour that long costs money. So, near the end of the 1800s, millers began treating fresh flour with oxidizing agents to whiten it and make it handle like aged flour. These bleaching and maturing agents leave the flour's food value unchanged. They include:

• chlorine dioxide
• chlorine gas with a little nitrosyl chloride
• ammonium persulfate
• ascorbic acid

Two kinds of bleach are used. An organic peroxide whitens only the yellow pigment and leaves the gluten alone. Chlorine dioxide, used more than any other in North America, whitens the pigment and also improves the gluten, but it destroys the tocopherols (the vitamin E group).

Enriched flour has had iron and three key B vitamins (thiamin, riboflavin and niacin) put back after milling removed part of them. Enrichment does not change the taste, color, texture, baking quality or calories of the flour.

Pre-sifted flour has been sifted many times at the mill through extremely fine silk. The mesh differs by flour. Cake flour goes through a finer mesh than bread flour, so a cup of cake flour holds more tiny particles, packs denser and weighs a little more than a cup of bread flour. Sifting also matters in the bakeshop: bread made with sifted flour rises to a bigger volume, because of the extra air.

Flour additives

Many additives work better in combination, which is why commercial flour may carry several. Some act as dough conditioners and some help fermentation. Countries differ in what they allow: in Germany, ascorbic acid is the only additive permitted.

• Bromate made flour age, or oxidize, much faster. It was used until the early 1990s; Canadian millers stopped after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration raised health concerns. In the United States some states allow it and others, such as California, ban it.
• Azodicarbonamide (ADA) has been approved in the United States since 1962 and is permitted as a food additive elsewhere too, but is banned in Europe. It works fast and gives a dry, cohesive dough that can take up a lot of water. It is not a bleach, but the finer texture it gives makes the crumb look whiter. It destroys no vitamins. A baker can ask the flour supplier whether a flour contains ADA or other chemical additives.
• L-cysteine is an amino acid that speeds up reactions in the dough, cutting bulk fermentation nearly to nothing and giving a "no-time" dough. It makes dough more elastic and better at holding gas.
• Ascorbic acid is vitamin C. It was first used to improve bread in 1932, after bakers noticed that old lemon juice in a dough helped it hold gas and rise higher. Too much does no harm, because the heat of baking destroys the vitamin. It is now added as a matter of course to some North American flours meant for artisan bread.
• Calcium peroxide is another agent that matures dough. It is a different thing from the peroxide used to bleach flour.
• Glycerides go into cake mixes and yeast doughs. They are surfactants, short for "surface-acting agents". In bread they mainly keep the crumb soft, which slows staling, and they strengthen the dough a little.
• Sodium stearoyl lactylate, approved in the United States since 1961, helps dough hold gas, shortens proofing, gives a bigger loaf and slows staling.

Whole grain and artisan milling

Before shoppers came to want smooth white flour with additives to age it fast, flour was milled the whole grain, artisan way. Artisan flour differs from the white kind.

• It is less refined.
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• It has few or no additives.
• It keeps more nutrition.
• It suits traditional breads.

Demand for it, and for whole grain flour made from the entire grain, is growing.

Artisan millers, also called micro millers, grind many grains the big mills do not, such as spelt, kamut and buckwheat, along with other grains and pulses that have no gluten. Bakers can buy from them directly or through a distributor, and knowing where a grain came from matters to an artisan baker. Many of these millers buy straight from farmers, which builds trust and makes growing and food safety practices easier to see.

Their grain may be grown conventionally or organically. Certified organic grain has passed a demanding process that guarantees no chemical additives. When a whole grain flour with little refining is wanted, stone mills and impact hammer mills are the usual methods.

29.3 Flour in baking: gluten

Flour is the base of bread, cakes and pastries, whether they rise with yeast or with chemical leaveners. It is "the skeleton, which supports the other ingredients in a baked product".

Protein becomes gluten

A flour's strength depends on both how much protein it has and how good that protein is, and flours differ widely. Good protein gives a strong, stable flour. Even so, how a bread turns out depends on handling the dough well during fermentation so the gluten develops.

For bread, flour from hard spring wheat is thought best, because it has more good gluten than soft wheat flour. Mills often blend hard spring with hard winter wheat to get the strengths of both. A good bread flour has about 13% gluten.

Storing flour

Flour is not a potentially hazardous food: it does not support the growth of disease-causing bacteria the way moist foods do. It still needs a proper dry store.

