The wheat, the whole wheat, and nothing but the wheat

Passover officially ended last night, and I'm reveling in fresh-baked bread after eight days of matzah. As I mentioned last year during Thrift Week, we bake all our own bread—or, to be more accurate, Brian does—and his default recipe is a basic whole-wheat loaf. This means we go through quite a lot of whole-wheat flour, which, while no doubt better for us than white flour, is also quite a bit more expensive. The best price we can normally find for whole-wheat flour is 85 cents a pound at the Amish market, which is more than twice the usual price for store-brand white flour at nearby supermarkets.

So we were thrilled to the core—or at least several layers down into the crust—when on a recent trip to Costco, we spotted a 20-pound bag of "Chakki Atta" whole-wheat flour for $7.99. That works out to 40 cents a pound, the same price we normally pay for white flour. Assuming it worked the same as our normal whole-wheat flour, it would mean we'd no longer have to make a trade-off between health and cost every time we baked. With this stuff, whole-wheat bread would cost no more than white.

The first recipe Brian tried it in was his basic brown bread, and we discovered with the first bite that this flour was not, in fact, identical to normal whole-wheat flour. The look, texture, and taste of the bread were all changed—but not necessarily for the worse. The bread was lighter in color and finer in texture than usual, a bit denser and moister than our usual slightly crumbly brown bread. The flavor was also lighter and slightly sweeter, closer to white bread. To someone who prefers an extra-hearty bread like Brian's Mega-Fiber Health Bread, it would be a disappointment, but it was perfectly suitable for an everyday loaf—in fact, possibly better than our usual wheat bread, since the flavor was a little more neutral and would go with more types of topping.

I couldn't help suspecting, though, that if the bread this flour produced was so tender and fine-grained, it couldn't really be as healthful as our usual whole-wheat flour. So I did a little research, and I found that there are a few distinctions between the two types of flour. Atta flour is more finely ground than regular whole-wheat flour, and it comes from Indian white wheat, which is a different variety than the type we usually get here in the States. It's lighter in color and also higher in gluten, which means that the bread is likely to hold together better. (Brian normally has to add extra wheat gluten to his brown bread, but this stuff doesn't even need it.) Sources differ about its nutritional content, but it seems to be pretty close to regular whole-wheat flour—probably not quite as high in fiber, but in the same ballpark.

Encouraged by the results of his first experiment, Brian went on to try the atta flour in some homemade parathas, a type of Indian flatbread that's repeatedly rolled out flat and folded over to produce thin layers, like a croissant. These are baked on a griddle rather than in the oven, and Brian was pleased to find them puffing up as they cooked the way his cookbook said they should. In the past, when he'd made them with regular whole-wheat flour, only maybe one out of three parathas would puff, so he concluded that this type of flour was the right stuff to make them with. And indeed, when we bit into them, he felt that the taste and texture were much closer to the parathas he'd had before in Indian restaurants and never actually been able to replicate at home. (When he told a couple of Indian coworkers about this triumph, however, he didn't get quite the response he expected; they were so impressed that he actually made his own parathas that they hardly registered his point about the flour.)

I was so impressed with the performance of this flour that I suggested Brian try it in a golden egg bread, a rich, slightly sweet, eggy bread similar to challah or brioche. This is a type of bread I really like but seldom request because I've always assumed it needed to be made with white flour to achieve the desired fine texture. However, the atta flour seemed to be up to the task. The loaves were a little denser and a little darker than they are with the white flour, but the texture was still tender and tasty. (The flavor was a little more salty and less sweet than I remembered, but that might be because Brian couldn't find the recipe we've used for this bread in the past and had to turn to Mark Bittman's, which is probably a bit different.)

All in all, we're quite pleased with this new variety of wheat flour and see no reason to go back to the supermarket stuff. I'm looking forward to trying a version of Brian's Granola Bread made with atta flour in place of all-purpose flour, not to mention rye bread, muffins, popovers—maybe even cookies and cakes. If they all turn out well, we might actually be able to give up on white flour altogether and rely on this atta for everything.