The flour is not the problem

The received wisdom about baking Swedish recipes in Australia is that Australian flour is much stronger, and you should expect to adjust for it.

Both halves of that are mostly wrong, and the numbers are on the packet.

The labels

Kungsörnen's vetemjöl special, which is the Swedish bread flour, declares 12 grams of protein per 100. Laucke's Wallaby bakers flour, which is what an Australian home baker buys at the supermarket, declares 11.5.

The Swedish bread flour is, if anything, marginally stronger than the standard Australian one.

What confuses the comparison is that Sweden also sells a flour called plain vetemjöl, at 10 grams, and that is the one most people picture when they think of Swedish flour. It is a general-purpose flour and it is genuinely weaker than Australian bakers flour, because it is a different product for a different job. A Swedish recipe that says vetemjöl special means bakers flour. One that says vetemjöl means plain flour. The mistranslation happens at the ingredient, not at the border.

One trap worth knowing

You cannot compare a nutrition panel with a wheat classification figure, and it is very easy to do by accident.

Nutrition labels in both countries calculate protein as-is, using a nitrogen factor of 6.25. Grain traders and cereal chemists conventionally use 5.7, on a fourteen per cent moisture basis. Those produce different numbers for the same flour. Comparing two nutrition panels is fair. Comparing a panel against "Australian Hard, minimum 11.5 per cent" is not, even though the numerals line up so invitingly.

For the record, since it is genuinely useful: Australian wheat is classified by Grains Australia into classes with protein minima — Prime Hard at 13 per cent and up, Hard at 11.5, Premium White at 10.5, Standard White around 9.5 to 11.5, Soft at 9.5 and below. Those are grain classes. Mills blend across them, so no bag of flour maps onto one class.

Where the difference is real

At the level of the crop rather than the bag. Swedish milling wheat does trend low in protein — enough that Lantmännen, the big Swedish grain co-operative, dropped its minimum protein requirement for milling wheat and now buys low-protein loads and blends them up to hit specification. Protein runs lower in the south of the country and higher in the middle.

So the folk belief has a real thing behind it. It is about Swedish wheat in the field, not about the bread flour on a Swedish shelf, which is milled to a specification and comes out fine.

Hydration, and a number I am not going to give you

Higher-protein flour absorbs more water. That much is solid, and the physical reason is straightforward: dry gluten binds roughly twice its own weight in water, while undamaged starch binds about a third of its weight. More gluten, more water.

A coefficient would be the useful thing. Add one per cent protein, add this much water. No such figure exists in the cereal-chemistry literature. The published position is that absorption rises with protein linearly, and that the slope of that line depends on the wheat variety. On top of which, protein is not even the only driver: damaged starch from milling and pentosan content both raise absorption independently, and the damaged-starch difference between two flours of identical stated protein can be larger than the protein difference between two different flours.

This is exactly why bakers hold back water and add it by feel instead of computing it, and it is why every confident "add two per cent hydration per point of protein" you read is somebody's rule of thumb wearing a lab coat.

So what do you actually change

Less than you were told. If a Swedish recipe calls for vetemjöl special, buy bakers flour and follow it. If it calls for vetemjöl, use plain.

I do add water. Usually about two per cent more than a Swedish recipe asks for, and I want to be careful about what that number is and is not.

It is not a conversion rate. It is not derived from the protein figures above, and if you take it away from this piece and apply it to your flour you are doing the thing I have just spent six paragraphs arguing against. It is where I ended up after enough batches with the flour I buy, in my kitchen, at the hydration I like. Somebody using a different bag would land somewhere else, and the literature says exactly that: the relationship is real, and its slope depends on the wheat.

So the useful version is the habit rather than the figure. Hold back some of the liquid, mix, look at the dough, and put the rest in if it wants it. My two per cent is what that habit has averaged out to. It is a description of a bench, not a rule.