Instructions: )) One of my many great aunts, who lived on an isolated farm in Lorraine, France, made her own breads from flours produced by a rural miller and baked in the communal oven of her village. Every third month, she bought flour which she stored in huge barrels, lined up in order of purchase from left to right and stored in her cool, dry pantry. When the flour arrived from the miller it was almost as yellow as our present semolina.

To aerate it, she would take a long paddle and stir the flour in each and every barrel once a week; until it had turned a wonderful, soft, and luminous ivory-white she would not use the flour. When a flour had reached the correct colour, she made a test loaf. If the loaf was compact and somewhat sticky when cooled and sliced, it was promptly relegated to the toasting tray and finally ended up in the crumb box. The flour had failed examination and had to wait longer to be used, until it could make "a true loaf of bread with big holes". Such flour, which is too young and not oxidized enough to develop a solid gluten structure, is called "bucky and was as much a feature of Colonial and Federral America as it was of the early twentieth-century French countryside.

"Aerating the flour" is an old-fashioned country expression for what we call nowadays letting the flour proteins oxidate. As my aunts flour rested for weeks, often months, after going through the milling process, the yellow carotene-xantophyll pigments in the new flours were naturally bleached by light and oxygen to that lovely ivory-white and the sulfhydryl groups in the flour decreased appreciably, resulting in a bread dough that did not stretch and produced honest solid loaves of bread with big holes. The holes could be so big that I remember vividly passing one or two of my young fingers into them to see whether there was something in there; one day I found a small medal of the Holy Spirit.

The unbleached flour that we can buy in markets have been aged with the help of potassium bromate which accelerates their aging process. I prefer them to the bleached flour because their color is more natural and they really can bake a true loaf of bread, even if the holes in the bread are not as big as they need to be to host the Holy Spirit.

By law only benzoyl peroxide is allowed for the bleaching of flours in the US. It modifies the yellow color of young flours to that pallid white that is-say the flour people-desired by modern bakers.

Other improving agents can be used to accelerate the maturing of flours; most are gases which act immediately upon contact with the flour. Among them are chlorine gas used for cake flours, chlorine dioxide, nitrogen di- and tetra-oxide, and nytrosil chloride. Yet other conditioning agents are added to doughs in the making of commercial baked goods. The functions of these chemical may vary, but basically most of them bring on a reduction of thiol groups and encourage protein cross-linking.(For a more detailed explanation of thiols-check Harol McGees "On Food and Cooking")

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