What is High-Gluten Flour?
For that matter, what’s gluten? The next time you make a batch of bread or pizza dough, pinch off a little bit and work it between your fingers under the kitchen faucet for a minute. A good proportion of the dough, mostly water-soluble starch, will wash away. Yet a small rubbery ball will remain. That’s it. The non-water-soluble, protein portion of flour: gluten. Of course if you tried the same thing with just a pile of flour or a simple water-flour paste the whole thing would wash away. That’s because gluten must be both watered and worked in order for it to organize itself into a mass. What we call gluten is actually a combination of two different proteins: glutenin and gliadin. Both are extremely long-chain proteins, but with different properties. Glutenin molecules are rather fluid, and are capable of forming very strong bonds with one another. When they’re worked they do just that, bonding both end-to-end and side-to-side into a kind of mesh or network. Gliadin molecules by compar