How a dry storeroom is set up and rotated, first in, first out, is covered with food safety. see chapter 2: Rotation: first in, first out

• A dry storeroom should be dry and cool, ideally between 10°C and 15°C (50°F and 59°F).
• Flour keeps best at about 60% relative humidity. In a damp room above 23°C (74°F), mold, bacteria and fast spoilage take hold.
• Seal every opening in walls, ceiling and floor against rodents and vermin, and keep shelving at least 15 cm (6 in.) off the floor, with nothing stored on the floor itself.
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• Flour picks up smells and holds on to them, so the room must be well aired, and flour should not share space with onions, garlic, coffee or cheese.
• Store dry foods above wet foods.

Flour also dries out over a long stay in a dry store, and that changes the dough. A 40 kg (88 lb.) sack at 14% moisture can drop to 39 kg (86 lb.). That lost kilogram (2 lb.) of water has to be added back when you mix.

Testing flour

Flour from a reliable mill, milled and blended by modern methods, is fairly even all year and should not need testing. Even so, bakers and students should know how flours differ and how they are usually tested. The main bakeshop tests look at color, absorption, gluten strength and baking quality. Laboratories also test for albumen, starch, sugar, dextrin, minerals and fat.

Color. Flour color carries through to the bread, provided fermentation has gone properly; malt, brown sugar, molasses, salt and colored margarine in the dough also change the color. To compare a flour with one of known grade:

• Put a little of each flour side by side on a smooth sheet of glass.
• Work each with a spatula into a firm, smooth patch about 5 cm (2 in.) square, about 2 cm (4/5 in.) thick at the back and thinning to a film at the front.
• Compare the dry patches. Creamy white means a hard flour with good gluten. Dark or grayish means poor flour or dirt. Specks of bran mean a low grade.
• Dip the glass at an angle into clean water and let it partly dry. Color differences and bran specks show up more clearly when damp.

Absorption. Flours soak up different amounts of water, so the same formula gives doughs of different firmness. Most flours absorb between 55% and 65%. To measure it, weigh out 100 g (4 oz.) of flour and stir in water from a measured supply until the dough feels right, finishing by hand. Weigh what water is left, and divide the water used by the flour used. If 60 g of water went into 100 g of flour, the absorption is 60%.

Feel. Hard wheat flour takes up more liquid than soft. Rubbed between thumb and fingers, a good hard flour feels a little gritty; a soft, smooth feel points to soft flour or a soft and hard blend. Squeeze some in the hollow of your hand: hard flour holds the shape but crumbles as soon as it is touched, while soft flour stays in a lump.

Gluten strength. Hard flour has more gluten, and better gluten, than soft flour, and two hard flours can differ with the weather and where the wheat grew. A laboratory measures this exactly; a gluten ball gives a rough comparison.

• Take 250 g (9 oz.) each of a hard flour and an all-purpose flour, in two bowls.
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• Add enough water to make each a stiff dough, and mix until smooth. Rest the doughs about 10 minutes.
• Knead each dough under cold running water until the water runs clear and the starch is gone. Set a flour sieve in the sink so no dough goes down the drain. What is left is crude gluten.
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• Roll the gluten into balls and bake them on a pan lined with paper for about an hour at 215°C (420°F).
• The hard flour's ball comes out bigger, showing how its extra gluten gives more volume.
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Ash content. Ash is what would remain if 100 g of flour were burned. A high ash figure means the flour still holds more of the bran, the germ and the outer layer of endosperm; a low one means a more refined flour with a lower extraction rate.

Baking quality. The final test of any flour is the bread it makes. Good volume goes with good gluten. Poor volume points to young, or green, flour. A flour that cannot hold up through the whole fermentation may give a small, flat loaf. More yeast sometimes helps such a flour, because fermentation is shorter and the dough stays in better shape while it proofs in the pan.

29.4 Rye and other flours

Rye

Rye is a tough cereal grass grown for its grain, and people have eaten it for over 2,000 years. It was once a staple in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, and it lost ground as world trade made wheat easier to get. It grows well in cold northern places, including the Canadian Prairies, Wisconsin and the Dakotas.

Rye is the one flour besides wheat that can make a yeast-raised bread without being blended with wheat flour. Its food value is about the same as wheat's, and its lysine, an amino acid, is in some cases better.

