MEHL (FLOUR) AND BAKING IN GERMANY

Random thought: We have a word for a short period of sleep during normal waking hours: nap. Why don't we have a word for a short period of wakefulness during normal sleep hours? Any suggestions for such a word?

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To the point: during my baking experimentation in Germany, I've discovered that the products found in supermarkets here differ greatly from those found in American grocery stores. For example, see my post about baking with yeast.

No product demonstrates this more than (what I thought was) simple flour, which is Mehl in German. Shopping for flour at my local supermarket presented me with a huge amount of shelf space with many different small, 1-kilo (about 2 pounds) bags of flour with names like Weizemehl, Instant Mehl, Vollkonmehl, Maismehl, Kartoffelmehl, Roggenmehl, and so on.

I'll spare you the gory details, but bottom line is that Weizenmehl is wheat flour. In the USA most of the wheat flour is labelled All-Purpose or Self-Rising, with Cake and Bread thrown in sometimes. Here, the system is completely different. The flour bags have type numbers instead of words. The most common is Type 405, but you see a lot of Type 550 and other, higher numbers.There is also specialty flour for Spätzle and pasta:

Whaaa??? My German "mom" Hilde always uses Type 405 for her copious baking, so I assumed that was like All-Purpose, which was sort of right but not exactly. And what about the other numbers? I found a GREAT website, German Food Guide, that explains it. They say that US flour is labelled according to the gluten content. In Germany, it's labelled according to the refinement, or how much whole grain is in it. The numbers refer to how much ash is left after burning 1 kilo of the flour in the laboratory. So, a more refined flour, which has less of the grain included, will have less ash and hence a lower number.

Therefore, Type 405 is more refined than Type 550, and whole wheat flour has a very high number like 1600. Ok, now I understood the numbers, but what do I do when I have an American recipe and German grocery shelves? Again, German Food Guide to the rescue! Here's the lowdown:

• Type 405 - pastry flour with a lower gluten content than All-Purpose; not generally found on supermarket shelves in the States
• Type 550 - equivalent to All-Purpose flour
• Type 812 - equivalent to bread Flour
• Type 1050 - high-gluten flour for things like bagels
• Type 1600 - whole wheat flour

So what about the Spätzle/pasta flour as in the photo above? That's Hartweizen, or semolina flour. Had to look that one up, too.

So what about all those other German words on the flour shelf? Here are a few translations:

• Weizemehl - wheat flour
• Instant Mehl - self-rising flour
• Vollkonmehl - whole-wheat flour
• Maismehl - corn flour
• Maisgriess - corn meal (if you're lucky it will also say "Polenta")
• Kartoffelmehl - potato flour
• Roggenmehl 1150 - rye flour
• Roggen-Vollkornmehl - pumpernickel flour (whole-grain rye flour)
• Dinkel Mehl 630 - spelt flour; very popular in German cooking and my favorite grain name
• Dinkel-Vollkornmehl - whole-grain spelt flour
• Speisestärke - corn starch

Here's a shot of the ingredients I used to make my own hamburger buns recently. I needed bread flour and chose the Type 550.

That was before I knew Type 812 would have been more appropriate. But the brioche buns turned out wonderfully, nonetheless. You'll see them in a future blog post.

No equivalent to cake flour is available here as far as I can determine. This might be the reason German pastries seem so dense and tough to me. But you can make your own cake flour if you can't buy it. Place 2 tablespoons (1/2 oz / 15 g) of corn starch in a 1-cup measure and fill it the rest of the way with All-Purpose flour (about 3.5 oz / 100 g). Repeat for as many cups of cake flour as you need for the recipe. Mix well and sift at least twice before using.

You'll notice in all my recipes involving flour, I use weight measurements in addition to, or instead of, mass measurements. That's because flour can absorb moisture and its weight changes according to the length of time it's been stored and ambient humidity when baking. Therefore, weight is more accurate than mass. So, my cardinal rule: ALWAYS weigh your flour instead of measuring it in a measuring cup or spoon. In fact, German recipes are written that way, in the metric system, of course.

I want to mention one more type of flour I've found and used here. It's Italian Type 00. There is no word to describe it other than silky. It's as smooth as talcum powder and a joy to work with!

I used it to make focaccia, which I learned to make in my cooking class in Tuscany last year and which turned out excellent (on my third try) at home with this flour!

One more bit of trivia about German baking products. There is a product line here called Mondamin, which includes things like sauce thickeners, pudding mixes and so forth, similar to Knorr, which they also have here. In researching this article, I found that Mondamin is the name of the corn deity in some Native American cultures who gave corn to humans. He is mentioned in Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha". The brand name was used from 1913 to specifically refer to the poem.

Photo for No Apparent Reason:

source : http://liputan6.com, http://komnatachista.blogspot.com, http://log.viva.co.id

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