I am trying to make a wholewheat starter. For the past 6 days I have added 30 grams of wholemwheat brown flower plus 30 grams of water @ 20c. I am keeping it in an old ice cream box which is sitting outdoors where the temp is 3c at the moment.

It has started to bubble up and develope little holes in the surface. Its depth is about one and a quarter inches.

I have never tried this before so haven't a clue what I am doing! If the starter is successful, how much of it would I use to make a medium sized loaf and should the quantity of starter I have thus far (if it works!!!) big enough, or should it be considerable bigger please?

Best wishes,

RonB

Guys,

I have recently started baking again, and seem to have run into a small problem. I bought a new 10.5" by 5.5" by 3" one and a half pound loaf pan. Now, I am using the Whole Wheat honey-buttermilk recipe from the recipe section of this website, and have tried with 1.5 pounds as well as 2 pounds of dough. Neither seemed to fill the pan the way it should for a sandwich loaf, i.e. above the rim across the loaf pan. 

Now, the rise times for this loaf seems a little excessive (2.5 first, 1-1.5 second, and then post shaping), and as a result oven spring is minimal, as is the final rise. 

So, my question, is the weight appropriate for the loaf pan, and should I reduce rise time? Or should I increase the weight and keep the rising time the same?

I'm a sucker for heritage or heirloom wheats. I wanted to get 25 lbs of soft wheat berries and had started an order for them at Azure Standard ($10.50, organic) but then I remembered there's a farm nearby named Full Belly that I know sells Sonora wheat flour at farmer's markets in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

So I emailed them and they sell Sonora berries (25lbs @ $37.50, organic). That price is up there in the foodie stratosphere, but what the heck. After all, you can't get Sonora at your neighborhood grocery! I drove over the hill and picked it up at their farm in Guinda, California.

This morning I milled some up in my little Retsel mill and used stone wheels. I usually sift my flour through #30 and #50 sieves and then put the stuff caught in the #50 back through the mill again for a more finer flour, then use the stuff caught in the #30 for that rough whole wheat texture. I was surprised that almost all of the stuff left on top of the #30 was bran and almost none of the stuff left on top of the #50 was pure endosperm. I had unintentionally ended up with classic bolted white flour in the sifting tray on the first grind! I decided that I might as well have white refined flour for the first go-round with this Sonora, so I milled some more to bring up the quantity of flour I needed for the formula.

It tasted great, of course. Maybe I'll try it again and let the white flour age a couple of weeks, maybe not. It made some very nice scones. 

The goal:  A simple, 100% wholegrain, sourdough bread that I can make on an after-work weeknight schedule. 

I've tried a variety of approaches.  As is so often the case, simpler seems to be better.  On past attempts I was making things harder than they needed to be and the bread suffered.  This time I refrained from making any radical changes to the method and focused on a few details, trusting more to feel and less to thinking (and by thinking, I mean over-thinking... and over-thinking, and over-thinking).

Flour.  I switched from a WW bread flour that sounded good but just didn't feel right to a combination of Bob's Red Mill organic WW and Heartland Mills whole white wheat, about a 50/50 mix.  The dough felt better right from the start.

Hydration.  It needed more, so I gave it more.  I was resisting this earlier to keep the math simpler (I know, I know, but it seemed like a good idea at the time) and to keep the loaves from going flat, but the bread wants what the bread wants.

Salt.  Again, I ignored the math and reduced the salt because I was tasting too much of it in previous versions, even though the same amount worked fine using traditional methods.

Steam.  This method tends to produce a heavy crust so... less steam!

Fortune smiled on me and I managed to bake a couple nice loaves of bread.  It still isn't quite at the level of a one-day, Saturday sourdough, but it will certainly get me through when time is tight.  I plan to try this method again without any changes, and a result worth repeating must be a good sign.

The Method - for 2 loaves

Evening 1 - Starter Build - 335g WW flour, 250g water, 100g WW starter @ 75% hydration.  Mix 3-4 minutes.  Ferment @ room temp overnight, refrigerate the next morning.

Evening 2 - Final Dough - All starter, 500g Whole White Wheat flour, 200g WW, 2 tsp sea salt, 600g water.  Cut up starter and mix w/ dry ingredients.  Add water and mix until incorporated.  Knead 5-7 min wetting hands as needed.  Rest 5 min.  Knead 2-3 min.  Ball and refrigerate in closed container immediately.

Evening 3 - Proof and bake - Gently stretch dough into a rectangle 1 inch thick or less and place on floured board.  Cover with plastic wrap and let warm 1 hour.  Shape gently and proof 2 ½ hours.  My microwave functions as my proofing box.  It starts about 70F and will get to about 80F after 1 hour - this helps a lot.

Bake on preheated stone 500F for 5 min w/ steam.  Reduce heat to 460F and bake 45 min.  Place on cooling rack and go to bed.

Percentages (give or take, if you find fault with my math I don't want to hear about it, it's a work in progress [the math as well as the bread] =)) WW flour 52% / White WW flour 48% / Hydration 81% / Salt 1.6% / starter is approx. 35% of finished dough weight.

-Marcus

Bagels, the perfect antidote to an overdose of sticky, tempermental sourdough ryes.  They may not be the prettiest bagels to ever come out of the kettle, but YUM!  I don't know why I didn't try these sooner.  These are going to replace english muffins as my "easy, little, single-serving bread" of choice... at least for a while.  The simple fact that there is nothing sticky going on makes them a breath of fresh air.

They are 100% whole wheat, straight out of Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads.  I didn't have any barley malt syrup, so I used dark, local honey, but I will definitely be picking some up for the next batch.

I'm eager to try different additions to the boiling-water.  For this batch I used baking soda and a little molasses just for the heck of it, but that didn't seem to get me a very bagel-like crust.  Not that I'm going for any kind of serious authenticity here!  Not really in my nature to stress about that, and besides, I wouldn't know an authentic bagel if it jumped out of the oven and sang "New York, New York."

-Marcus

I've been baking a lot of stuff out of PR's _Whole Grain Breads_. His 100% whole wheat sandwich bread is awesome. It calls for a soaker (made with ww and buttermilk and salt) and a biga (ww and water and yeast).

Through inattention (I blame Sportscenter), I tried a variant yesterday -- the soaker used water and the biga used buttermilk. I'm happy to report it came out just as good. :)

I would say it came out better -- I liked it better -- than the correct method, but I think that the fact that it used Agave nectar instead of honey had more to do with it. I may do some side-by-side tests.

Maybe bread that is made solely with bleached
white flour, yeast, salt, sugar, and oil, does not have much nutrition in it,

I baked a Babka using half unbleached flour & half whole wheat flour & finished product tastes terrible having a sour taste to it.  I've baked Babka for many years, using only unbleached flour with great success, but I'm not sure - is wheat flour supposed to have a sour taste to it?

Also baked a batch of cinnamon rolls - my first attempt - well half way through the baking, the filling started to smoke.  I turned the temp down immediately, but don't understand why that happened.  The end product turned out beautiful, waiting for them to cool down so we can check the taste.  I followed a recipe that is supposed to be the original Cinnabon recipe.

Would appreciate any feedback.  Thank you all.  Love this site!

For those who may be interested, I've detailed a recipe for a 100% white whole wheat sandwich bread here:

http://www.breadcetera.com/?p=177

SteveB

Hi. Does anyone have a good recipe they tried out for making 100% whole wheat bread in a breadmaker? I dont want to use gluten nor any white flours. The yeast I have availabe is instant packet yeast. I dont mind using honey, sugar etc.  Thanks