Another Fine mesh…

I must have been off school when they did mesh in maths class. I didn’t even know that mesh, as a measurement existed.

I’m trying, in my old age, to learn about grain and home milling and sieving flour. I’ve been baking, both amateur and for sale, for 30 years but when you get into milling you realise how little you actually know about flour. In the UK, if you want reliable organic flour there are not too many destinations, Shipton Mill and Doves Farm are the obvious ones. I settled down to Doves: delivery was straightforward, quality consistent, it said “Bread Flour” on the label and it worked. All I wanted to know was, was it bread flour, wholemeal wheat, rye, etc. (We won’t go into the discovery that Doves were adding Ascorbic Acid – unlabelled – to their bread flour)

Let’s be honest – I know bugger-all about grain and flour.

So, back to the topic of sieves. Adam Leonti, in Flour Lab, says he uses a 70 mesh sieve for his flour. Jennifer Lapidus, in Southern Ground, talks about three grades of flour, sifted, middlings and bran. I Googled sieves. Not surprisingly there are hundreds but the only two that mentioned size were a 60 and an 80 mesh so I bought both.

For the last few months I’ve been happily sieving out the bran with the 80 mesh then sieving out the middlings with the 60 and then adding back some of the bran to the sifted.

Should have stayed in blissful ignorance. Yesterday I was looking at a set of four sieves sized in millimeters which I converted into mesh sizes. Hang on, I thought, something’s wrong here. As the mm sizes went up, the mesh sizes went down. What was wrong was my understanding. The holes in a 60 mesh sieve are bigger than an 80 mesh.

Monday morning will be back to the drawing board …