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It's probably about a 5-6 hour drive to the Pittsburgh area for you, then.
My former next door neighbor runs the local Sysco office, I had him check his flour suppliers for first clear flour, his flour sales reps had never heard of it either! They did some digging and found that Gold Medal makes it available in the northeast and, oddly enough, on the west coast, but not anywhere in between. He could get it, but would have to order a pallet, which is twenty 50-pound bags.
Stover doesn't always have it in stock, it took me 3 trips to Pittsburgh to be there when they had it available. The brand was Boxer flours, made by Bay State Milling, which are based in Massachusetts but they have an office in Clifton NJ.
If you take a ball of dough that has rested after scaling, flatten it into a circle, tri-fold that together (top and bottom to the center) and then fold that again along the center and seal the top, you get a pretty good pre-shape for both batards and baguettes. I let that rest seam side down another 5-10 minutes, but that's optional.
I bought a 50 pound bag of clear flour from Stover & Company in the Pittsburgh area some months ago, it was around $18 for the bag, including tax. That's a bit more than AP, pastry or cake flour, but still a whole lot better than buying it in small bags.
But my older son current lives in the Pittsburgh area, so we usually drive there once or twice a year. Shipping would raise the cost substantially. There may be similar suppliers in your area, though.
BTW, Stover has the Callebaut ruby red callets, 2.5 kg is normally $60 but is currently on sale for $45. That I might be willing to pay shipping on, since we're not going to Pittsburgh for Christmas this year.
The formulas on the BBGA website are all in baker's math format, so they're easy to size up or down as needed. (A lot of them default to 5-10 kg of dough per batch, which is a moderate sized batch for a commercial kitchen.)
The think the secret to making batards and baguettes is to have the right technique for pre-shaping, so that when you start to roll it out it naturally rolls into the desired shape. I also find that if you divide the dough, pre-shape it and let it rest for 10-15 minutes, the final shaping is easier and a lot more consistent. (A rest after dividing and pre-shaping is one of the 12 steps in Jeffrey Hamelman's book.) I find for baguettes and batards I want an oval pre-shape and for boules I want a round one.
When I took my pastry class at SFBI, one lunch break they were making baguettes in the production kitchen, and they invited me to roll out a few. I had hoped to take the weekend baguette class at SFBI but it was cancelled due to low registrations, so I jumped at the chance to roll out some baguettes.
I was pleased that mine came out very much like theirs, enough so that they went onto the rack for baking. Back when I was testing recipes for Peter Reinhart, I made several baguettes every day for about three weeks, so I probably had that technique down pat. When I make Vienna bread, my goal is a loaf that has uniformly sized slices for most of its length, except at the ends.
If 1 cup = 4.25 ounces, it should also equal about 120 grams.
My claim to fame at Microsoft is that I found a bug in the most commonly used program in history: Microsoft Solitaire. This was back in the Windows 3.1 era. I reported to someone I knew at Microsoft, he took it to the weekly 'bug report' team meeting, and got a huge round of applause.
It had been sort-of fixed in the Windows 5 beta release, but not in the master code library.
I wonder if KAF has cut back or lost staff in the test kitchen. I haven't looked at their blog in several months.
I know PJ Hamel is still doing some work for KAF, but has moved to Cape Cod. I haven't heard from Susan Reid in several years, I don't know if she's still there. I know Jeffrey Hamelman retired a year or so ago, but he was in production, not editorial.
I thought it was interesting that the BBGA Kaiser roll formula uses less than 3 1/4 ounces of dough per roll. The Kaiser rolls I see in the stores and the ones they use in fast food restaurants tend to be HUGE, they've got to be 4 or 5 ounces after baking!
When I make hamburger buns, I tend to use 2 to 2 1/2 ounces per bun, as I prefer smaller burgers (not quite sliders but close).
I think I'm currently using the KAF weights in my tool for flour, but the USDA weights for most everything else.
I'm not color blind, but my wife says I'm color indifferent. I do know that my left eye see somewhat different shades of color than my right eye, and I honestly don't know which one is 'correct'.
One of my college friends applied for a summer job at a paint factory. They gave him a color matching test, 100 color samples that you had to match up correctly. He said it was really challenging as it went along, as you weren't allowed to change any of your previous choices so your subsequent matches got strange as you had to pick the best choice from the remaining colors, because you couldn't pick the same 'matching' color twice.
