Cooking Skyrim: Flour

    Flour, in TES: Skyrim, is found as the food item Sack of Flour, which weighs half a pound (including the sack?).  Each Sack of Flour is made from three Wheat ingredients at a grain mill.  Each Wheat is composed of about half a dozen stalks of grain.  Therefore, there should be about 18 stalks of grain in one Sack of Flour.

    This is not enough flour.  For anything.

    Fortunately, I feel confident enough in my own baking skills to ignore pretty much everything about the ratios suggested in Skyrim's baking mini-game.  So let's skip the amounts and get straight to the sources: if all flour in Skyrim is wheat flour, what kind of wheat should we be using?

    Northern Europe continued to use older wheat varieties like einkorn well past the Middle Ages, but it's hard to find those wheats these days.  All-purpose whole-grain flour, preferably unbleached, should be good enough for our purposes—though if you can find any "ancient" wheat, like emmer or spelt, by all means give it a try!

    The Forgotten Seasons Creation adds a few more varieties of wheat, though they aren't food items and can't be ground into flour.  Their names are really... evocative, like Sickly Green Wheat, White Molded Wheat, and Glowing Red Wheat.  The in-game lore states that these were developed by the dwarves for some reason—possibly to irradiate unwitting guests with glowing red bread?—and I can't really imagine a real-world equivalent.  I was hoping that there might be a wheat version of red yeast rice, but it looks like most versions of koji are made with rice or soy, not wheat.

    Historically, northern Europeans would have mixed wheat flour with barley, rye, or oat flour, but none of those exists in Skyrim; it's possible even the ale in the game is a wheat-based beverage, rather than barley-based.  Farms could even have other grasses growing up amongst the grain, so various wild cereals might end up in a given harvest.  In Skyrim, the only other grass I can find seems to be a kind of pod grass, from which the player harvests Grass Pods; there is no indication that it is used in food.  Without those extra grains to add variety, all the flour-based products are going to taste pretty similar to one another, especially without herbs or spices to differentiate the breads.

    One way to combat this is, as stated above, using whole wheat rather than white flour; whole wheat is supposed to have a slightly nuttier flavor than white flour, though I can't say I've ever noticed much difference.  Another way is to toast some of the flour, which lightly caramelizes it.  Because the heat breaks down the proteins, most advice I've seen says you can replace up to 10% of the flour in a bread recipe with toasted flour (though you can use a lot more in cookies or cakes).  It should be stirred until golden-brown on the stove, or on a baking tray in the oven.  MasterClass and King Arthur Baking both have decent instructions on their websites for toasting flour.

Lightly-toasted flour is sort of beige or yellow.

    Similarly, you can add a bit of warmth and sweetness by baking with flour made from malted (sprouted) grains; however, the only grain I can find examples of is malted barley, and even malted barley flour is pretty rare on the market.  In theory, a person could take some actual heads of ripe wheat, pluck the seeds out, let them sprout, bake them to stop the sprouting, and then grind the sprouted seeds into flour.  I will probably not be doing that.  I might use some commercial malt flour when trying to improve on a Skyrim recipe, though, if I can find some.

    Finally, you could try for a textural difference by using meal or coarse flour, like semolina, instead of the finely-ground stuff, like all-purpose flour.  The loaf itself can be steamed instead of baked for a crustier end product, or given an extra rise to be fluffier.  If you're willing to make (or buy) a sourdough starter, you can have sourdough bread in your arsenal, as well.