Sardinian Flatbreads

[BakerAunt]

I came across this short article from Saveur about Sardinian Flatbreads, which has a link to the recipe. I've printed it for myself and plan to try it. Without the toppings, it might be a good snack for me. I'm also wondering if as "chips" it would work with salsa. (I gave up tortilla chips after looking at the saturated fat, sigh.)

https://www.saveur.com/shatteringly-crisp-sardininan-flatbreads

I'm a bit confused as it says semolina (durum) flour. I have separate semolina and durum flours from KAF. Which should I use?

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[Mike Nolan]

Semolina is made from durum wheat, the difference is in how coarsely ground it is.

In a modern roller mill, the first thing they do when milling wheat is grind off the germ and bran in a series of grooved rollers. What's left is called the middlings and is pretty much all endosperm. The bran and germ is separated out, then the middlings are ground to produce patent flour. (This is a major simplification of the process, leaving out a lot of steps.)

Semolina is made by cracking durum middlings into pieces rather than grinding it to produce durum flour. The semolina can be further processed using steam to produce couscous.

Semolina is a bit more granular, somewhere in between a flour and couscous for size. Because it is more granular, it has a different consistency when turned into dough, it tends to be more extensible and less elastic, which are good properties for a pasta dough but not so much for a bread dough.

For bread, I'd probably use durum, for pasta I'd use semolina.

[aaronatthedoublef]

The recipe refers to Sardinian flat breads as "semolina flatbreads" and it looks more cracker-like. Don't know if this changes anything.

[BakerAunt]

These are very thin flatbreads, and Aaron is correct in that they look like crackers. I'm on the fence about which flour to use when I try the recipe. I use both semolina and durum flour in my pizza crust.

[Mike Nolan]

Durum wheat is often used for crackers, in part because it can be readily shaped into sheets and doesn't have high elasticity. (It has to do with the ratio between the two gluten proteins, glutenin, which contributes to dough elasticity, and gliadin, which contributes to dough extensibility.)

[BakerAunt]

I'll use the durum flour when I try these.

[Mike Nolan]

How wheat is milled can affects its properties, and the more you know about the properties of your ingredients, the more you can control the results.

[aaronatthedoublef]

KAF is doing much better with info about flour on their bags. But there website needs to catch up. And I am looking for something that says if there is a correlation between the nutritional protein and the gluten-protein and what the connection is if there is one.

[Mike Nolan]

The government-required nutritional label is essentially worthless for flour, because the 'serving size' is so small that the roundoff error makes the protein content information next to useless.

KAF does better in general than most other home-use millers.

I've always thought KAF put more data on their website than on their bags, but I see that they've updated the AP bag since the last time I actually read one, and they've reorganized their website in such a way that their flours are harder to find these days, though I did eventually find them. It still shows the protein percentage, and you can see what's printed on the entire bag.

I've seen full-blown spec sheets for some commercial flours, they list a lot more information, including things like moisture and ash content, some even give things like the falling number and other lab tests that millers run. But looking at the Gold Medal commercial flours site, I don't see that information readily available, it may be behind their login. However, I don't think I've ever seen anything in which the percentage of glutenin and gliadin is given, I guess you just have to know that durum has a different ratio than ordinary wheat.

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