What’s the best value flour for making vegan meat? 

How TF do we dry the vital wheat gluten to turn it into powder?

Also the starch

I was also getting total Ethan Chlebowski vibes from him! I would love that so much 😍

Ha! That would be BIG shoes to fill! I'll keep digging into these topics for sure :)

This guy seems more genuine and less skeletons in the closet than Ethan. Ethan seems like he's late to it but will eventually show up as a feature of the metoo movement.

This is a good question and something that needs to be researched. I just ran out of time. Given the different results of the gluten contents from my little test here, my guess is that they are different flours.

I will say that I am not sensitive to the 'wheat taste" that many people talk about, so YMMV in the taste between the two! As I say in the video found almost no difference between the products.

Bob's is actually cheaper for me since I shop at Wegmans! It's $7 for 20 oz right now which comes down to $12.37 per kg. And the only place I could get Anthony's from is online which is the same price as in the video.

@@laurakatelin4825 Huh, I just bought a bag of Bob's at my local Whole Foods because I forgot to order the Anthony's, and it was almost 9 bucks. I'm going to have to price the Anthony's out with shipping. Thanks for telling me this!

what the hell is conagra?

@@duolingoowl8294 It's a gigantic agribusiness multinational corporation.

That is definitely another consideration! You'd have to figure out if you get more starch from the different types of flour and then factor that into your value vs cost decision. Can you share your fave recipes for using the starch water?

​@@BoldFlavorVegan @Bold Flavor Vegan My go to is the bacon recipe from 'The Pot Thickens' with a couple of tweaks (beetroot powder instead of wine). Would love to see your take on it, especially if it's anywhere near as good as your ham🙂

It is really difficult to compare WTF to VWG unfortunately as many VWG recipes use different ingredients to "cut" the gluten. For instance, I use tofu here, which increased the weight and price of the recipe, so it is dependent on the specific recipe you choose and the value you personally get from the labor shortcut of using VWG. I go into a lot more detail about this specific topic in this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bDvltnUHLzE.html

@@BoldFlavorVegan Thanks for your answer. What about if you don't add extra ingredients to "cut" the gluten? Is cutting the gluten necessary?

@@blahdelablah For sure and good question. You have to cut the VWG with water at the very least to activate the gluten. I forgot to mention that issue. Every VWG recipe is different with the amount of water you add, so you can't weigh out the final cooked product of VWG and directly compare to WTF. Also, we already know the gluten content of VWG as we know how much we put in. If you put in 100g of VWG in the beginning, in the end, you still have 100g of VWG after the cook but the hydration and other cutting ingredients in the end can vary wildly depending on bake vs simmer vs steam. Hopefully this makes sense!

@@BoldFlavorVegan Thank you for sharing your insight into this.

I must have felt it in the force! Hope it turned out awesome.

@@BoldFlavorVegan Oh, it did. It was my first time trying to make a seafood-flavored seitan with a nori and kelp broth.

@@AV57 Nice! I used nori in my beef stew recipe video to mimic anchovies (I veganized a Kenji recipe) and it was awesome. Lots of great applications for that ingredient.

Glad you liked the video! It is really difficult to compare WTF to VWG, unfortunately. I did a video on answering roughly this question. It might help answer this better than I can in a comment: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bDvltnUHLzE.html Hope that helps!

@@BoldFlavorVegan /// thank you I will check that link, funny how some foods can be so controversial. You are doing a good job with any dough, it must have taken a lot experimenting in the wee hours of the morning! eh Take care as I go off into the night doing another drum roll to the Seitan gods.

Glad this answered (or began to answer) a question you had! I felt the same, so I decided it was worth a trial. Depending on what I'm making, I may switch to the store brand bread flour. I'll have to think about it more. On another note - I need to get into noodle making. It has been on my list for SO long. Do you have any beginner recipes that could be done in a day?

@@BoldFlavorVegan Absolutely. I highly recommend a pasta maker to thin out and cut the dough for ease and convenience, but all of that can of course be done by hand. After combining the dough it's best to let them rest for at least an hour, and more time off you have it. I also find that bread flour makes a much springier noodle, and asian recipes list that as the recommended flour. Italian pasta: 300 grams flour, 150 grams water 1/2 tsp salt, 2 tsps olive oil. Japanese Ramen: 250 grams bread flour, 120 grams water, 3 grams salt, 3 grams baking soda. For both mix all dry ingredients together well first, then make a well in the center, add the wet ingredients, and mix until well combined. Adjust dough if too sticky or too dry by adding more flour or more water. Knead to a smooth dough about 5-10 minutes and allow to rest covered in plastic wrap or in a bowl with a towel for 1 hour minimum (more if you have the time). Next roll the dough out thin dusting with flour to stop the sticking, pass through the pasta machine lowering the setting as you go to the desired thinness, and cut. Cook in boiling and salted water for 3-5 minutes, when the noodles float to the top they are done. Enjoy as there is nothing like fresh noodles!

