A Guide to Wholemeal Flour
When you start to delve into the world of baking, it can get pretty confusing, pretty quickly. Recipes may call for different types of flour, which can have varying availability depending on where you live. To make it even trickier, there are almost no standards or universal labels for flour. All flours will vary due to different varieties, growing conditions and milling methods.
Let us help you decipher this with our deep-dive into the world of wholemeal flour – also known as wholewheat flour, wholemeal bread flour, high-protein wholemeal flour, stoneground wholewheat flour, atta flour etc.
To understand wholemeal flour, you first need to learn a little about the wheat berry of the wheat plant.
About the Wheat Berry
A wheat berry is divided into three parts: bran, endosperm and germ.
The endosperm is the inside body of the wheat berry. When we make white flour, like our AllGrain Bakers Flour and Plain Flour, this is what we are milling. It comprises 82 to 86% of the grain weight.
The bran is the hard outer shell. Think of it like the shell of an egg – once that shell is broken during the milling process, it adds shall shards of bran powder to the flour. These small bran shards are the fibre – thus why wholemeal bread has more fibre than a plain white loaf.
The germ is at the base of the wheat berry. It contains fat, which is why wholemeal flour tends to have a shorter shelf life than white flour. It is easy to prevent it from going rancid by refrigerating or storing it in the freezer.
To put it simply, wholemeal flour contains more of the entire wheat berry, while white flour is made primarily from the endosperm of the wheat berry. It’s called ‘white’ due to having those darker-coloured outer bran layers and inner germ components of the grain removed during the milling process.
To make wholemeal flour, or as some refer to it, "whole grain flour", the germ and the bran are mixed back into the white flour. As per the Grain Central report on the Australian Technical Millers Association website, "increasing wholegrain consumption is one of the most effective dietary changes someone can make to improve their health."
About FPM's Different Wholemeal Flours
One of the most frequently asked questions we get is about the difference between our wholemeal flours. Both our commercial bakery customers and home bakers often want to know which is the right one for their needs.
To begin with, all of our wholemeal flours are made using locally-sourced, high-protein wheat, making them perfect for bread making.
AllGrain Wholemeal Flour is a strong flour with a creamy colour that contains bran. You may have heard this sometimes referred to as “90/10” flour by other companies, referring to the percentage of wheat flour to wheat bran that is in the product. Our AllGrain Wholemeal Flour currently sits at 12.5% bran, giving good loaf volume and a wholesome taste. It has coarser bran particles.
Next, we have our AllGrain 100% Stoneground Wholemeal Flour. What makes this flour different is that it retains all the components of the wheat berry during the milling process. Rather than having just some bran particles, it contains all the bran and wheat germ. This flour is milled to a finer specification, resulting in smaller bran particles. This makes it ideally suited for artisan breads, levain/sourdough starter as well as flatbread, naan and roti production. Many of our home bakers also love using it!
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We also sell AllGrain Purple 100% Stoneground Wholemeal Flour, which is made using the exact same technique as the 100% Stoneground Wholemeal Flour. It is milled from unique purple wheat grown in the Moree area of NSW. The husk of the purple wheat berry contains anthocyanins, a water-soluble vegetable dye, which gives the seeds and resulting flour, a distinctive purple colour. You can read more about our AllGrain Purple 100% Stoneground Wholemeal Flour in this blog post here.
We recommend experimenting with the different products to find the one that best suits your needs and personal taste preferences. Plus, you can always add a percentage in as a trial - for example, using 50% Bakers Flour and 50% Stoneground Wholemeal.
Want To Try?
All three of our AllGrain Wholemeal products are available for delivery across Australia, or directly from our mill at 1 Showground Road Tamworth NSW. The flour is available in 25kg or 1,200kg Bulka Bags.
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Check out the full product specifications in our datasheets linked above.
For more information and pricing, please contact Katherine at katsherrie@fpmsystems.com.au or 0401 552 954.