Milling rye

Rye is cleaned, tempered and milled much as wheat is. The difference is that its endosperm is soft and turns to flour much faster. It gives no semolina, so purifiers are rarely needed. The break roller separates the bran, and the flour is rolled and sifted further into grades.

• Chop: the miller's word for the coarse stock that comes off the break roller.
• Meal: like chop, made by grinding the whole rye kernel, at 100% extraction.
• Light rye flour: from the center of the kernel, low in protein and high in starch, much like white bread flour. It makes light rye breads.
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• Medium rye flour: a straight flour, meaning all of the kernel once bran and shorts are taken off. It is light gray, has 1% ash, and goes into many sourdough breads.
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• Dark rye flour: like first clear wheat flour, with 2% ash and 16% protein. It is used mostly for heavier rye breads.

The lighter rye flours are usually bleached, most often with chlorine. This only lightens the color; it does nothing for the gluten.

How much of the grain is kept

How much of the rye kernel goes into the flour affects how much dough a batch yields and the flavor of the bread. Two rye flours compare like this, by their dry matter:

The flour that keeps more of the grain has more ash, fiber and pentosans, and less starch. Pentosans are gummy carbohydrates that swell when wet. In the oven they help a rye loaf hang together and keep its shape. Rye flour has more of them than wheat flour, and they matter more to a good rye bread.

Why rye bakes differently

Some dark rye flours carry as much as 16% of gluten-forming protein, but all of it is gliadin. Rye has no glutenin, the protein that makes dough elastic. So a dough of rye flour alone cannot trap the gas the yeast gives off while it ferments, and the loaf comes out small and dense.

In rye, starch and pentosans count for more than gluten. Starch is what builds the loaf's structure, and how well it does that depends on the flour's age and acidity. Rye flour needs less aging than wheat flour, but it has both a "best after" and a "best before" date; about three weeks after milling is thought good.

• Too fresh: the starch sets (gelatinizes) fast, at a heat where amylase enzymes are still very active, so the bread may be sticky and very moist. see chapter 7: Starch gelatinization
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• Too old: the starch is slow to set, the enzymes are unable to work, and the loaf may crack and split. Some breakdown of starch is needed for the dough to swell.

Rye flour should hold 13 to 14% moisture; the drier it is, the better it keeps. Store it the way you store wheat flour.

In short, rye differs from wheat in these ways:

• It grinds to powder more easily, and it gives no semolina.
• Its gluten matters little to the dough, while its starch matters more than wheat's does.
• It has more pentosans, and they count for more in the bread.
• Its starch and pentosans let it bind more water than wheat flour.

Both grains are highly nutritious and have long been called the "staff of life". Modern North American mills even out differences between crops, so bakers get flour they can rely on, in many types made for different products and tastes.

Corn in the bakeshop

Corn is one of the most widely grown grains in the world. Besides breads and cereals, it gives many other products.

• starch
• sugars, corn syrup and dextrose among them
• plastics
• glues
• ethanol fuel
• spirits such as bourbon

Its formal name is maize. Some kinds are soft and sweet, for eating fresh; others are starchy and are dried for baking, animal feed and popcorn. Corn as a vegetable and as hominy and masa harina is covered with grains. see chapter 16: Corn

• Cornmeal feels sandy and is ground fine, medium or coarse, with most of the husk and germ removed. It is used in dishes of the American South such as cornbread, and adds texture to other breads and pastry.
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• Stone-ground cornmeal keeps some husk and germ, so its texture is close to whole wheat flour. It is more nutritious but spoils sooner. With no gluten, it behaves more like cake flour in baking.
• Blue cornmeal is light blue or violet, ground from whole blue corn kernels. It is closest to stone-ground cornmeal and tastes slightly sweet.
• Corn flour, in North America, is cornmeal ground very fine, with husk and germ removed, and feels soft and powdery. In the United Kingdom and Australia, though, "corn flour" means cornstarch.
• Cornstarch is the starch taken out of the maize kernel. It is a very fine powder that mixes easily into water, and it is used mainly to thicken. It needs heat to set and gives a clear, shiny result. see chapter 7: Thickeners and gelling agents compared
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Rice and oats

Rice is a staple for much of the world. It is not a crop grown in Canada. Rice flour is ground fine from rice with the husks removed. It is a little sandy, and with no gluten it gives crispness while staying tender, which is why many gluten-free breads are built on rice flour or blends that include it. In the pastry shop, short grain (pearl) rice also makes rice pudding and other desserts.

