Six Tips For Baking With Wholemeal Flour
The world has become a lot more focused on trying to eat healthily, and one of the ways to achieve this is to switch out white flour for wholemeal flour.
Wholemeal flour is higher in nutrients and fibre whilst also delivering a range of health benefits, including lowering your risk of heart disease, risk of stroke, obesity and more. In this article, you will find six tips for baking with wholemeal flour that help make the switch that little bit easier.
Make The Switch To Wholemeal Flour Slowly
There is no getting away from the fact that wholemeal flour has a different taste and texture than white flour. If you change everything and switch overnight, you are much more likely to meet resistance from your family, which could mean you are ultimately setting yourself to fail. By substituting 1/3rd of your white flour for wholemeal flour in each recipe, you can slowly re-educate your taste buds.
Always Add More Liquid When Baking With Wholemeal Flour
When baking with wholemeal flour, it is important to understand that you will need to add more water to the mix. This is because wholemeal flour has a tendency to absorb more liquid than other types of flour. Although there is no hard and fast rule, our suggestion is to add an extra teaspoon of liquid for every cup of wholemeal flour that you use.
Do Not Worry About Over Mixing
Another benefit of using wholemeal flour is that it you are less likely to overmix it. Mixing is the process that allows for the elastic gluten in your baked products to rise. As most bakers have experienced when baking with white flour, overmixing is something that can happen all too easily. When this happens, you end up thickening these "elastics", which in turn makes it difficult for the air bubbles to expand. Wholemeal flour is higher in protein, which is why overmixing is less of an issue. Overmixing with white flour makes your final product chewy, whereas overmixing with wholemeal flour keeps your final product fluffy and fresh.
Invest In High-Quality Wholemeal Flour
The quality of the flour you choose will directly correlate to the quality of your finished products. Although it can be tempting to save a few pennies here and there by purchasing a cheap type of flour, this is a false economy and is not something that we recommend at Nelstrops.
Nelstrops have been making flour at their family mill in Cheshire for over 200 years. We invest time and effort to source only the best grains for our flours. None of our flour is bleached or treated in any other way, and we passionately believe that this makes a huge difference to the quality of the flour we produce. To buy what we believe to be the best flour for your baking requirements, click here to go to our online shop.