Bread Recipe Vital Wheat Gluten

While it's not a perfect fix in all cases, vital wheat gluten can help all-purpose flour perform more like bread flour by boosting its protein levels.

Sho Spaeth has worked in publishing and media for 16 years. Prior to joining Serious Eats, he worked at The New York Times for a decade. Sho has written for Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Baffler Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, among other publications.

From the dawn of civilization to in these uncertain times, bread has been a staple of the human diet, and cultures the world over have discovered the culinary magic of applying heat to a dough made from ground wheat and water. But one lesson that all of us had reinforced during the coronavirus pandemic is there's bread, and then there's

Best Vital Wheat Gluten Low Carb Bread Recipes

Bread. Whether you could no longer patronize your favorite bakery, or whether you, like millions of others, boarded the sourdough bread train, it was painfully obvious to bread lovers everywhere that not all breads are equal.

To complicate matters for home bakers, supply chain issues made bread flour, which many recipes call for, harder to come by. In many cases, dosing regular all-purpose flour with vital wheat gluten is a viable workaround. Now that the worst of the pandemic is behind us and grocery shelves are more or less fully stocked, workarounds like this feel less urgent. Nonetheless, if you are unable to buy bread flour—or simply wish to make do with the flour you already have stocked in your pantry—adding vital wheat gluten is an option worth considering.

Vital wheat gluten comes in more than one form. Many people probably know it better as seitan, the mock-meat that is widely used in many East Asian cuisines and has been adopted by many vegetarians and vegans in the West as a versatile source of protein. But in the context of baking bread, vital wheat gluten is a dry, flour-like powder. It is considered a dough conditioner, an ingredient that can be added to bread recipes to encourage specific characteristics in the dough.

Low Carb High Protein Bread

Vital wheat gluten is essentially wheat flour that's been stripped of almost all of its starch, leaving behind a substance that is almost entirely made up of wheat proteins. Wheat proteins, when combined with water, form gluten, which, as Harold McGee notes in

, is a complex, semisolid structure...which is both plastic and elastic: That is, it can stretch under pressure and yet tends to resist that pressure. These properties are the reason why yeast-raised breads made from wheat flour can expand to contain carbon dioxide produced by yeast without breaking.

Vital wheat gluten is produced by mixing wheat flour with water to form a dough, after which the dough is repeatedly washed in water to dissolve and strip away the starches in the dough.* According to Bakerpedia, the resulting mass of close-to-pure gluten is then wet-milled—extruded into pellets—and dried at controlled temperatures, since excessively high temperatures can damage gluten's functionality, a phenomenon that should be familiar to anyone who has made a hot-water dough, like the one in scallion pancakes. The process yields a powder that is about 73% wheat protein.

Washed Flour Seitan Method

*If you've ever made seitan at home, in which you massage a wheat flour dough in a large bowl of water to produce a rubbery mass that looks like a skeleton of a loaf of bread, you may be familiar with this process. Relatedly, as Fuchsia Dunlop notes in The Land of Fish and Rice, the starchy water that is a byproduct of the process can be used to produce liang pi, or cold-skin noodles.

Gluten is what provides structure to bread. When sufficiently hydrated, gluten becomes a cohesive network that's viscoelastic, meaning it becomes both extensible (it can be stretched and formed) and also elastic (it will at least partially return to its initial form when deformed by external pressure, as when it's stretched).

These two, contradictory properties are the reason why gluten is so important for yeast-raised breads. As yeast organisms produce carbon dioxide in the dough, gluten's extensible nature means it can inflate to accommodate the production of the gas, whereas its elastic nature means it's strong enough to trap and retain that gas without breaking, resulting in a risen loaf that's light and chewy, not hard and dense.

Homemade Seitan (for Vegan Chicken)

Since gluten is produced by hydrating wheat proteins, specifically the proteins glutenin and gliadin, the amount of protein in a given wheat flour will determine how strong the gluten network becomes when made into a dough. Different wheat flours contain different amounts of protein: Cake flour, for example, has a relatively low amount of protein (typically about 8%), which leads to tender and soft pastries and cakes. Bread flour, on the other hand, has a higher protein percentage (up around 13%), allowing it to make extra chewy and elastic loaves.

This is where vital wheat gluten comes in. Say, for example, that you can only find all-purpose flour, which has more protein than cake flour but less than bread flour. It can be used to bake good breads, though they won't have quite the same structure and texture as bread made from higher-protein bread flour. Add vital wheat gluten, which is primarily made up of wheat proteins, and you can bump your all-purpose flour's protein percentage.

Of course, while adding vital wheat gluten to something like all-purpose flour pushes its protein percentage up into bread-flour territory, that doesn't magically turn AP flour into bread flour in all respects, since their differences are not protein percentage alone. As a practical matter, then, the question is, how well adding vital wheat gluten works as a stopgap when you can't get the flour you want? Can you otherwise follow a recipe as written and get good results?

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Yes, according to Francisco Migoya, the head chef at Modernist Cuisine and the co-author of Modernist Bread. Short answer is, you can do that, Migoya said. If you have a low-protein flour or something not quite as strong as bread flour, you can compensate for that lack of strength by adding vital wheat gluten. When I asked specifically about all-purpose flour, Migoya said, Typically, all-purpose flour is around 10% protein, but the majority of that, probably 9%, is gliadin and glutanin, which will be what can form gluten. Doing a little bit of math, you can add vital wheat gluten to approximate bread flour, which should have at least about 11.5% protein.

There are, Migoya notes, some caveats to doing this. One of the things to keep in mind is all it adds is strength. He was quick to note that there are many, many variables that go into making bread, and although a stronger gluten network will lead to a chewier crust and a large crumb in some bread recipes, neither of those enhanced characteristics necessarily translates to better bread; while a large, open crumb might be good for some breads (or your Instagram feed), it isn't always desirable. He also cautioned that adding large amounts of vital wheat gluten—large, in this instance, meaning anything over about 2% of the total flour weight in a recipe—will require some additional changes, particularly with respect to the amount of water you'd have to add to the dough.

Flour), we thought it would be useful to our readers to test how well it works to substitute vital wheat gluten for some of the total flour in a few of our recipes that call for bread flour. And since we aren't able to work in our test kitchen during the pandemic, I enlisted the help of Kristina Razon and Vicky Wasik to do side-by-side tests of specific recipes; I also conducted a test of my own.

Flaxseed Sandwich Bread With Whole Wheat Flour

Vicky tackled Kenji's no-knead focaccia using Gold Medal Blue Label all-purpose flour, which has a protein content of 10.5%; Kristina took on Stella's dinner rolls using Gold Medal Blue Label; and I tested Sasha's focaccia recipe using Hecker's all-purpose flour, which has a protein content of 11.5%.

Despite the fact that commercial vital wheat gluten is typically about 73% protein, Migoya suggested that you can treat vital wheat gluten as effectively being 100% protein in the context of approximating bread flour's strength with all-purpose flour, so we adopted that assumption for these tests.

Each of us made two batches of each recipe: one with all-purpose flour alone, using the recipe as written; the other with all-purpose flour plus a set amount of vital wheat gluten to increase the protein content and approximate bread flour. The added vital wheat gluten necessitated including a whisking step to fully distribute the vital wheat gluten in the flour, but otherwise the recipes were made as written. While both focaccia recipes say you can use either all-purpose or bread flour, the dinner roll recipe specifically calls for bread flour for best results.

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After assessing the tools Vicky had on hand at home, we decided to halve Kenji's no-knead focaccia recipe so that we could use two 8-inch cake pans to do a side-by-side test. After halving the quantities (and omitting any extraneous extras, like the garlic and garlic