![]() “It’s something you order from your purveyor that comes ground up, in a bag, that you use as an ingredient.” “We forget that flour is a crop,” she says. She hadn’t considered, though, how it might affect her business. The weather also affected the quantity of wheat: There was less to go around, which drove the price up 8 percent, a cost that Fukai had to pass on to her customers.įukai, of course, knew how flour is made, and she knew that climate change is an ongoing problem. The hot and dry conditions made the wheatberries shrivel and store minerals in different ways: Nutrients that should have been going into the endosperm, the part of the wheatberry that’s ground into conventional white flour, went into the bran, which is discarded. The previous winter had been unusually dry across the plains, from Arizona to North Dakota, where Central sources most of its wheat. He told Fukai that the flour the mill distributed in the summer of 2021 was the driest he’d ever seen. Fukai called up the mill and talked to Nicky Giusto, a miller who tests flour for protein content and gluten development. That left the flour.Īs it happened, the bakery had recently received a new shipment of Red Rose flour from its supplier, Central Milling in Logan, Utah - the first batch from the spring wheat harvest. Perhaps it was the yeast? The bread was still rising - slightly less than usual, but it was recognizable as bread. The water they were using hadn’t changed. By process of elimination, that meant there was a problem with one of the ingredients. They double-checked the math on the recipe and determined that it had been scaled correctly. They decided it probably wasn’t equipment failure. Fukai and her staff went through every single one to figure out where they’d gone wrong. Aya PastryĪt Aya Pastry, croissant-making is a three-day process with many steps. Aya Fukai, owner of Aya Pastry, began having trouble with her croissant dough in August 2021. It wasn’t an anomaly: The next batch was the same. The end result was 240 hard, crunchy pastries. In the oven, the butter leaked out, essentially frying the croissants instead of baking them. It shrunk back whenever the bakers tried to roll it out, and during the folding, the layers would snap. In the oven, the water in the butter would evaporate, leaving a flaky, honeycombed interior.īut this time, the dough was unusually dry and brittle and wouldn’t stretch the way it was supposed to. Usually it was soft and supple, easily wrapped around a block of butter to be folded and rolled multiple times until there were hundreds of alternating layers of butter and dough. Last August, Aya Fukai, owner of Aya Pastry in West Town, noticed that the dough for the latest batch of wholesale croissants was behaving strangely.
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