My first attempt at croissants.  We're a 100% whole wheat family, so that's what I used.  Also, since I cannot find anything but bleached white flour on the local market  (we're posted to Turkmenistan), I hand milled the flour.  Not bad, if I do say so myself.  Could have added some salt to the butter slab, and next time I'll do an egg wash, but overall a success!

I've been actively experimenting with my sourdough this week, trying to come up with various sourdough sandwich breads.  This one makes the mark, I think.

I'm trying my best to try out whole grains, including rye, oats, and whole wheat. I'm trying to cut down on the purely white bread I consume, and I'm also trying my hardest to get a good amount of fiber into my diet. This bread has the benefits of being 35% whole grain flour, and has just the right tang to work for a beef or turkey sandwich.

Rye flour makes up 10% of the whole grain flour and whole wheat makes up the other 25%. For the rest of the flour I used normal King Arthur bread flour.  My hydration was somewhere between 70-80%, and the bread was impossible to knead by the normal method...I just folded. A lot. The initial rise took almost 6 hours, and the proofing went for 1.5 hours. I made two small boules.

I'm pretty happy with how the texture of both the crust and the crumb turned out on this bread. I think the oven could've pre-heated a bit more, though, to give me more crunch on the bottom, but the top is right as it should be.

The starter used was fed up as I normally feed my starter, at about 100% hydration.

If you want the recipe, I'll post it. Otherwise I'll keep working. :)

Hey All,

Just wanted to share with you all my experiment baking whole wheat bread...  This is 85% whole wheat flour with 15% bread flour, and 85% total hydration...  I also used a small biga starter, and a long autolyse for the whole wheat portion of the dough...  The texture of this bread was lighter than I expected, but not quite what I had intended...  I would like to try for a lighter texture in the future...  The flavor however is has a wonderful sweetness to it...  There is no added sugar or anything other than flour, water, yeast, salt, and time...  Lemme know what you think.  I can post a recipe if any of you are interested in trying this one out...  It takes about 11 hours to make...

Tim

I have recently been making all of our bread at home because our middle son has so many food intolerances that it is just safer (not to mention cheaper and tastier!) to make everything.  Also everything has to be dairy free because he is lactose intollerant.  I usually substitute rice milk and canola oil or extra virgin coconut oil for the milk and butter.  I have done pizza dough, pita, dinner rolls and hamburger buns all with excellent results.  My sandwich loaves are okay but I haven't been WOWed by them.  I usually try to do a long ferment with my sandwich loaves because I love the flavors that are created and the ease at which gluten is developed with less kneading.  BUT, I tend to have problems with large bubbles in the crust that mess up the whole loaf.  I have been slicing the tops to reduce this isn't truly fixing the problem - if I didn't slice then I would still have the large holes.  I probably need to knead the bread more of differently but I have trouble with my wrists and don't want to overdo it(for my sake).   I really want to make a whole wheat sandwich loaf that tastes good but can't seem to pull it off.  Maybe I haven't found the right recipe or technique yet.  Right now I am using half whole wheat half bread flour and also adding vital wheat gluten because if I use all whole wheat nobody wants to eat the bread! I could really use some good recipes and tips to help me make a good sandwich loaf for my family.

Jennifer

I made Pita!  My first time.  I had thought, maybe, there was some voodoo involved, but there isn't.

I used Beatrice Ojakangas' "Whole Wheat Pita Bread" recipe on page 277 of "Great Whole Grain Breads".  I stuck the dough in the fridge overnight, planning to pick up her instructions after the kneading.  But the recipe got confusing.  If I took her literally, I would "preheat" the oven to 500 after I stuck the rounds in the oven; didn't make sense since I was baking only for 4-5 minutes and in three batches.

I sat on the floor and watched through the oven window each batch bake.  After about the two-minute mark, they would start to fluff up.  By the end of the baking time, they were fully-puffed out.  I ate one and it was delicious!  Next time I'd probably make them a bit smaller, though.

Does anyone know of a pita-making video?  I think that might help.

