June 14, 2007 - 9:15am
Wanted: 100% WW Bread Recipe
does anyone have a good recipe for making 100% Whole wheat bread that they can share? most recipes i find only contain about 50% whole wheat flour. thanks,
david
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does anyone have a good recipe for making 100% Whole wheat bread that they can share? most recipes i find only contain about 50% whole wheat flour. thanks,
david
Here's a recipe I like.
I've used Laurel's recipe for "basic whole wheat" a bunch and have had great success. I use 100% stone ground WW and still get a good spring. I've substituted whole spelt as well but my hydration was too high...made a good tasting but flatish loaf.
Lately I've been trying variations on that recipe using the folding method and using sourdough. The fold method seems to work but I haven't determined if it works as well as 20 minutes of kneading. Still working on that one. The latest loaf came out pretty nice using stone ground, sourdough and the fold so I think I'm getting there. I did adjust the percentages a bit to get the hydration right with the sourdough (kept at 100% hydration) I mix everything (including the salt...which I want to try adding later the next time), let it rest for an hour, fold every 45 min or so 3-4 times and then let it rest till it passes the poke test, shape, proof and bake on a stone.
I'll post my proportions when I get home.
Sean
And hopefully see photos of your ww sourdough bread done with stretching/folding instead of kneading. Hope it works well because I want to give it at try. Good luck.
Has anyone else tried this? weavershouse
... works GREAT! Here's a blog post from May with pics in which I made whole wheat burger buns, Desem and whole wheat sourdough sandwich bread all with the stretch and fold method.
Well, I didn't get a chance to post this last evening but here it is today.
The formula (assuming my math is right...feel free to check it):
100% Flour
25% Starter @ 100% hydration
2% Salt
67% Water
The particulars for the recipe end up to be:
24oz 100% Stone Ground WW Flour
6 oz starter @ 100% hydration (3oz flour, 3oz water)
0.5 oz salt
16 oz water
I mix the flour and salt in one bowl, the starter and water in another and add the water/starter mix to the middle of the flour/salt and combine by folding with a spoon or a slightly cupped hand. Give it a good couple of swift strokes once everything comes together and then cover for an hour. After an hour, dump it on the counter and fold a few times until it forms a nice ball. After that I fold 3 more times every 45 minutes for a total of 4 cycles, let it rest until doubles, form one or two loaves, proof and bake. I put it into a 450f oven for 5 min with a pan of boiling water, mist the oven three times ala BBA and then drop the temp to 400 and bake 30 min more for two loaves or 35-40 for one loaf, check the temp and take it out when it is 200-205f.
I'm interested to hear what luck anybody else has with this. I've never gotten a very open crumb since I use stone ground and the coarseness inhibits fluffy loaves but we like how it tastes.
I usually see it double 3-4 hours after the last fold (assuming you gauge the doubling from the ball resulting from the first fold) with the ambient temp around 68-72f and I'm at about 5400 feet.
Sean
Rideold,
That's very close to recipes I've done, too. I've done two other things that got me to what seemed a little lighter more open crumb, even with WW.
1) Combine the flour/water without the salt and starter and allow to soak for an hour or more. I've actually let it soak all night, and I think that can make a big difference.
2) Use about 90% hydration. Your recipe above is 80% overall hydration if I got it right. I've found it makes a big difference to the density of the bread to get the hydration up higher with whole wheat.
Another way to get a similar result is to use only 25 grams of starter and adjust the flour and water to get the same formula overall (prefer 90% hydration). Mix all the ingredients together and form the dough. Let it rise overnight. It should take about 12-16 hours to double. What this does is let the dough soak a long time, similar to above, but you aren't messing with trying to incorporate the salt and starter later which can be a hassle.
One other thing. If it's organic flour that has not had any diastatic malt added to it, then it may benefit from a teaspoon of diastatic malted barley flour.
Bill
Bill:
Thanks much . I've never tried letting it rest that long. I remember now reading about the malt in the BBA and yes, the flour is organic. I think my formula calcs are done wrong. How do you get 80% hydration? I thought I was at 67%....time to get out the book and re-read that section. I'll give it a try tomorrow or Sunday and try to coordinate both suggestions. One with 90% hydration as is and the other with the smaller dose of starter (guess I should start that one tonight). Thanks again for the help.
