Hi,

I am newly registered here although I have been lurking around and learning a lot from the contributors of this forum.  I just had to register now because I ran into trouble with this flour and wonder whether there is anyone out there familiar with this flour.

I tried to bake wholegrain sourdough sandwich bread using this flour with a 12 % protein content.   As this flour is available at my area at a very very reasonable price, I really wish to bake nice loaves with this flour.  The recipe goes like this

300g sourdough starter at 100% hydration

350g Atta flour

185g buttermilk

185 g water

1.25 tsp salt

2 tbsp honey

2tbsp butter

What happened was I mixed the dough with my breadmachine, basically just getting them wet, then I let it rest for about 45 mins before I continued the kneading process on the machine.  I let it knead for 25 minutes until it sort of pass the windowpane test.  After that I retarded the dough in the fridge and then the next morning, took it out, let it rest on the counter for half an hour, and then I did a couple of stretch and folds at one hour intervals.  During the last stretch and fold, the bread actually tore.  The gluten strands seemed to be very weak. Does anyone out there have any idea why this is happening?

I have baked with this recipe using hard spring wheat flour and there were no problems at all.  The bread rose very well with a nice crumb although there was a bitter taste that I do not like which is why I am trying out this flour.

Thank you so much for paying attention to my thread.