Woah! That is a good price. The cost has inflated quite a bit here, unfortunately.

Wow - do you have videos of your rig? Would love to see that operation!

@@BoldFlavorVegan I just use a Wonder Mill, got it from Amazon. Plug it in, I usually select pastry grind, and turn it on. Sounds like a saw. Pour in red wheat berries I also get from Amazon in 25 lb. bulk buckets and freeze, and let it do its thing. I use the flour to make my own bread, pasta and breadcrumbs. The bread is a lot denser than store-bought. But if you don't eat it within a week it spoils, so after a few days if I still have some left, I toast it, throw it in a food processor and crunch it up then freeze it. Later when all the moisture has left, I throw the crumbs into a blender and make fine breadcrumbs which I then refreeze. I've always been about making food from scratch as far as from seed to table. You really do taste a difference compared to anything you'll find eating out or buying at a store. My mill along with my instapot and food processor are some of my proudest kitchen stuffs. My other favorite is called an Almond Cow which you need to check out when you can, if you have not already. As a side note, if you're really into sustainable living, you should look into earthship homes. 🙂

Thanks! It's not a graph, but here is the spreadsheet I used to calculate everything: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Yc7F7v-eYx2GkNt28BoixMnI4LjyQX5HOCRlZzW8XIk/edit?usp=sharing While the math is fun, I think the big takeaway should be to buy whatever you personally value when you consider cost vs labor. I value high yield for my labor and I'm willing to pay a premium for that, so I'll be sticking to KA BF. But if someone wanted the cheapest gluten possible, then maybe the Store Brand AP would be the most valuable to them :) Thanks for watching!

​@@BoldFlavorVegan Oh cool, thanks! I was more referring to the difference between the WTF method and using bread/AP flour but still awesome of you to provide that! That take is a good one, I'd draw the same conclusions. It was more of a feeling that the video left me hanging, but not a big deal, the video was great, thanks!

That is what it seems like could be the case. As long as the gluten content is there you should be fine in theory. I have heard stories of people getting low quality gluten flour before leading to a poor final product, so YMMV depending on what you get.

You're right on about the VWG. Almost every recipe adds something else to cut the gluten flour, so you have to account for the ingredient and the cost of that ingredient, which could be very different for everyone depending on where you live or what you use. For instance, I added tofu here, so that ramped the cost of this specific recipe but the goal was only a taste test so see if there was a difference. For a quick ball-park you could just find the cost of a serving by finding the cost of the VWG you're using in a recipe and dividing by the recipe's yield. Regarding the flour for WTF, I had a hard time talking about this concisely in the video where it wasn't confusing or boring, but in the future for videos like this, I'll show a screen cap so those who want to dig into the numbers can pause and do so. With that said, here the spreadsheet I used to calculate cost per serving of gluten (cost of seasonings were not included): docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Yc7F7v-eYx2GkNt28BoixMnI4LjyQX5HOCRlZzW8XIk/edit?usp=sharing In the end, it really comes down to what you can get in your area and what you value. If you value paying the least, then the cheapest AP might be the most valuable to you. Like I said, I like the KA Bread Flour as I get the most gluten per wash and I don't mind paying the extra so I can cut down on the amount of labor.

@@BoldFlavorVegan Thanks a lot for the spreadsheet! Mine looked pretty much exactly the same, just with some missing numbers. :) For sure, it'll be very much dependent on where you live. I have to order my VWG from amazon, and the prices can vary quite a bit even on a month to month basis. That said, just from plugging some guestimate yield numbers into a spreadsheet myself, it was pretty apparent that VWG was going to be quite a bit more costly. I guess that makes sense since VWG is still a bit of a specialty product, especially compared to something as ubiquitous as AP flour. What I didn't realize was just how much cheaper the store brand flours were going to be. I certainly wasn't expecting it'd turn out to be half the cost of the name brand per unit yield. Overall, it's a topic I'd thought about before, but seeing the actual numbers really helps clear up some misconceptions. Definitely some food for thought! Thanks!

