Flour Test-Everest Chakki Atta

I paid a visit to Mustafa on my day off and spotted some Atta flour that had spilled onto the shelf. It was a nice creamy color and that made me pick up a pack to try out. Chakki Atta is 100% stoneground wheat flour. It is probably made from a soft wheat. I was quite happy with the results as the crumb was relatively open for a 100% whole-wheat bread. The flavor was very good and tasted fantastic with butter.

I decided to use the entire pack as I did not want to leave any lying around. There is just too many packets of leftover flour from our kitchen exploits. Sometimes I wish I can just dump everything into a mixing bowl and come up with something nice but alas, I know only too well that the end result are usually monstrosities.

For this 100% whole-wheat bread, I decided on a hydration of 80%. The poolish was made the night before and this morning, it was incorporated into the main dough. It has been some time since I had made a 100% whole-wheat loaf but this time round, I felt a level of maturity as a baker. When I was mucking around with 100% whole-wheat bread over a year ago, I was still experimenting with techniques and I could never be certain if I was doing it right. However, it was all those years of experimenting that was the most fruitful.

Bread is certainly a big subject and as I look back at my experiments in making malt, culturing wild yeasts, dabbling in homemade natural bread improvers, testing wheat and other exotic flours, playing with wood fired ovens, not to forget making homemade baking implements such as peels and proving rattan baskets, I realize that there are still many more challenges out there. 

The next few projects to try out will be the Tang Zhong method and making Poh Piah skins. I am really inspired by my  baking buddy whose talent and passion for the culinary arts is unmatched. Maybe I should do one more project since I am at it and that is to learn to make roti prata from scratch. The flipping should be fun to do.