Introduced within the early Nineteen Sixties, Wondra is the model title for a kind of instant flour that has been steamed and dried — a course of referred to as pregelatinization — earlier than being packaged and bought. The course of primarily precooks it and ends in an excellent high quality powder that simply dissolves in liquids.
“I love it,” chef and cookbook writer Adrienne Cheatham mentioned when speaking about making gravy for smothered hen. “For singer-ing the pan, [the French term for sprinkling the pan with flour when building a sauce], I use Wondra every time because you never have to worry about lumps.”
What units instant flour other than all-purpose is that it disperses simply and might be sprinkled in as-is to a liquid to assist thicken it with no need to make a roux, beurre manie or slurry. A canister of Wondra in your pantry will probably be a godsend the subsequent time you end up with a watery gravy that wants be salvaged on the final minute.
Beyond sauces, Wondra is nice for coating baking pans for simple launch. Its high quality texture makes it simple to evenly distribute throughout a pan’s floor in a skinny layer, which means that much less flour is added to a recipe, thereby not impacting the result.
Another results of the pregelatinization course of is that the flour’s potential to type gluten is diminished, making it behave just like low-protein flours akin to cake or pastry flour. This means Wondra can be utilized to make tender, flaky pie crusts, and it ends in crepe batter that doesn’t have to relaxation, as recommended by Julia Child in her seventh cookbook, “The Way to Cook.” Food author Allison Robicelli makes use of it in her angel meals cake recipe “that’s ethereally fluffy, no folding or futzing required,” she wrote. However, it’s vital to notice that it’s more costly than different flours — Wondra is about double the worth of cake flour and 5 instances as a lot as all-purpose — so I wouldn’t advocate it for recipes that require flour in massive quantities.
Instant flour can be nice when cooking animal protein. “Chefs love to use Wondra flour for dusting fish and meat,” meals author David Hagedorn wrote in a recipe for veal piccata. “It aids in even browning and prevents items from sticking during sauteing, but it doesn’t impart the pastiness that regular all-purpose flour can.”
Jacques Pépin calls for Wondra in his recipe for garlic hen breasts. And the oldsters behind “Modernist Cuisine” use it along with potato starch in their recipe for Korean-style hen wings for a long-lasting crisp. (They additionally advocate it as a thickener for creamed spinach.)
Chef Eric Rivera loves utilizing it to coat “lean and thin fish like petrale sole, or thin sliced fish like a ling cod or halibut,” he mentioned. Since this stuff prepare dinner so shortly, “about 30 to 60 seconds on each side,” the truth that the flour is basically precooked means there’s no fear about uncooked flour, even with the brief prepare dinner time.
“It’s great for creating a light, crisp crust on proteins, because it binds the surface liquids really well with an even coating that you can’t achieve by using raw flour,” Cheatham instructed BuzzFeed. “The crust is so light that it seems like there’s nothing on the protein at all. You just end up with a beautiful sear!”
And on the subject of getting a ravishing sear, Wondra is the key to nice scallops. As former Post deputy meals editor Bonnie S. Benwick wrote in 2016: “We’ve been taught never to expose a sea scallop in the skillet to very high heat, lest its tender meat turn rubbery and dry-looking cracks creep up from the bottom edges. The new ‘Poole’s: Recipes and Stories From a Modern Diner’ (Ten Speed Press, September 2016) has forced me to reconsider that position because of the way chef Ashley Christensen puts a dark sear on them. One side only is coated with Wondra flour, which promotes a brown crust.”