Pastry flour is made from a soft wheat, that's why it is so much lower in protein.
As I understand it, white wheat has both soft and hard varieties, though I think the soft varieties are less common. I also think the soft varieties of white wheat aren't quite as soft as the ones used for pastry flour and the hard ones aren't quite as hard as the hardest of red wheat varieties.
My experiences with dough shaping lead me to think that if the flour is too strong, the dough fights the shaping. I think that would include cutting with a Kaiser roll stamp.
I have always thought that the reason first clear flour was used for rye bread was that it isn't pure white (more of a pale yellow or cream color) but when mixed with rye flour that didn't matter since the rye flour is much more towards brown. First clear flour was once less expensive than patent flour, though that's not true today, at least not unless you can buy a big bag of it, and maybe not then, either. This may be because flour milling has changed over the years, clear flours used to be important intermediate stages in the milling process, I'm not sure that is true any more.
Another thing to be aware of with first clear flour is that everything I've made with it has been prone to go moldy quicker than if made with patent flour. I'm not sure why, something to do with increase bran or germ, I suspect, or maybe higher ash levels. But unless I'm concerned with having a white color, I do like the taste of products made with first clear flour.
I don't see what the point to having caraway in a rye starter would be. A starter is all about enzymes, yeasts and bacteria, and caraway isn't really contributing to those.
The challenge with standardizing volume to weight measures is that nobody agrees on how much a cup of flour should weigh. King Arthur uses 4.25 ounces for AP flour, the USDA database uses 125 grams (4.41 ounces). Other authors use a number anywhere from 4 ounces per cup to 5, and I've seen a few that appeared to use 5.25 ounces per cup.
Other ingredients have similar problems.
For example, while table salt is fairly standardized, kosher salt is not, because the crystal sizes vary from one brand to another. A tablespoon of kosher salt is about the same weight as 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons of table salt. Morton Salt advises against using kosher salt in baking. About the only advantage I see to using kosher salt in baking is that it isn't iodized. Some people can detect a bitter metallic taste with iodized salt though I can't say I've noticed it.
I've been building a tool for entering recipes that has baker's math capabilities, so I've been trying to decide on what standard volume-to-weight measurements to use in it. I need to do some work on it, I updated the PHP software on my server a while back and that broke some things in my program, which is mainly a proof-of-concept tool at this point, I need to expand the food database it has, too.
Another challenge is rounding errors. Consider table salt. USDA says a teaspoon of salt weighs 6 grams. It also says a cup of salt weighs 292 grams. 6 x 48 = 288, so there's a 1.3% difference. But nobody is likely to want to measure 6.0833 grams of salt. (Many of our small measuring spoons are grossly inaccurate, but that's a separate problem.)
A lot of bread formulas in baker's math format specify 2% salt. I suspect that's another form of rounding error. I've not checked the scientific literature to see if anybody's done a study of how much salt bread 'should' have, but 2% is a convenient number to use.
The nutrition labels required in the USA exacerbate this problem, both because of how they round to whole integers and what they say a portion size is. For flour, a single serving is usually 1/4 cup, which is generally either 29 or 30 grams. So a cup of flour would weigh either 116 or 120 grams. (As noted earlier, the USDA database says a cup of flour weighs 130 grams.)
People have done studies of how much yeast to use, but that gets into time vs flavor trade-off issues, which are separate from volumetric concerns.
I think sifting whole wheat flour would remove the biggest pieces of bran and germ. I've done that a few times myself, I think it makes for a slightly less 'toothy' bread. It would also lower the protein content a little.
I've actually run some of my freshly milled flour through a fairly fine screen mesh (at least 25 wires to the inch, I've also got one that is 40 wires to the inch), it isn't quite the same as having bolting screens, but it is the best I can do at this time. (The biggest problem is that it creates a LOT of dust.)
I made two Texas Chocolate Sheet Cakes, one 10 x 10 that is for my wife's office and one 8 x 8 for us.
To decorate them, I found a silicone mold for skeleton parts and made two skeletons with white chocolate.
I also made a recipe for ossi dei morti that is different than the one I made a couple of years ago. It doesn't have any leavening in it so they're really solid almond cookies with some cinnamon and clove in it, and a bit darker in color. I made a variety of Halloween shapes, including some tombstones that I hoped would go in the cake, the rest will probably go on a plate for people to eat. (Couldn't find space for the tombstones.)
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