All about scalded flour

Scalding flour is the art of getting flour to absorb boiling water, effectively cooking the flour and gelatinising its starch before baking begins.

Scalding flour helps to create an open, soft, bendy, custardy crumb. This technique brings more water into the flour, which makes the loaves keep for longer.

This is a great technique to use if you want to get bigger holes in 100% whole grain breads, if you want a very soft and flexible crumb for sausages and sandwiches, or if you want to make bread that stays fresh for longer.

The scalding process gelatinises the starch in the flour, which adds strength to the dough, so it is an excellent way to get a more open crumb from flours low in gluten, such as rye and barley.

You can experiment with adding scalded flour to any bread with scalding as little as 2% of the flour from the recipe, or up to 20%.

Scald your flour with between one and four times its weight in water, so for 100g of wheat or rye flour, use 100g to 200g water, or use 160g to 400g water for 100g barley, polenta, or oats.

How to scald flour

One method of making scalded flour is to cook it up in a saucepan, adding cold water or milk with the flour and whisking as it heats up and thickens. This is the method I’ll be using in the recipe below.

Another method is to put your flour for scalding in a stainless steel bowl and pour boiling water on it, quickly mixing it in.

The saucepan method is more time consuming, but some bakers claim it makes for stronger bread, as the scald gets heated to a higher temperature. You may need to use more water with the saucepan method.

The bowl method is far quicker and easier, with less cleanup needed, but the flour won’t get scalded unless the water is really rapidly boiling and is transferred from pot to flour before it begins to cool down, so you will need to work very quickly if you are using this method.

I normally use the bowl method, measuring out the right amount of water, bringing it to a rolling boil, and then pouring and mixing it into the flour very quickly.

For this sandwich bread recipe below, I’ll be using the saucepan method for the technique of milk-scalding, also sometimes known as ’tangzhong’. This technique uses roughly four times the weight of the flour as milk.

How to convert your favourite recipes to use scalded flour

When you’re converting a recipe to a scalded flour recipe, reduce the amount of flour in the rest of the recipe by however much you used in the scald, and reduce the amount of water in the rest of the recipe by half the amount of the scald water, so, for example, if you used 240g (1 cup) water in the scald, reduce the amount of water in the rest of the dough by 120g (½ cup).

Recipe: Milk scalded sandwich bread

If you are looking for a soft and fluffy whole wheat sandwich bread recipe that doesn’t use a bunch of expensive ingredients, this recipe could become your favourite. Here are some of the comments it got during the recipe testing process for Sourdough Without Fail:

And

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May your bread be delicious. Floury regards,

Kate

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