Baking in the Heat

Because of the heat this past week (excuses excuses!) I’ve been reluctant to do any baking. Ironically the incessant heat and humidity makes it the perfect environment to bake bread. Fortunately the samples of flour from Australia could not wait any longer so I headed off to my little house and baked in the sweltering heat. Of course the dough happily complied and rose in half the time and turned out beautifully despite the bad feed-back that I received about the flour. Although the Australian bread flour was not as high in gluten as the flour milled from US wheat, the cheaper price makes up for this shortcoming.

I subjected the flour to a variety of mixing methods starting with focaccia to test the liquid absorption followed by a rich egg bread to see how it would stand up to all the fat and eggs without having to adjust the recipe and finally a lean loaf as a neutral base point. I also tried the flour on a cupcake using 100% Australian bread flour and a locally milled soft brown sugar. The results confirmed the findings that the flour is quite low on gluten but is still very much acceptable as long as they educate the bakers and the bakery owners that because of the low gluten content it has low water absorption and therefore cannot yield the same amount of bread as the predominant flour in the market.

Australian bread flour has a future here because many panaderias (bakeries) sell bread that do not rely heavily on high gluten flour, add this to the low cost and you’ll see that in the long run it will make up for the lesser yield.