A testament to soaking...

I've read a number of places on this fantastic site about the benefits of soaking whole grain flours before incorporating them into a dough, and I happened to give it a try yesterday while preparing today's loaf of bread, a Rosemary and Thyme Sourdough Boule.  While I was preparing the fresh herbs, I added the usual amount of (hot) water to the 1 cup of wholewheat flour I wanted to use in the dough.  That soaked while I stripped the thyme off the stalks and chopped the rosemary needles.  I threw the herbs on top of the soaking flour (and incidentally, I had also added the tablespoon of olive oil I generally add to my loaves to the water before adding the flour, don't know if that made any difference).  Anyway, being as this was the first time I had soaked the flour, and adding to that the fact that this was the first boule I've used exactly half and half of whole wheat and strong white flour, I was really, really pleased with the result!  The hydration was no different with this loaf than my other loaves, but I believe the soaking is what resulted in a gorgeously moist and light and fairly open crumb, despite the higher than usual proportion of whole wheat (and therefore lower than usual proportion of higher gluten white flour).  Anyway, I just wanted to encourage anyone who is considering increasing the amount of WW they use in their bread, but doesn't want to sacrifice lightness and moistness of the loaf (wholewheat doesn't have to be dense and dry!) to give soaking a try.  Another thing of interest to me was that usually when I use more wholewheat than usual, I find I have to add a little extra water to compensate, and sometimes I can't quite get the dough moist enough before kneading is done so the end result is on the dry side, which can be very frustrating.  However, with this loaf I used exactly the same amount of water as usual, and the resulting dough was the perfect combination of stickiness (stuck to my hands but not the counter), and even required a tiny bit of extra flour in the kneading process!  I have read that wholewheat soaks up water quickly, then releases some of it again after a period of time, so my conclusion is that it must soak up a lot of the water straight away when not soaked, and not get the time to release it again before kneading begins.  I'm no expert, and this certainly wasn't a controlled experiment, but from now on I will be soaking my wholewheat flour!