Manjula's Kitchen HOWTO

[nonnihil]

Things to keep in mind when cooking breads from Manjula's Kitchen recipes:

+ If you live in NE, do not mistake her "whole wheat flour" for your whole wheat flour. Hers is much lighter, finer-ground, and lower-protein than what we get up here. The recipes will fail. Go to your local Asian grocery and find chapati flour. You will be happier

Comments

[zogathon]

Regarding whole wheat flour: Would white whole wheat also be an acceptable substitute?

(I'm not sure I've ever used chapati flour)

[nonnihil]

Dunno; you'd have to try it.

I tried the rotis with the whole wheat I had on hand -- King Arthur -- and they felt and cooked like bricks. The same dough with the chapati (which advertises itself as "100% whole wheat") is much more pliable, and with a more manageable gluten. Not a huge surprise, given how legendarily hard King Arthur is.

Chapati flour feels to me like a softer flour than I've worked with otherwise, and has that slightly greasy feeling that whole wheat generally does, only much more so, and a slightly sweeter taste. That says "very low protein" to me, though I'll readily admit I'm no expert. If that's the case, you might get good results just mixing some cake flour in with the whole wheat.

Probably some baking expert has all of the vital stats of these various flours online somewhere, but I don't know where.

[nonnihil]

Further searching suggests:

+ White wheat flour is not very different from ordinary whole wheat flour -- the major difference is that it lacks some of the tannins, which shouldn't be relevant

+ Chapati flour is made from a hard wheat with a high protein content, but the milling process leaves in a lot of fiber, giving a lower net protein content in spite of the hard wheat

+ Chapati flour is also milled in a strange way that involves high-temperature grinding stones. This may or may not be relevant to its baking properties.

[ukelele]

Cookwise has a table of gluten contents for common flours, and a method for determining how much your flour has.