She tested recipes with 45 different types of flour. Which one kept going in the bin?

Drilling into exactly how different flours work – how they feel, look and taste – is what makes Christine McFadden’s Flour – A Comprehensive Guide (Absolute Press/Bloomsbury) an essential addition to every baker’s book shelf.

After all, these days, what we call flour isn’t just made from wheat, rye, or barley. As the book explains, it’s ground from all sorts of grains, plus nuts and seeds – even coffee and crickets. And they all perform differently – you can’t just take your favourite tart case recipe and swap pastry flour for coconut (as Christine’s bin could testify… more on that below).

Christine was an ideal candidate for this sort of project. She has great organisational and analytical skills, plenty of experience – and boundaries! Her 30-year career in food has taken in everything from commercial recipe development and demonstrating to writing and editing cookbooks, food campaigning and running a cooking school.

Here she speaks to Jenni Muir about the nitty gritty of bringing Flour together.

You chose 45 flours to categorise. How did you then go about deciding the best structure for this book?
First I checked the structure of other books on flour. Some are divided into flour source, eg grains, nuts, pulses, others into meal type or the type of dish. Whether the flour is gluten or non-gluten is also an important classification.

Then I put myself in the place of a reader having purchased an unfamiliar flour – buckwheat, say – and considered the thought process involved in discovering where to locate it in a book. If it’s a good one, the index is an obvious place, but invariably there is ambiguity and over-lap. The A–Z format avoids such pitfalls and, to me, is the easiest way of finding the relevant flour.

That said, there was a bit of head-scratching when it came to Indian wheat flours: atta and maida. Should they go under W for wheat? Or C for chapatti flour? In the end I allocated them individual entries under A and M as non-Indian readers might not realise they are wheat flours.

How did you decide which varieties to devote more recipes to? Did it pan out nicely or were there tough decisions to make?
In general, things panned out smoothly. The first step was to define the different uses for flour – not just in baking but also in batters, as a coating, binder, thickener – and then allocate flours for each use. I wanted to make sure there was a good spread of recipes and to choose those that would make individual flours shine. Those that are multi-use were allocated more recipes than specialist types.

After that, it was a matter of deciding which flours to allocate fewer, rather than more, recipes to. For example, cricket flour and coffee flour are relatively obscure, and also eye-wateringly expensive, so I tipped my hat to these and allocated just one recipe each. In contrast, semolina is probably the world’s most widely used flour in a correspondingly wide range of recipes, so that was allocated the most.

How do you approach recipe testing?
A prolonged period of recipe testing can be physically and mentally challenging, so it’s important for me to have a schedule with breaks. I began by allocating three days a week for testing, and I also enlisted two experienced assistants. Their job was to assemble trays of ingredients for each recipe, wash up after each one had been tested, and, most important, restore order to the kitchen at the end of the day.

We aimed to test three recipes a day – one complicated, one medium and a quickie. I would prepare a typewritten draft for each, based on researching other versions, and then creating my own. We finalised ingredient quantities, bowl size, serving size etc as we went along.

The rest of the week was used for writing up the final version, writing recipe intros, retesting as necessary and restocking ingredients.

Was there a particularly memorable flop?
The coconut flour pastry used for Piña Colada Tart was initially a spectacular flop – I remember the bin filled with endless trashed tart shells. As someone who doesn’t have gluten-related health issues, it was a steep learning curve. Not only was it my first attempt at non-gluten pastry, but also my first experience of using coconut flour. It’s a hydrocolloid, which means it absorbs an excessive amount liquid. The temptation is to keep on adding more flour to compensate for the very wet dough, but doing so means you will end up with a massive amount of excess dough. The trick is go with the moisture and trust that a seemingly small amount of flour will absorb it, which it does. The recipe turned out fine in the end.

And any great ones there just wasn’t space for?
Not at all. There was enough space for all but one recipe (Sesame Flour Flapjacks), which we had to ditch once the flat-plan was produced and we could see how much space was needed for the rest of the text.
 

