Cooking with Flour: Healthy Eating with Flour Recipes

Cooking with Flour - Healthy Eating with Flour Recipes

Table of Contents
Introduction
Self-Raising White Flour
All-Purpose Flour
How to Make Your Own Baking Powder
Knowing More about Graham Flour
Rye Flour
Cornmeal and Maize Flour
Pea flour
Knowing More about Kneading and Sifting
Enriched Flour
Corn Flour – Cornstarch
Cake Flours
Introducing Gluten
How to Differentiate between a Good and Bad Batch of Bread
Whole meal Flours
Mixing of the Fat and Liquid
Making Dough Wrappings
Filled Wontons
Fried Wontons
Baps
Appendix
Perfect Bread Tips
Kneading Bread19
How Do You Get the Right Flour Consistency?
Shaping the Dough
Important Ingredients in Baking
Understanding Pastry Quantities
Making Pastry
Chilling the Dough – Yes or No; That Is the Question
Rolling out Pastry
Ready-Made Mix for Pancakes, Waffles, or Biscuits
Perfect Pies
Ingredient Replacements
Conclusion
Author Bio

Introduction

A couple of months ago I wrote a natural health series book on cooking with wheat berries. Here is an introduction to one of the basic natural ingredients which is used extensively in cooking, but we overlook it so often, because we are so used to it.

Just imagine a life without bread, pastries, cakes, doughnuts, waffles, muffins, griddle cakes and other such delicious items. If we enjoy baking, the first ingredient which we are going to collect in our recipe list is going to be flour.

Nobody knows when cereals and grasses began to be used as flour, by mankind. Until then, he used to make his bread by making up a pounded paste of roots, bark and seeds, flattening it, and then cooking it on hot stones. As his tastes began to grow more and more sophisticated he found out that it was very easy to grow and then harvest cereals, and then grind them into a powder. This is the powder, which we hold so precious and, which we call Flour.

Many of the ingredients that we see now in baking recipes call for all-purpose flour. This is made from hard spring wheat. It is high in protein and it is normally used to replace highly refined pastry flour

Pastry flour is made from soft wheat and it gives a lighter texture to fragile baked products like small cakes, biscuits and pastries.

A Baker normally chooses the all-purpose flour for yeast dough, sauce thickening and strudels. In the same manner, cake flour is also a different type of flour. It is a soft wheat flour and is of very fine grain. It is velvety soft, when you handle it. It is perfectly white. However its protein value is very low.

But millenniums ago, people did not know much about all-purpose flours. They just knew that they could use buckwheat, rice, soybean, rye, potato, split peas, lentils, maize and cornmeal as the basis of a large number of flours. So, depending on the place where you live, you are going to get either refined white flour or whole wheat flour.