A question of flour

[cteavin]

First of all, let me say that this is my first post here and I'm hoping to become an active member as I love to cook and learn about cooking.

I'm a long term resident of Japan and I've been getting deeper and deeper into baking over the past couple of years, starting with French (thank you Julia Child) and now going westward. Long story short, I'm really good with stream risen cakes like genoise or the flourless and meringue based cakes but I've not been able to make a decent high ratio cake. Then I found out why: Japan doesn't sell bleached flours; the flour I've been using is unbleached whereas the recipes were written for bleached.

If you don't know about Kate Flour, I'll suggest you look it up on the web. Kate is an inspiration. A hobby cook, she discovered a technique for mimicking the properties of bleached flour.

I'm curious if anyone here, living in Japan, has tried Kate Flour or if they've found a way to get bleached flour. I'd also love to hear what kind of pastries and cakes people are baking and where they're getting their recipes and where they're buying their flour and other baking ingredients. Myself, I use Tomizawa-san and sometimes order online through Rakuten.

Cheers,

Steven

[helenjp]

Welcome to eGForums, Steven! Deep into baking....you will surely know a lot more than I do, but I do quite enjoy baking.

Haven't heard of Kate flour, it sounds very interesting indeed.

I order from Tomizawa, and also from a Rakuten store, "Hokkaido kara no Megumi"...I've just cracked open a 10 kg bag of "Neige" flour from Kida Mills in Hokkaido, but have not yet used it for cakes. Protein content if just over 7%, and it makes nice scones (biscuits) and is at this very moment turning into some okonomiyaki.

First off, do you use any Japanese baking books? I find that serious baking books in Japanese work well for me with Japanese ingredients.

Also, where did you start baking? I started baking in NZ, where flour is also unbleached, and the baking tradition is more British, so high-ratio cakes are not a strong point with me either.

Have you tried subbing "katakuri-ko" for some of the flour? The cheap katakuriko is actually potato starch...really good in cakes.

Adding a little vinegar to the mix might help.

Also, what type of sugar are you using? You could try giving granulated sugar a whizz in the blender to make it finer...the regular "spoon" sugar is too wet for really fine cakes.

Finally...size of oven vs. size of cake...how fast does the temperature recover

My favorite US baking author has to be Rose Levy Beranbaum - that obsession with detail is really useful for those of us who are using non-US ingredients. I haven't seen her latest though.

My Japanese favorites are all very old, so I'd love to hear what you are reading and using. I love some of the European baking books in Japanese, but it seems that books on classical American cakes are harder to find...books on US baking seems to be more everyday.

[cteavin]

Ah, this site is back online.

I love to cook. Coming from Los Angeles the goal was low fat, low carb, low sugar and as densely packed with nutrition as you could get. That's my base. Even the restaurants in L.A. follow those tenants; it wasn't until I started to travel that I tasted foods, like Creme Brule, as they were intended and only after I started making the real thing side by side the knock off that I understood how great the differences were. Still, I do get some satisfaction in playing with a recipe and finding variations that work (for me) and that's kind of where my hobby is today: I try as best I can to master the original then I cut this and add that to see the results.

As for katakuriko, I learned from books by RLB, Paul Healy, Shirley Corriher, and other, about adjusting the protein content with starches and it's a tremendous success. One of the best recipes from The Cake Bible is RLB's crepes using only corn starch. Brilliant every time. I wish I had the space for a 10K bag of flour! As it is, I keep about ten different flours in my pantry for a couple of kilos of this and a few kilos of that. And in the U.S., bleached is the norm.

Sugar, I superfine it in the food processor but I use different "cuts" depending on the baked good, for example large grains are excellent on the outside of a sugar cookie for decoration or inside to help limit spread.

Do you -- or does anyone -- have a Japanese baking book or author they can recommend? Kanji isn't really an issue.

Finally, @ helenjp, since you asked about books, I strongly recommend Bakewise and Cookwise. I just bought a book about Japanese seasonal cooking called 英語で売る和食 as a primer. Not bad as I never cook Japanese food. I've long had someone in my life that prefers to do the 和食。　；)

[ray goud]

I live in the U.S., so I won't be able to tell you where to get bleached flour in Japan. However, I can say that I now use unbleached flour EXCLUSIVELY in all my cooking (after many years of not caring if it was bleached or not), including bread making a la Julia and Jacques. I don't think your problem is with bleached vs unbleached because my experience shows them to be interchangeable. A recipe for one will work with either. My bread loaves come out impressively highly risen and I don't do anything special besides doing machine kneading for somewhat longer than prescribed. Perhaps your problem is yeast? If you don't use yeast, maybe it's the starter culture, which is so unreliable I don't use it. And you don't need any sugar to feed the yeast or get the dough to rise, so that isn't it, either.

Ray

[ray goud]

I must tell you what I just discovered: The method for "producing" Kate flour, at home, looks very dangerous to me. One is supposed to heat the flour, in a microwave, to a temperature higher than the boiling point of water. Regardless of what is done later to the flour, this is the dangerous point, because it would be extremely easy to accidentally heat flour dust to past its ignition point and produce a small explosion in one's microwave! (Think of grain silos and how they sometimes blow up) So, I don't think it is at all advisable to try this at home, especially considering that it (unbleached flour) is probably not the cause of your problems with baking.

Ray