Rosalie

When I first made my sourdough starter, and it appeared strong enough to use, I began my baking cautiously, with a couple of loaves in my bread machine. The first was a basic white bread from a sourdough book I found on our bookshelf at home. I simply scaled it for my machine, added the ingredients in the order my machine expects, hit the basic bread button, and let it go. It was a little wet, so I added a little flour in the mixing stage, but that's all. The bread came out fine. If anything it was a little higher than the normal recipe with yeast I was used to. I thought, "this sourdough stuff is easy. It's just like using commercial yeast."

So then, I proceeded to try to convert my favorite 100% whole wheat bread machine recipe to sourdough. I built myself a whole wheat starter over a few days, and proceeded to convert. My book called for 1 ½ cups of starter for a 2-pound loaf, so I subtracted the amounts of flour and water in that amount of starter from my recipe, and proceeded as in the first loaf, this time using the whole wheat button. This loaf didn't rise nearly as high as my normal whole wheat loaf, so it was a bit heavy, but the taste was great. I decided I'd better learn more about baking with sourdough.

That led me to the yahoo sourdough and bread machine groups, to breadtopia.com, to thefreshloaf.com, and to other sites. I learned about bigas, and poolish, and levains, and preferments, and autolyze, and French fold, and stretch-and-fold. I learned about how to make my breads more sour, or less sour (conflicting advice, to be sure). I learned about oven spring and how to achieve it (conflicting again). I learned about cloches and bannetons; baking stones and quarry tile; and much, much more. And along the way, I tried to apply what I was learning to producing my whole wheat bread with sourdough starter.

I tried letting my machine do the kneading, then stopping it to let the dough rise slowly, then using the bake cycle to cook it. I tried adding another rise, after kneading the dough a bit by hand. I tried making a wetter dough, and using the French fold technique instead of kneading. I tried using a presoak before mixing in my starter and other ingredients (other than flour and water), letting the dough rest for an hour, doing a few stretch-and-folds, wait 30 minutes, stretch-and-fold, repeat twice more, let it rise until doubled, stretch-and-fold a few more times, shape into loaves, let rise in loaf pans, retard overnight, let rise a few more hours, and bake in the oven. Each attempt has been another step backward from my first, naïve bread machine attempt. I am now consistently producing the famous doorstops.

I am, of course, a novice at all this. But, I am clearly not getting good gluten development, and not getting good rise. On the chance the problem might be my whole wheat starter, I made a loaf of New York Times no-knead bread, using 1 cup of my starter, and 2 ½ cups of white flour. It turned out great.

My ultimate goal is to be able to make my weekly 100% whole wheat loaf in my bread machine, using sourdough instead of yeast. But, at this point, I just want to produce a good loaf, even if it is completely by hand.

Do any of you wiser, more experienced hands have any suggestions?

Dave

Hi. I've set a dough of Peter Reinharts Struan from WGB, made with whole grain rice. However the soaker became more batter-like or porrige-like than what I expected, which resultet in a very very wet final dough. Because of this I added a lot of extra flour  to get the kind of dough that I'm used to. I can't find another explaination than that I've misread the instructions or measured wrong (I suspect my weight to not be entirely good). Have other had similar experiences?

This is my second ever sourdough attempt. The recipe is adapted from Susan from the  Wild Yeast Blog and converted to use with sourdough. Here are the modifications I made:

• Instead of making the poolish, I made a 100% hydration levain from my stiff WW sourdough starter to equal the amount of poolish. 
• Skipped the yeast called for in the final dough.
• Fermented for 2hrs at ~75deg F, folding at 30, 60 and 120min.
• Retarded in fridge overnight (~8hrs).
• Took dough out of the fridge and let it warm up for ~1hr before shaping.
• proofed for ~2hrs. 
• I also halved the recipe. 

And here are the results:

They tasted divine! I do think 1. I over fermented (the dough had almost tripled in volume while i slept =P ) and 2. I handled the dough a little too much during shaping. Hence the lack of big holes like Susan's.  But the texture is still light, and I've happily eaten them as is, with honey, with cheese spreads, with soup, and in a sandwich. Very versatile bread!

Ah, my images are blurry and pixely -- they're taken with the iSight camera on my macbook pro. Sigh.... I must be the last person on earth (well, maybe the last person on the internet is more accurate) without a digital camera...