What are your top tips for recipe testing? 

• Beware of attempting too many recipes in one day. 
• When planning a schedule, remember to build in time for shopping, unloading and putting away shopping. Or enlist help with these.
• Always clean up after each recipe. This will help you think more clearly and ultimately save time.
• Research other versions of a recipe, then do not consult these again. Develop your own version.
• Assemble ingredients before you begin.
• Keep meticulous notes of ingredient quantities used, bowl sizes, oven temperatures, cooking time etc.
• If possible, use different ovens for testing. 
• Always, always, always type up your recipes at the end of every testing session. Your kitchen-stained notes are likely to be incomprehensible the next day.
• Keep all your notes until after publication. You may need to refer to them if there are ‘author’s queries’.

You assisted on the photo shoots. How do you feel about food styling – would you like to do more?
My role was to advise art director/designer, Marie O’Mara, on the shots that show the source of a particular type of flour. I had to make sure the right variety of wheat was used, for example. I also helped the two home economists, Genevieve Taylor and Danielle Coombs, who were preparing the food – they weren’t always familiar with the quirks of various flours.

It was fun working as part of a team, and with photographer Mike Cooper, but I’ve done my fair share of food styling in the past and don’t particularly want to do more. That said, I do occasional styling sessions as part of recipe development projects for local food producers in and around Dorset.
 

Your introduction to Flour touches on the problems of looking to old reference books. Given first hand research is vital, how do you go about it?
I usually begin by going to a secondary source such as Wikipedia and check out citations and references. This in turn leads to other sources such as subject-specific websites, and what I call deep-nerd stuff. This was particularly apposite with Flour – there is a parallel world of flour fanatics and grain groupies, especially in the US.

If I want to dig really deeply I use Google Scholar to find primary sources. My university food science notes are another useful source.

Equally important is making direct contact with relevant experts. In the case of Flour, these were arable farmers, millers and bakers. When I wrote Pepper: the Spice that Changed the World I went to India to visit spice experts, pepper plantations and talk to farmers. It was well worth it.

Travel has played an important role in your career, which really comes through in this book. Where to next for you?
I spent part of the summer in the Charente region of France, where I enjoyed cooking in the house that my husband is renovating. Then in early autumn I returned to my beloved Sicily to research recipes, and visited the Orkney Islands where I sampled the iconic beremeal. On the list for 2019 are Scandinavia, the Ukraine, Georgia and the Czech Republic – where there are even more flours to be investigated!

What’s the flour you’ll be using more of in future?
I’m intrigued by cassava flour and its many incarnations – raw, toasted, crunchy, finely ground, tapioca starch, sweet starch, sour starch to name a few. It’s an every-day flour in Brazil but I would like to see it used more over here in Europe. Unfortunately it’s mysteriously hard to get hold of at the moment.

Meanwhile, chickpea flour has become a favourite kitchen staple. It’s easy to find, packed with protein and other nutrients, and there are plenty of appetising dishes to make with it.

How has running the cooking school helped with your research and recipe development?
It’s more a question of how research and recipe development for my books has helped with the cookery school programme. The recipe I use in my classes will have been developed and tested by me for my books. This means I know how long they will take to prepare, what the likely pitfalls for students will be, and how much I will need to prepare in advance. Sometimes, if a dish needs a long resting or proving time, I will prepare one in advance and produce it Blue Peter style as “here’s one I made earlier”.

A less obvious connection is that the assistants who help me manage the classes also helped with recipe testing for the book. This made things run wonderfully smoothly since they are familiar with how I work, and they know where everything is kept.

Running a cookery school is mostly about time management and people skills, both of which come in handy when employing assistants and working to a publisher’s pressing schedule!

Follow Christine on Instagram @thedorsetfoodie, Twitter @TheDorsetFoodie, or Facebook.