Semolina Flour—Just for Grins

OK so two weeks or so ago I ordered some flour. I get flour locally and I get some flour mail order. Both take more that a day to be delivered or milled and picked up.

Everything arrived on the same day.

I’d ordered some Semolina flour from King Arthur Baking.

After putting everything in containers and away I looked at the package the Semolina Flour came in. 

Originally I’d purchased the Semolina flour because I wanted to dust my peel with it. But actually you want Semolina for that as it’s grittier. And depending on which source you read, you should only buy Semolina flour from Italy, or always buy US Durum flour (which Semolina is, but in the US the Durum flour is ground finer than the US Semolina).

You know what this is beginning to sound like don’t you—Arches Text Wove becoming Arches Velin and then outside of the US that name Velin being used for everything else. Heck I had to rewrite class notes for one of my bookbinding classes and find alternate papers because what was being sold as Velin outside of the US was not the ATW and was too thick for the structure we were making. Students outside of the US were tearing their hair out.

Sigh.

But in the case of the use of the word Semolina there is a happy ending.

I looked at that package on the counter. It had a bread recipe on the back.

The loaf was one of those loaves that didn’t take long: no overnight on the counter or in the fridge. And I kind of, sort of, wanted some bread.

King Arthur Baking is in the business of getting bakers to bake successfully and buy more flour. If they said it would work…

I whipped it right up. 

And in no time, with me going off and doing other things while the loaf rose and then baked, we had a wonderful loaf of Semolina (Durum) Flour.

The crumb was lovely with tight, even little holes. The crust came out a lovely brown with a bit of a crunch to it. 

The only hiccup was it had been months, nope over a year, since I’d made a sandwich loaf (and several years before that since I’d done it the penultimate time). When the moment to form the loaf arrived I couldn’t remember which folding method I’d liked the best and there was no time to search, and I didn’t want to over work it.

The result was that little gap/bubble you see in the slice laying down on the plate. It appeared in just in two slices.

Oh, there was one other hiccup—the sesame seeds that survived the move were OLD and not edible. This loaf is supposed to be topped with them. I decided it was better to have a good loaf without seeds, than a good loaf covered in rancid seeds…

The bread was absolutely perfect for a hard salami, lettuce, sandwich. In fact I now think all salami needs to be served on this bread if you’re going to do a sandwich.

I turned to Dick, as he munched on his sandwich and said, “If I had a cafe I would put this on the menu, and if you came in late and all the Semolina flour bread was gone I wouldn’t make this sandwich.”

We had a good laugh. We knew it was true.

There are several more reasons I don’t have a restaurant.

Have a great sandwich today.

And get some sketching done.

Bread Recipe

Here is the link to the recipe if you’d like to make the bread for yourself. It’s the Semolina Sandwich Bread, don’t confuse it with their semolina bread which requires a liquid levain and I wouldn’t have been up for that, other loaves I bake call for such moves, but I just wanted to make a loaf right away (so to speak).

I either read the recipe wrong or the package was mislabeled—I didn’t use any cornmeal. I think that would have made the interior a bit too dry and crunchy.

I wish I had saved the package—now I’ll never know what it said. It didn’t call for Baker’s Special Dry Milk like the linked recipe, but I didn’t have any non-fat dry milk and I did have some of the BSDM so I used it instead with no problem.