I have been baking for a little while, but I’m having trouble switching over to whole wheat. I do have a mill and grind it myself. I’ve got so many questions and I feel like I’m never going to exactly replicate lamination and other things, but here’s a basic question- is it possible or advisory to knead a 100% whole wheat dough to “windowpane” status? I am having mixed results and only twice have reached what I would call pretty close. Thank you!
It depends on what kind of bread you want to produce but mostly no - if you are making a bread that has a relatively long fermentation time. After initial mixing and kneading (by hand or machine), doing a series of Stretch-and-Folds during the bulk ferment period will bring out enough gluten strength to produce a fine loaf.
If you are using yeast rather than a starter you can get a longer ferment by using less yeast. Instead of a packet, for example, you could use 1/2 tsp. With a longer ferment, the bread will taste better, too.
I would suggest that you start out with only part whole wheat, though, say 50%. It will be easier and you can get used to handling these kinds of doughs. You could also sift out the largest bran bits; that will make the bread rise better and be easier to handle.
Others will chime in with other suggestions, don't worry!
TomP
So when you talk about fermentation, are you meaning sourdough types? I think you are just meaning the yeast rise but I don’t usually here it that way lol. I have dipped my toe in the water with those (sourdoughs), but for this particular bread, I’m actually trying to change my just regular staple sandwich loaf bread (got a recipe that calls for 100%wheat so I wouldn’t have to guess as much), but it didn’t state how long or to what consistency to knead to. It usually has about 30 minutes in the bowl with the yeast and the water and a few cups flour just to give it time to double (don’t know if this is technically a rise), then add a couple cups more flour and there’s another rise, then the rising in the loaf pan. But the rises themselves don’t typically take very long. I’m having fairly good results, but this recipe makes either two large loaves or three small ones so my time between experiments is lengthened lol. I think I messed up last week and added some spelt to the whole wheat just to try it, and I’m not sure if my less than stellar results were because I kneaded less or added the spelt. I have sifted out bran before as well, especially with cakes. It can be very disheartening when you feel like your things used to all taste good but now even your cake tastes “too healthy” 😄
Hi Cary,
I also grind my own flour and often bake 100% whole wheat bread. In my experience, I never need to mix the dough to full windowpane to get a light, airy loaf.
Example:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/71297/20221020-simple-100-wholewheat-bread-clas
If you were referring to lamination in puff pastry, I make 100% whole wheat puff pastry with freshly milled flour too. The dough usually starts out shaggy or just barely cohesive—definitely nowhere near windowpane—but it smooths out beautifully as it’s extended and folded repeatedly.
Yippee
You have no idea how happy I am to hear that one day I might be able to do a whole wheat puff pastry. I didn’t think it was possible. You’ve made my night!
YIPPEE,
Please show us your ww puff pastry and tips on how to do it!!!
Pretty close is close enough. Do remember it is a different beast. You'll have to adjust for it but those are really minor. You'll get it - eventually. Enjoy!
Thank you for the encouragement! I was afraid to ask such a basic question with all these bread masters on here, but glad I did. ☺️
There's never a bad question (within reason that is) - just beware the answers. Enjoy!
A nice,soft sandwich bread can be made with 100% WW flour but there are a few things that need to be done to get there. Whole wheat dough needs not only enough hydration but also time to absorb it. From the brief description, it sounds like some of the flour and water is allowed to sit for a short period of time but then additional flour is added and that goes through a relatively fast bulk fermentation. The added flour does not have enough time to really soak water into the branny bits and after baking will probably be prone to cracking and crumbling as you try to take a bite of your sandwich.
So enough water and time for all the branny bits to absorb it are very important. Additionally, IMO, it is always important to develop the dough, either through kneading, stretch and folds, autolysing and secondary mixing, cold retards, or any method you want to try. Personally, I like to make a liquid preferment and mix my dough up in the evening, cold retard overnight in an oiled container and warm, shape and rise before baking the next AM. Lots of time to absorb water and develop flavor.
It would really be helpful if you could share your recipe, handling and timing. It would be much easier to help if you weighed the ingredients, also, but not totally necessary.
I absolutely can share the recipe and will try to do so tomorrow when I can type it all out. It’s my daughter’s recital weekend so it might take a little bit for me to post it. Unfortunately I don’t remember where I got it he recipe, and it doesn’t have weights. I usually like to weigh all my ingredients as well, but I have recently learned that whole wheat weighs differently than white flour. I’d never even thought about it before. I can definitely do overnight in the fridge. I do that with some other kinds of breads as well. What you’re saying makes sense as it has been more crumbly than my other, slower-rising breads. I will post tomorrow or Saturday at latest. Thank you!
