What's In A Name? Flour Does Not Smell As Sweet

At some point, we've all discovered that the same food can have different names.  The name for soda (or pop or tonic or soft drinks or...) is a big one in the US, and everybody thinks that everybody else's regional dialect has a silly name.  I personally believe that calling all sodas "Coke" is just plain ridiculous.  This snippet of a real conversation I heard in a diner illustrates my point:

"I'd like a Coke."
"Sure, what kind?"
"A 7-Up."

What?!

It's not just soda, of course.  A milkshake in New England is (or used to be) a blend of milk and flavored syrup and not a blend of milk and ice cream.  That is a frappe - except in Rhode Island, where it's a cabinet.  I learned about frappes ten years ago, which is also when I figured out what the name "frappuccino" was supposed to mean: frappe + cappuccino.  Nobody has explained why a coffee chain that's from Seattle is naming things using a strictly New England regional name.

There's also regional brand name differences, such as Edy's/Dreyer's, Best Foods/Hellmann's, and Arnold/Oroweat.  Then there's differences in names between countries that supposedly speak the same language.  In the UK, cilantro is called coriander and zucchinis are courgettes.  We have also borrowed a lot of words in English and have ended up changing the meanings: in Italy, peperoni are bell peppers and salame piccante means pepperoni (the American version).

But some food name differences are important and really don't mean the same thing.  Take the word "flour": in the US, flour generally means wheat flour and any other type of flour is called "plant flour" to indicate what plant it was made from.  However, there are many different types of wheat flour and you shouldn't use a different type unless you know how to adapt a recipe for substitution.

The key difference between wheat flours is the amount of gluten.  Gluten is a protein that is found in wheat and other relatives, such as rye and barley.  It helps dough to rise and keep its shape and makes the dough elastic, which is why bread is chewy.  In general, savory dough recipes use flours with more gluten and sweet dough recipes use flours with less gluten.

There are six classes of wheat in the US (durum, hard red spring, hard red winter, soft red winter, hard white, soft white), and the types of flour they produce are different.  Not surprisingly, the hard wheat types are best for yeast breads and the soft types are best for pastries.  Durum is the hardest type of all, and is used to make pasta.

This is what your bread started out as.

An Explanation...

I originally set up this blog when I bought a house for the first time.  Words cannot describe how terrified I was (so much money!  so much work!  so much money needed to do said work!).  I decided that it was time to get organized, and that included making sure that I wasn't that friend - you know which friend I'm talking about, the one who sends you sporadic emails with 100 pictures attached to each one.  As a homeowner, I needed to be efficient and get things done with a minimum of energy and time.  The solution was obvious: make a blog to keep everybody up to date and let the people who actually cared follow it.

This home improvement blog has no home improvement updates for one simple reason: the seller was committing fraud.  No house, no home improvements.

I spent a number of months dealing with the legal system to get my money back (ask me about the tort of negligence) and, after that, I didn't want to think about or do anything related to the house, including this blog.

Time heals all wounds, etc.  Several days ago, a friend asked my why I didn't have a cooking/food blog.  I love baking and I spend far too much time reading other people's food blogs.  So why not make my own?

Chez Le Awesome does not have a chez anymore, so it's now about food.  It may include home improvement in the future.  When? I have no idea.

I do not expect this blog to become popular.  I do expect that some friends who want my recipes will pop by to print them off.  The plan is to update once a week, either with something of my own or with what is hopefully an instructive and useful post.  Right now I have lots of food albums on facebook that I'll move over here to start things off.

On a side note, I also intend to have several entries on really basic cooking skills and on vocabulary.  Many food blogs and cookbooks don't have information on the basics because they're intended for more practiced cooks which makes it basically impossible for a beginner to follow the recipes and instructions.  You can do everything that the recipe says and still end up with a mess because you don't know that the instruction to "fold the dry ingredients into the wet" means something very specific, or that "stir" and "mix" are different hand motions.  There are several really helpful cookbooks that cover these types of issues (note: make an entry on recommended cookbooks) but if you don't know about them, you can't read them.

So that's the plan.  My second job starts in one week (OMG I am an idiot sometimes).  Let's see if I can manage one update per week.