VITAL WHEAT GLUTEN

You may ask me ,what’s Vital Wheat Gluten ?

Every once in a while in our baking, we come across a recipe that calls for a tablespoon or two of vital wheat gluten. Since it’s almost always listed as “optional” and since the ingredient was hard to find, it took us a while to catch on to what we were missing!

Vital wheat gluten is like a super-powered flour that is all gluten and very little starch. It’s not technically flour itself, but it’s made from wheat flour that has been hydrated to activate the gluten and then processed to remove everything but that gluten. It’s then dried and ground back into a powder.

Because it’s almost pure gluten, a little goes a long way to improving the elasticity and rise of the raw dough and the crumb and chewiness in the final loaves. Most baking sources recommend about one tablespoon for every 2-3 cups of flour.

You can add vital wheat gluten to any bread recipe, but it’s especially effective when baking with low-protein flours like whole wheat and rye (which have trouble developing enough gluten) or in recipes with a lot of extra ingredients added in like nuts, dried fruit, or seeds. We add a few tablespoons of vital wheat gluten when a recipe recommends using high-protein bread flour but all we have is regular all-purpose flour, as with bagels and some artisan breads.

So it is very popular and used in our daily life.