Today, I made Peter Reinhart's master formula whole wheat bread from his new book Whole Grain Breads.  According to the text, soakers "change the way the dough performs, usually sweetening it and creating a richer more golden crust."

Normally, I never add sweetner to my sourdough recipes. Interestingly, I see that most of the recipes in the book call for a whopping 2 - 3 Tablespoons of honey or agave nectar; sugar or brown sugar, so I wonder if that is the reason why the bread is sweetened ....

Diane

Upstate NY 

Even though these are 100% whole wheat, I'm not even going to try convincing anyone (though I've tried to convince myself) that these are remotely healthy. But since whole wheat flour is what I've usually got on hand and since using whole wheat flour does make them somewhat less unhealthy (maybe), when I make sticky buns, I make them this way. The dough is an amalgamation of many recipes, but the filling and topping are from King Arthur Flour Whole Grains Baking.



In any case, however detrimental they may be to the body, these warm sticky buns are awfully good for the soul on a chilly weekend morning.

Just a quick post to show the Cream of Wheat I made using whole wheat ground

CREAM OF WHEAT

Though I'm sure I'll be lured away once again by the delights of a good poolish, I'm back to baking whole grains.

This picture is from a 100% whole wheat, rather high hydration dough. It had been kneaded for about 20 minutes at speed 2 in a Delonghi/Kenwood mixer. The lighting isn't that great, but if you look at the base of the left thumb, you'll see a fingertip behind the dough. The browner areas are simply dough that has not been stretched. This started as a piece of dough about the size of a golf ball And yes, it made nice bread - in this case a light sandwich loaf.

I was concerned that my success with the whole grain hearth bread that I posted about early last month was just a one-hit wonder. Thankfully, it seems I can repeat it. Here's a few loaves that have come out of the oven in the past weeks:

For Thanksgiving weekend, we've got guests for the first time in years. When we lived in Boston, Aurora and I decided after a couple of years traveling to Atlanta for Thanksgiving that it's just too much to hop on a plane. Flying on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving sucks rocks, and both of us always have to work that day, so we had to rush to the airport in the evening holiday traffic.