Sean
Sean,
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I'm talking about total hydration of the overall formula for the dough. If you took all the water from the starter and the recipe and divide by all the flour from starter and the recipe, you would get the overall hydration. I think it is 80% for your formula, but I may be wrong. I'll try to check it again later, but I have to run off for the moment. I am still suggesting that you might want to try 90% overall hydration, although people sometimes have trouble handling the very wet dough. Watch out for problems with the couche sticking to the dough, if you use a couche. A pan is easier for a first try on this. Other problems would be having a hard time shaping the dough with enough tension, especially if it ferments a little too long and becomes overly puffy before shaping. You can punch it down, but then it may not rise back as much as you want, so I would try not to overdo the bulk fermentation. Similarly it's easy to let the final proof go a little too long. The oven spring will make up for a lot anyway, if you don't overproof. I guess I'm saying that wet doughs ferment a little faster somehow, and you can overdo it if you're used to lower hydration doughs.
OK, I'm back..., and I'm sorry because I was making an erroneous assumption that your percentages were of total flour weight in the dough, so I was counting the flour in the flour from the starter. I think your dough is therefore around 70% overall hydration, which I get by dividing (16+3)/(24+3), as in (16 oz of dough water plus 3 oz of starter water) divided by (24 oz of recipe flour plus 3 oz of starter flour). That's the number I'm suggesting should be 90%. You could get there by using about 21 oz of water instead of 16. If you want to have a little less trouble with slack dough, you could try something like 82%, i.e. use about 19 oz of water instead of 16 oz.
Again, sorry for not checking more carefully which way you were doing the percentages before I commented. I hope I didn't make yet more errors above.
Bill
Bill:
I get the same numbers as you do. Thanks for the clarification. I've adjusted my formula for 80 and 90% and will give it a go. I had at one time bumped my water way up to get a high hydration level but messed up my math and put so much in that I had to add something like 8 oz of flour to get the dough to behave....then I adjusted down to get an easy to shape dough but I see the need now to bump it back up. Of course with summer almost here my fermentation temp will be up and everything will act differently....need to dust off a spot in the basement!
Thanks again, Sean
Sean,
The dough will not come together when you mix it. It may not even come together after a further folding an hour later. However, by the second fold, it will come together.
I use wet hands and a wet counter for the initial folds or do it in the bowl, and then I use wet hands and a lightly dusted counter for subsequent folds. You dust off the flour after each fold to keep from incorporating flour or streaks into the dough.
Bill
this recipe has been foolproof for me, and makes a beautiful textured, well-risen bread.
I can't believe I forgot about both of these posts. My brain is getting doughy! I'm grinding my wheat tonight. Thanks so much. weavershouse
can someone go into a little more detail the stretch/fold method that was referred to earlier? is this just a repeated business fold which is actually done instead of kneading the bread? it seems to almost defy logic but i would be interested to hear this.
david
Hi David,
The following is a link to a blog of doing some WW loaves. I didn't convert my starter over, so it's something like 95% WW, but you could use a WW starter, and it could easily be 100% WW.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/3057/sourdough-whole-grain-sandwich-loaf
I didn't necessarily get the very highest quality loaves compared to some of the WW experts around here, but the blog entry more or less lays out a process that doesn't do much kneading at all, in accordance with the advice from JMonkey and other WW gods around the site. Check out "eye opening techniques" on the "highest rated stories" panel of the front page. Ehanner summarizes the folding techniques.
The key points seem to be a long rest (sometimes called an autolyse, if you do it only with the flour and water) - one hour or even overnight - of the flour and water, some "french folds" after everything is mixed, and then just stretch and fold a few times over the course of a few hours, depending on how fast the dough is designed to rise. I've had much better luck getting a lighter, more open crumb with recipes that have all or mostly whole grain bread by using the stretch and fold technique and fairly long rest periods for the flour and water.
The Seawater Sourdough Wheat Bread on my blog (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/blog/bwraith) is also a mostly whole wheat bread (just the starter was white flour, once again).
Bill