Vienna Bread - Hungarian High Milling

Hungarian High Milling

Hungarian high milling used a hard or tenacious variety of Hungarian wheat. Their mills were outfitted with both stone and steel-roller mills, and were using a new process that was undoubtedly at the forefront of the technology of the day. This time period marked a changeover from one-pass stone grinding or low milling with its higher damaged starch content, to that of roller milling with greater speed, efficiency, and cooler-temperature operation.

Horsford wrote, "... the quality of the Hungarian wheat ... being rich in flour of extraordinary keeping quality ... contains more gluten than other varieties of wheat. ... The Hungarian flour produced by high milling, is, in the points of purity, whiteness, yield and keeping qualities, not equaled by that of any other country. ... The mills of Buda-Pesth, for the most part erected or enlarged between 1865 and 1869 ... contain 500 run of stones, and 168 Walz sets (of three pairs each) of steel rollers. They have a capacity of about 1,000,000,000 pounds of wheat per annum...." Horsford observed that high-milled flour contained less damaged starch, "In comparing this flour No. 0 with ordinary low-milled flour, under the microscope, one remarks a striking uniformity in size among the particles of the latter. One also remarks relatively very few broken or bruised starch-grains in the high-milled flour, while the reverse is true of the low-milled flour."

The origins of high milling appeared to be Austria. Horsford attributed the phrase high milling to Vienna grits or greis, and which were claimed to be on sale in Berlin as early as 1810. The recognized pioneer was a miller named Ignaz Paur (1778-1842) who by 1810 had moved to Leobersdorf. The demand for these grits was so great, hand sifting them was inadequate, so Paur employed the services of a cabinet maker named Winter to build the first middlings purifier. Paur milled already-separated grits a second time, first making an extract flour locally known as Auszug. Over the course of several decades, these high-milling techniques spread to Hungary, Saxony, and Bohemia, among other areas. In Hungary, the steel cylinder or roller mill, locally known as the Walzenmühle, was first invented, and later improved. The Walz sets kept the grain cooler over multiple passes, as successive pairs of rollers were adjusted to incrementally smaller spacings, the grain moved through cooling air from one pair to the next, each cracked them pass-by-pass into smaller successive bits, instead of crushed between stones in one heat-generating pass.

At the Pesth Walzenmühle, when wheat had been fully transformed to flour, it had passed through 18-to-24 pairs of rollers. This new cold milling process, particularly well suited for hard wheat, likely resulted in lighter, more airy breads of greater baked volumes.