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I was lacking bread flour, which has 15% protein content. I needed to make something where this is crucial, since you need to roll out the dough really thin. I have all purpose flour with 10% protein content.

So I decided to extract some gluten from flour following this video.

The gluten extracted is already clumped together like in the video. I'm not sure what's the right way to add it to my dough to enrich it.

I can think of three ways:

  1. Dry it and let it powder, mix it in with powdered flour
  2. Mix powdered flour with it, mixing it well with water perhaps
  3. Stretch it out and add to kneaded dough and knead more

The main concern here is that since it's already clumped together, will it become a part of the gluten network of my dough and actually enrich it uniformly, or will it stay together as a strong sub-network within my dough which will continue to have a shallow gluten network.

So I can also think of some bad ways of doing it:

  1. Mixing it with flour without dissolving in water
  2. Mixing it with kneaded dough without stretching it out

I did #3, since I mis-sequenced my moves. I'd have wanted to do #2 instead. But I think #1 would be the most effective, if you have the time.

I don't know enough about molecular level details of gluten network formation to judge which of these will be effective and which will be ineffective. I'll have some empirical evidence for #3 but nothing to compare it with.

Is my concern valid? Are the methods 4 and 5 actually bad? Are methods 1-3 alright or is one of them bad as well?

Phil
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Peeyush Kushwaha
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    Amazon and a lot of other places sells Vital Wheat Gluten. that *might* work but I have no experience with it so a little googling might help if someone else doesn't have an idea or put the kibosh on my idea... – Steve Chambers Jul 09 '20 at 23:48
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    I think Serious Eats did a piece on adding vital wheat gluten to flour some time in the last few months. Don't have time to track it down right now, but it's definitely a good option. – LSchoon Jul 10 '20 at 16:30
  • Questions containing information from a third party become useless should that third party source disappear. Voted to close unless someone wants to insert that information into the question. – Rob Nov 06 '20 at 11:25

1 Answers1

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Making gluten per that video is useful for an experiment but not so useful as a recipe addition. As Steve points out, the right solution here is to buy Vital Wheat Gluten. I buy it in the bulk food section at two local stores (WinCo, Central Market) and I've also seen it in the specialty flours section (usually in a Bob's Red Mill package) at better grocery stores.

Vital wheat gluten is a powder. Just add it to your dry ingredients when making bread. I usually grind my own flour so I know exactly what level of protein and gluten are in my wheat berries. If I'm using hard winter wheat or I want a denser loaf with smaller holes (think: sandwich bread) then I don't add any gluten. If I'm making a whole wheat or mixed grain loaf, then I always add some. For a whole wheat loaf, adding a tablespoon of vital wheat gluten is about right.

Matt Simerson
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  • This question isn't quite a duplicate but is very very close to this one: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/42055/create-my-own-high-gluten-flour-by-mixing-vital-wheat-gluten-and-bread-ap-flour – Matt Simerson Nov 06 '20 at 08:54