Wheat

The type of wheat a flour is milled from determines most of it's characteristics. Wheat is typed three ways: hard or soft, red or white and spring or winter. Hard wheat tends to have higher gluten and makes better bread flour while soft wheat makes better pastry flour. Red and white refers to the color of the wheat berry. We haven't had much luck with white wheat here in Illinois, it doesn't like our rain, so we grow red wheat. Spring wheat is planted in the spring and harvested late summer. Winter wheat is planted in the fall and then harvested in early summer. It tends to yield better than spring wheat.

We classify the age of the variety as either modern, heirloom or ancient. Modern varieties have been developed recently, usually around 50 years ago. Heirloom are varieties that were used before the Green Revolution in the 1950s. They do not yield as well as modern wheat but taste better. Ancient grains are the oldest, effectively predating written records. 

Please Note: Most of these flours can NOT be used as a direct replacement in modern recipes. Our All Purpose-sifted HRW (Turkey Red)- flour is the closest substitute for the all purpose white flour typically found in stores today. In most recipes (except for yeasted breads) they can be used as a substitute with minimal recipe alteration.

If you're new to artisan flours, I'd suggest starting with our sifted flours. (meaning the largest pieces of the bran and germ are removed). It's a good compromise between whole wheat flour and typical store white flour. It seems the "industry" is starting to use the term "bolted" for what we have listed on this site as sifted wheat flours. We stone grind the wheat in a single pass and then sift off the largest pieces.

The extra bran and germ in these artisan flours (stone ground in a single pass) usually absorb more water and take longer to do so than white flour. The larger pieces of bran also act as a knife, cutting the gluten strands as they develop during kneading.