I don’t think that WTF would as the whole wheat would hinder gluten formation - but I’ve never tried it! Not sure how good the texture would be either.

Glad you found it helpful! I'm really interested in knowing the costs in the UK and how they compare here.

I don't really like to compare WTF and VWG directly, to me it is a little bit of an apple oranges situation because the techniques are so different. I do a deep dive into why in this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bDvltnUHLzE.html

I've never tried it, but I'm sure you could layer VWG strips into a WTF roast.

Maybe one day! Good idea. I think this is the first step in a longer research project, so I'll add this to the list. So many flours out there!

Welcome back, haha. Glad you liked the new videos. Working hard on the next one now :)

@@BoldFlavorVegan ❤

Thanks so much - yeah, you can't go wrong it seems, unless you use something with crazy low gluten content.

WTF will (almost) always be cheaper than VWG but it is hard to compare apples to apples as VWG has a wide range of other proteins that are added, like tofu. Here is the math behind the experiment if you're interested: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Yc7F7v-eYx2GkNt28BoixMnI4LjyQX5HOCRlZzW8XIk/edit?usp=sharing

@@BoldFlavorVegan thanks for sharing that, it was very eye opening!

Unfortunately, the only way to do this is to calculate the cost of an individual VWG recipe and then compare as they vary wildly. For this reason there is no universal answer. For instance, I used tofu in this recipe which increased the price, but I've made seitan with chickpea flour, blended mushrooms, all sorts of things that cost different price points. Rarely is only VWG used, it is usually cut with something else. Comparing WTF and VWG is sometimes apples and oranges re cost/technique as I go into more detail in this video here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bDvltnUHLzE.html

Yes! Lot's of work to be done, this is just the first step. The baking community gets into this much detail with their product, so I thought it was time to start tackling this question.

Thanks!! And yes I am :) instagram.com/mike_trabert/

Glad you like them! Thanks for watching :)

Glad you enjoy it!

I've seen a lot of debate on this topic, so thought it might help some people out :)

I thought about showing the price comparison vs chicken, but there are so many prices and types (unfortunately) that I wasn't sure what would be a reasonable comparison. I washed each for the same amount of time and let the raw glutens rest and drain overnight to get rid of as much hydration as possible, but no doubt, there was still some in there. A +50%~ gluten yield from 1kg for the KA BF surprised me too since it is only 12.7% gluten advertised, so there must be other stuff in there (starch/water/ash content/anything else the manufacturing process left over). However, this does track with the other flours I compared. In the end, I think it is a labor vs cost decision for each person. The Store Brand Bread Flour is a really good middle ground for that.

@@BoldFlavorVegan A while ago I did some tests with 13% bread flour. I was actually testing different wash amounts, but I weighed everything and for the right texture this is the result: 100 g flour, 60 g water to make the dough Raw gluten yield after washing: 46 g Seitan yield after simmering: 58 g Washing less resulted in slightly more weight (52 g raw, 62 g cooked). The texture was a bit soft - too much starch left. Washing more resulted in less mass with a rubbery texture. I estimate that the best sestina was about 22-25% protein, ~5-10% starch and the rest water. But this was only one trial. I think I need to repeat this in triplicate to determine any error bars.

This is great data. I wish there was a way to better measure/control for the wash besides timing it. Any ideas? One thing I considered for this was adding 00 flour to the test flours as it has a different composition of glutenin and gliadin than the others (from what I can tell) so I'm curious about the taste/texture of the final product. It sounds cost prohibitive, but maybe it is worth it's own test?

@@BoldFlavorVegan The washing is always the tricky part and I think it all comes down to experience as you feel the dough. I want to try to correlate the wash with the visual appearance of the liquid that weeps out of the seitan - trying to pin down the right cloudiness amount of the starch that indicates the correct amount. I am pretty sure the 00 refers to the fineness of the milling, not necessarily the protein content of the grain being used. So, I would expect that different brands of 00 would not all be the same. Not sure if it's worth it. I get a lot of questions about using whole wheat flour. To be honest, I've never tried it. But I always suggest that if people want to do so, they get the finest grind possible. Do you have any experience with that?

Glad it was helpful!

For sure! Glad you enjoyed. Lots more videos like this to come this year!

Glad you enjoyed it!

Glad it was helpful!

🙌🏻