Oats feed animals and people, and in baking they go into breads, cookies and dessert toppings, where they add texture.

• Rolled oats, the kind bakers meet most, are de-husked whole kernels pressed through rollers.
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• Oat bran and oat flour come from grinding the kernels and separating the bran from the endosperm.
• Whole grain oat flour is the whole kernel ground with nothing taken out.
• Steel-cut oats are chopped kernels, used more in cooking and for breakfast cereals than in baking.

Other grains and pulses

Corn shows up most in quick breads and oats most in cookies, while rice flour is used more and more for customers who are sensitive to gluten. Whole grain eating and the cooking of many cultures have also brought in more flours from other grains and from pulses.

In Canada these flours are becoming easier to find. They come from grains like spelt, quinoa and kamut, from pulses such as lentils and chickpeas, and from crops such as buckwheat that dry to a grain-like form. As allergies and intolerances grow more common, bakeshops use them to make products without wheat for customers with special diets.

29.5 Almond and other nut flours

A nut flour is nuts ground fine enough to be used like flour. Almond and hazelnut are the two you will see most. There is no wheat in them, so there is no gluten either.

Flour or meal?

Cooks use both names for one product: almond flour is also called almond meal. Almond meal is blanched almonds ground into a powder. "Flour" is a loose word here: the product is really ground almonds, coarser than milled flour, and it forms clumps easily.

The grind also changes from one producer to the next. Almond flours are not all ground alike, so a different one used in the same amount may not give quite the same result, although a similar grind should still work.

No gluten, so structure comes from elsewhere

With no gluten to develop, a batter made mostly of almond flour cannot be overmixed. Even an hour of mixing would do an almond doughnut batter no harm.

Something else must hold the bake up. Macarons contain no grain at all. Beaten egg white, a meringue, gives them the light, airy body that a wheat cookie gets from gas trapped in a web of gluten. see chapter 15: What eggs do in a recipe Other recipes add a little wheat flour: some financiers take some all-purpose flour for extra structure. Some almond flour recipes turn out dense and heavy.

Flavor and texture

Almond flour tastes nutty. Amaretti take plenty of sugar because the almond meal is so nutty that it needs balancing. Yet in a doughnut where almond flour is most of the batter, the almond does not take over, and the crumb is close to a cake doughnut's.

A smaller amount changes a dough's texture. Added to a tart crust, some gives more flavor and a crumbly bite. It is not only for sweets: almond meal can be scattered over stuffed peppers in place of breadcrumbs, for a nutty character.

Handling it

• Break up clumps. Sift almond flour if it looks lumpy, or whisk it with the other dry ingredients and rub out the lumps with your fingers.
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• Grind it finer with sugar. For macarons, sift almond flour with powdered sugar, whiz the two in a food processor, then sift and whiz again, three times in all. The finer powder helps give smooth tops. Do not try the recipe without a scale.
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• Let a wet batter rest. Rest a clafoutis batter for several hours, or better overnight. Baked straight away, the almond flour may not have fully taken up the liquid, and the texture can be gritty.
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• Toast it for more flavor. Toast almond flour in a 350°F oven before it goes into a tart dough. Spread it thin, and watch it: a powder this fine burns easily, and if it gets very dark it turns a little bitter. It is ready when it smells of toasted almonds.
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Where cooks use it

• Financiers, small cakes built on almonds and browned butter. The quality of the almond meal is one of the two things that make them. One approach starts with tant pour tant: powdered sugar and almond meal mixed in equal parts.
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• Macarons and other nut meringue cookies. Italian amaretti, ricciarelli and pignoli are all almond meringue cookies.
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• Frangipane cake. Almond flour mixed into a creamed butter batter makes a frangipane shortcake. see chapter 34: The creaming method
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• Sweet tart dough, where a little toasted almond flour adds flavor.
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• Clafoutis, a baked fruit batter that sits somewhere between cake and custard.
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Other nut flours

Hazelnut is the other common nut meal. Other nut flours, pistachio among them, can stand in for almond in amaretti. Pistachios sometimes replace almonds in macarons, and American cooks later swapped in shredded coconut, which botanically is not a nut.

For a cook avoiding nuts, leave the almond flour out of the tart dough and add a third of a cup more all-purpose flour instead.