Weighing ingredients is useful but not totally necessary. It helps with sharing recipes, sizing up or down, and analyzing the baker's percentages for different outcomes. However, with more words and more observations (and pics!), similar activities can occur.
As far as WW flour weighing differently than AP flour, all the different flours and ingredients weigh a bit differently. And not only that, I learned that the same ingredient can weigh differently in different kitchens by different bakers. Humidity and temperature also play a part.
I did an experiment with my daughter several years ago in her kitchen, using her measuring cups. It illustrated the difference in individual bakers. We were converting an old family white sandwich bread recipe from cups to weights so she could scale it down. The original recipe was from a grandparent that baked for all the farm hands. My daughter just needed 2 loaves-not 6. We set up 2 bowls and 1 scale. We started the recipe by each of us pulling 1 cup flour from the flour bin and weighing it. We put the flour back and did this 3 times each, we thought in the same manner-fluff the flour in the bin, scoop and sweep, weigh in grams. We were astonished at how different each cup weighed, even when the same person weighed it. In converting the recipe, we scooped and weighed each ingredient 3 times and used an average for the final recipe. We were successful in devising the final recipe.
I have also done this experiment using different measuring cups and different brands of AP flour. Quite an eye opener. A 1 cup measuring cup is not necessarily the same as another 1 cup measuring cup. There can be significant differences. And some flours also measure differently when it is raining out than when it is very dry atmosphere. Makes sense but also tells us not to get too focused on highly accurate/close weights. Bakers still need to "feel" the dough. So, weigh or measure or just toss it in the bowl. Many of my best loaves have been tossed together. It just makes it hard to analyze, share or scale up/down.
BTW, if you search my past posts you will find many discussions on making fluffy bread with WW flour. Many of these discussions also have other-very helpful and skilled bakers: MiniOven (excellent work in WW and great 100% rye formula) and TxFarmer (Beautiful bakes-noted for WW Tangzhong Milk Bread and great windowpane pics, if they are still available) and Dabrownman (all manner of breads but great with WW) are some I remember. I've been here a long time and WW is not a new topic. Have fun!
You are right, and I do know that even with my different baking cups the measurements are different. So I thought I was being meticulous with weighing until I realized the difference with all these things. I do try to go by feel and sight, but this is where it would really be handy to see this in person. Sometimes videos aren’t enough. I try to leave my dough as wet as possible while still being workable just because wheat is already kind of dry in my opinion. I have been cooking for longer than baking and have an innate sense of how to cook things now even if I’ve never made it before. Just waiting on that for baking lol. Thank you so much for those posts! I will be checking those out.
Ingredients:
3 cups warm water.
2 0.25 ounces packages of active dry yeast.
1/3 cup honey
5 cups hard white wheat flour
3 tbsp melted butter
Another 1/3 cup honey
1 tbsp salt
2 to 3 1/2 cups hard white wheat flour
2 tbsp butter
Directions:
Punch down, and divide into three loaves. You can freeze two of the loaves at this point. For the third loaf, place in greased 9 x 5 loaf pan and allow to rise while covered. Let the dough top the pan by 1 inch. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes. Do not overbake. Once out of the oven brush the top with 2 tablespoons melted butter.
so my note on here is that I try never to use all this flour (the max amounts listed) because it is usually too dry and crumbly. I am going to make some more bread Monday and am going to let it sit overnight in fridge as suggested. The reason I initially asked about kneading until window pane status is that I hear about dough being overworked and overproved (thanks for nothing, British Baking Show). Not sure how I would know for sure if these things are happening. Anyway, thank you and any other tips appreciated!
Stay away from overnight - what's left isn't the best. Enjoy!
WW does very well with an overnight cold retard. My favorite 100% hard red, gome-milled loaves are mixed, kneaded , put in an oiled container and started to rise about 1/4 and then refrigerated overnight. There is enough residual heat and activity that in the am it is often completely risen and then stopped. Sit at room temp half hour or so, shape,proof and bake. Works well for me. Well-hydrated, soft 100% WW loaf.
For an overnight stay, I would reduce the yeast by quite a bit. And you really won't need to worry about getting a window pane with an overnight rest. The extra time will develop and tame that gluten for you.
