You know those times when you're trying to make a soup, gravy or sauce, and it turns out too thin? It's too late for the corn starch, a trick that works best before you add the water. Sure, you could try to mix some corn starch with a TINY bit of water, but there is a very high probability of a lump of unblended corn starch staring back at you from the pan. No one wants that.
Toasted flour is what you want in such situations, a teaspoon or two blends nicely into just about any hot liquid. Here's how to do it.
Tools:
A wok. I prefer the round-bottom kind.
A metal spatula, business end curved to match the curve of the wok
Ingredients:
White or unbleached flour
Procedure:
- Heat wok to almost-high.
- Put a quarter- to a third-cup of flour in the wok bottom. Sift through a wire strainer to remove lumps.
- After 30-45 seconds start scraping/stirring flour at 10-20 second intervals. Make sure you scrape/stir the flour off the bottom of the wok.
- Adjust heat as flour heats up; do not let it brown too fast or it will burn. Watch the edges of the pile of flour for browning.
- After a few minutes the flour will start to darken. Now scrape/stir continually.
- Flour is done when medium-golden. Dump it into a bowl and toast another batch.
A word about Wondra. It is flour product that dissolves fast even if the liquid is cold; this is achieved by removing most of the protein and adding gelatin and some malted barley flour. This is all well and good, but I never need to thicken anything cold, and toasted flour achieves the same thing with ordinary flour. So if you have flour already, why spend another three bucks on Wondra?
The best use I've found for toasted flour is that it speeds up the creation of mac & cheese. No more trying to brown the flour-butter mixture for umpteen minutes! Just melt the butter, throw in some toasted flour, blend, and proceed with the cheesy goodness as you normally would.
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