I’ll cut to the chase, if you’re looking for a simple calculator to figure out how much wheat gluten flour to add to your plain or all-purpose flour to bring it up to a certain percentage of protein, then you have come to the right place.
Simply add the current percentage of protein in your plain or all-purpose flour, what percentage of protein you would like it to become, the percentage of protein in your wheat gluten flour, and finally how much plain or all-purpose flour you are using. It will then calculate how many grams of wheat gluten flour to add to your plain or all-purpose flour. Easy
But why?
There are a few reasons why someone might want to add wheat gluten flour to up the protein percentage of their flour. Protein is important when it comes to baking bread. The higher the protein, the better the gluten structure, the better the bread.
“So why not just buy bread flour that already has a high protein percentage?”. There may be a few reasons:
- You can’t find bread flour with high protein. Ideally your bread flour will be at least 13% protein, but unfortunately not all bread flours are made the same. I don’t know if it’s just a thing where I live, but I have never actually seen a 13% bread/bakers flour. They are normally only 11-12%.
- Bread/bakers flour is expensive! Maybe you can’t justify spending the high price for the fancy bread flours. Instead you could just buy a normal plain flour and up the protein yourself. Save them dollarbucks to buy some nice Lurpak butter to spread on your freshly baked bread.
- You don’t want the government mandated additives that are put in all bread/bakers flour. In Australia, manufactures by law need to add Thiamine and Folic Acid to any flour product that is used for the baking of bread products. This is to make up for the vitamins that are stripped out during the milling process. You might be thinking ‘but vitamins are a good thing, the government love us only want the best for us’. You may be right, however these B vitamins are synthetic, and some people can have negative reactions the synthetic version of these B vitamins. So if you want to eat bread in Australia without these additives, you need to make your own, and you need to make it without using bread/bakers flour.
So there you have it. Use the calculator, and bake delicious bread with high protein flour.
If you’re looking for a good gluten flour product in Australia, I have been using this one with good results, and it’s quite affordable. This isn’t an affiliate link, not because I don’t want it to be, I just can’t be bothered.