I am SO giddy about this flour! In my previous post, I sang the praises for the Azure Market Organics 100% Whole White Wheat Flour and now, I’m even MORE giddy about this bread flour. It not only goes through the Unifine process, Azure also performs an extra sifting stage to remove about 10% of the sharp bran particles.
So what we’re dealing with here is a high-extraction flour that has so much more nutrition than regular bread flour. And get this: It has 14.7% protein content! That’s 2% more than King Arthur at 12.7%! It’s amazing!
The first thing I noticed when I opened my bag was that the flour color is pretty dull, and Azure states it will get even more dull over time. But it’s silky-smooth in texture and it is an absolute DREAM to work with!
This morning, I made two 50-50 white whole wheat/bread flour batards. I used the whole wheat flour for a poolish and the bread flour for the final dough. The overnight ferment really helped smooth out the wheat flour (though to be honest, that flour’s already smooth). The results were spectacular. The poolish was nicely puffy with a distinct tang in the morning.
As for the final bread, as expected, it didn’t spring up as much as other loaves because of the high wheat flour content. But with the bit of extra protein in the bread flour, the crumb was not nearly as tight as with other white flours I’ve used.
