Sometimes the housewives are faced with the fact that their cakes do not keep in shape. The reason for this may be that the flour used for kneading yeast or unleavened dough leaves much to be desired due to weak gluten. Especially many problems arise with flour, obtained from a little sprouted grain.
If the dough spreads, then when sifting it is permissible to add a little boiled potatoes or quality starch to the flour. The dough should be as stiff as the consistency. In order for it to remain so, the products from it must be cut, carefully grinding the remaining pieces of dough in flour.
It is better to leave such flour for cooking closed pies of small size.
In order to avoid such problems, it is necessary to have an idea of how to determine the quality flour. Certainly, some experience would be superfluous, but there are several ways that even an inexperienced hostess can help.
- Take some flour into your palm and squeeze it hard. On dry and high-quality flour, fingerprints practically do not remain. If, as a result of compression, the flour forms a lump, then it is too moist. If you have a bag full of such flour, then in all likelihood somewhere in the depths there are clumps. After you have opened the palm, smell the flour, wet flour can emit a smell of acid and mustiness. To make the smell more pronounced, the flour should be warmed by breathing or rubbed with warm water( take a little water).
- To determine the taste, put in your mouth a little bit already tested for the smell and slightly warmed flour. High quality flour has a delicate, pleasant and sweet taste inherent in flour. The stale meal is bitter, it has an unpleasant aftertaste of mold. About good gluten says that the flour after chewing gets some viscidity.
- Knead the dough ball by taking a small amount of flour and water. Look at the color of the dough. A ball of stale flour will have a greyish-dirty color.
- Dough ball slightly washed, substituting it under a stream of cold water. The mass should be sticky and viscous. A washed ball of flour with good gluten can be stretched somewhere 20-25 cm. With such flour you can be calm, the dough does not spread out from it.
And the last advice: when buying flour, take first a little, kilogram or two, bake something from it and after that, making sure of its quality, buy a large batch.