Grissini

If you’ve been reading my blog for some time (one week today! wow!), you’d know that I have to cook Italian food and learn about chemistry in the process. On Wednesday, we learned about grissini, basically breadsticks, as well as protein content in flours.

First, we learned the correct way to measure out flour: fluffing the flour with a spoon, spooning it into the cup, and then leveling it with the back of a knife. (Measuring cup for scale.)

We then added the flour, yeast and salt in the bowl of the food processor, mixed, and while it was mixing, we added the olive oil, honey and water through the feeding tube. We mixed with the dough blade until combined, and then mix for no more than 1 minute to knead until it pulled away from the sides of the bowl.

We removed the dough from the mixer and transferred it to an oiled bowl, drizzled it with a little olive oil, and rolled to cover it.

We then covered that bad boy with a blanket and let it rest for an hour nap.

While we preheated our oven and lined our baking sheets, we got to cut and prep our grissini.

On our cutting board, we flipped out our dough and shaped it into a rounded rectangle.

We sliced finger-width slices of the dough and rolled it into long, thin snakes. They came out a little too fat. Maybe the snakes eat well.

We decorated them with a gratuitous amount of sesame seeds and let them puff up a little before baking them.

Once they were nice and golden brown, we took them out to enjoy with our peers!

To test the stiffness of each group’s grissini were (based on which type of flour they used), we had to break each one.

While we were waiting for our dough to rise, we tested the protein content of the flours by adding water and looking at the consistency of the mixtures.

The cake flour is very wet and barely recognizable as a dough; this is because there is a low protein content in cake flour. The AP flour is closer to bread flour than it is cake flour (since different brands have different definitions of all-purpose), but it is still pretty sticky and gooey because it has more protein than cake flour. Bread flour has a higher protein content than AP and cake flour so it is more cohesive. Rye flour was the most put together, but it has a similar protein content to AP flour. This mixture is denser than the others because it uses all parts of the grain (bran, endosperm, and germ) so we can’t really draw conclusions based on protein content alone.