TomP
When I do an overnight cold retard (a fully ready dough that is just chilled overnight to hydrate and slow down), I try and start with a sticky dough. Sticky means it should somewhat adhere to your finger when you lay your finger on it and pull away. By morning it will become tacky- meaning it is like a post-it note. It feels sticky but nothing adheres to your fingertip when you lay a fingertip flat on it and pull away. So feel the dough-either add a little more water or a little less flour as you are mixing so that it becomes a little sticky rather than the lovely softness of a well mixed dough. That will develop overnight.
I do agree with the folks saying it sounds like there are improvements to make with your process, but I’ve done a bit of experimenting with gluten development in whole wheat doughs and will share what I’ve learned in general.
I have just started working with hand kneading whole wheat doughs (so far only commercial flour and commercial yeast), but between my experiences and a few comments I’ve come across where people say they can get a window pane hand kneading freshly milled flour, I do think it is possible. But it might require 30 minutes of active kneading time. Potentially more, depending on technique. Fortunately, a windowpane isn’t necessary for great bread.
Some things that help with gluten development:
I’ll also note that personally, in my kitchen, I can only get a windowpane from whole wheat doughs after a 15 minute rest (10 is not enough). Even 100% refined bread flour doughs, sufficiently kneaded, struggle to form a small windowpane unless I rest them. When I make seitan via the chickwheat shreds method, in which you take a dough with a dramatically higher gluten content than any bread will ever have and knead it in a high powdered food processor for 2 minutes to create an astonishingly strong gluten network… I can’t get a windowpane out of that dough without resting it for 15 minutes.
I’ve seen videos of good windowpanes pulled from 100% freshly milled flour doughs in <60 seconds from the time machine kneading is stopped. So it is possible to get a windowpane immediately. It just doesn’t seem to happen in my kitchen with any of the doughs or any of the techniques I have tried so far.
So while being able to pull a windowpane immediately isn’t necessary for a nice bread, if you’re hung up on it, try resting your dough for 15 minutes and see what happens. After you’ve made relevant changes to your process, of course.
Cary,
A few years back, TFL hosted a Community Bake on the WSU Bread Lab’s Approachable Loaf challenge defined by them as…
“…tin-baked and sliced, contains no more than seven ingredients and no non-food. It is at least 60-100% whole wheat and priced under $8/loaf depending on regionality.”
A number of the bakes posted by our colleagues here dived into production challenges with high whole grain content. The archive is longish but there’s a lot of great anecdotal and analytical commentary you might find useful.
Bonne chance,
Phil
Thank you Phil! I’m off to read that long post. I look forward to it!
VerdigRegis thank you for all these points. Some of them I have not considered, and some of them I have actually suspected myself such as not adding flour during the kneading process. I also feel like that sets the clock back to zero so to speak. I have used vital wheat gluten before, and I don’t have anything specifically against it, except for the fact that it’s just one more thing to add. I feel like I would like to make it as simple as possible. I feel like I’m cheating 😄. I wouldn’t mind to use it if I could just get a really good loaf first without it. I know that sounds weird, but I would like to know I could do it myself first. I don’t think I’ve heard of just the water and flour resting before. If I did, I didn’t know the name for it. I’ve been looking into it and didn’t realize how helpful this would be whole wheat. It seems to be a step I have just somehow skipped or hadn’t read about before, but I will definitely try this. And I know what you mean about different kitchens. The reason I am frustrated partially is that I have not been making this recipe very long, but I had made it a few times in a different house before we moved, and I had better results every time in that house than I have in any of the times I’ve tried to make it at this house. Thank you for your help!
If you're using mainly hard red or hard white wheat, vital wheat gluten shouldn't be necessary. The feeling that it's cheating is pretty common. We've each got our own priorities for our bread and it's great that you're sticking with yours!
Also, regarding your concerns about overworking the dough in another comment, you are absolutely not going to get there by hand. It would probably take well over an hour of intense kneading. You would fatigue and potentially be in quite a bit of pain before it happens. In the videos I've watched on the subject, it takes 45+ minutes in a mixer, and those work much faster than we can by hand.
Thank you so much everybody. I’m glad to know that I’m WAY off from overworking it. That was my main concern with kneading too long. I’m happy to have some differing points of view because I am a person who likes to experiment by nature. I have a huge garden full of victories and failures from my experiments. So I’ll be trying a lot of things with bread too. And I appreciate the note on sticky versus tacky because I do try to leave it as wet as possible, but when it is too sticky, it is not easily worked and I think in that case the refrigerator might be a way to go. I’m sure I’ll be on again in soon with some follow up questions. 😄