whole wheat bread

My husband is on a whole grains kick and I want to make whole wheat bread. All the recipes I have found include white flour. Can I substitute whole wheat for the white or should I just not tell him there is some white flour because the quality will suffer otherwise.
Paulette

paulette wrote:My husband is on a whole grains kick and I want to make whole wheat bread. All the recipes I have found include white flour. Can I substitute whole wheat for the white or should I just not tell him there is some white flour because the quality will suffer otherwise.
Paulette

Paulette,

First off, I've never tried to make 100% whole wheat bread -- maybe I should. Anyway, in my experience, making Italian-style bread, the more whole wheat flour I use, the less the dough will rise. One needs to experiment with the proportions to get a balance of characteristics that one likes.

For my basic whole wheat bread, I use approximately 42% (at most 50%) wholewheat flour, though I like it with less as well (grey bread) (though I actually think of it as 'white bread plus' rather than a kind of whole wheat bread). In any event, with ca. 40-45%, I get both good flavour and good texture of crumb, at least as far as my family is concerned.

That same basic whole wheat dough of mine I used to make a bakery-style pizza ("pizza bread") recently and it came out really nicely:
Wholewheat 'Pizza Bread' (bakery-style pan pizza)
http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=10964

Antonius

This is a basic whole wheat bread mix, there are many many adaptations with honey, nuts, etc. and can be found in vegetarian or health cookbooks. This is from the Book of Whole Grains by Marlene Anne Bumgarner, St. Martin's Press, 1976

3 cups milk or water
3 TBSP. oil or margarine
1 TBSP salt
1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup molasses
2 TBSP active dry yeast
1/4 cup lukewarm water
6 1/2- 7 cups whole wheat flour

Combine milk, oil,salt, honey and molasses in a saucepan, heat and stir until blended. Remove from heat and cool to lukewarm. Dissolve yeast in 1/4 cup lukewarm water. Pour liquids from saucepan in to a large bowl and add yeast. Stir in 3 cups flour, beating well to develop gluten. Stir in remaining flour and turn onto a a well floured board. Knead thoroughly until dough is smooth and elastic. Turn in to oiled bowl, turning over dough once to coat. Cover with damp cloth and let rise for 1 hour. Punch down to form 2 loaves and place in 2 well greased bread pans, let rise, covered for 45 minutes. Bake at 375 for 45 minutes or until loaf sounds hollow when thumped.

Granted this is the "old" way of making bread, maybe someone has a recipe for a breadmaker. We used to make this all the time 15-20 years ago, too easy now to find whole wheat bread in a store!

I think that if you change the recipe to all whole wheat flour, it will not come out with the bread-like consistency you are used to - it will come out more resembling a brick than bread.

Hi Paulette

I bake a lot of bread and recommend you not try and use 100% whole wheat flour unless you're pretty comfortable with making bread in general. You'll probably want to experiment with proportions, but 50% whole wheat will give you bread that rises well and slices nicely with a good texture and even crumb. You can substitute wheat germ for about 1/2 cup of flour if you choose. Too much and the bread will be heavy.

If you're ready to branch out and have a good sense of how the dough should feel, try the 100% whole wheat recipe from King Arthur Flour.
Their website is http://www.kingarthurflour.com

It's important to give the bread enough time to rise or the resulting loaf will be leaden.

Good luck

Diannie's advice is excellent. I add only that you need to be very careful not to add too much flour when you're kneading. The dough should not be stiff, and you should oil your hands rather than flouring them.

I also like to add bulgar for some textural contrast. You could use cracked wheat instead, but then you'd have to soak it first.


Edited to add that King Arthur also has an excellent Primer on whole wheat breads. It strongly suggests starting with a sponge, which is generally good advice, but particularly in this case.

What type of whole wheat bread are you looking to make?

I made a 100% whole wheat flour sandwich bread with a bit of maple syrup last week and it turned out excellent. I just used the recipe on the King Arthur Whole Wheat Flour bag, though bastardized it a bit as I didn't have powdered milk, so substituted regular milk for that and the water.
Jamie

Although I used to bake all our bread, work interfered and have not done it in years. Now I'm retired and started baking, something else I never really got into before. All of a sudden everyone wants me to bring dessert. I decided to go back to bread making but as I said my husband doesn't want to eat white flour. I did see the recipe on King Arthur whole wheat flour and hesitated because of the dry milk. I think I'll try it using milk. Thanks for the advice and I'll let you know how it turns out.

Oh as aside, we have down sized three times in the last ten years and now I find myself missing a lot of the stuff I used to own. I have purchased a new processor, and some new baking pans. When I was looking at bread recipes I discovered I really don't have good bread pans. I also need to get a new rolling pin and pie plates since that was something I enjoyed doing and my son VI is always looking for pie.

Will report back.
Paulette

I'd just like to add a note on dry milk as a bread ingredient. I use non-instant dry milk (non-fat) but it can be hard to find. King Arthur carries it on their web site but I buy it from Home Economist. (Yes the Westmont store is still open). It keeps pretty well but tends to clump. I just sieve it before measuring. I really like the body milk gives to bread. Of course, as others have noted, you can substitute liquid milk for some of the water.

I occasionally use the bread machine I received as a gift years ago and dry milk is perfect for timed machine baking.

Diannie

I've done some 100% whole wheat baking, and everyone is right, it makes a denser loaf that doesn't rise as much as a mix of whole wheat and white flours.

It's worth experimenting with. There's two good books on 100% whole wheat baking, "Recipes from the Old Mill" and "Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book." If you only get on, I'd recommend Laurel's Kitchen first.

As for equipment, we're in a relatively small place, so storing equipment is always tough. We have a standing mixer, and had a pizza stone for baking for while. However, a few weeks ago we discovered baking bread in a dutch oven works out really well. You get all the "rustic" crust you want from a baking stone and lots of water in the oven tricks. It means that boule shaped breads are easiest to do, but that's fine by us.

Chris

Well I finally got around to baking bread since my husband ran out of whole wheat crackers so I said I would make it.
First, thanks Jamie for the advice on using milk instead of water and dry milk since I looked at dry milk and decided it was too expensive for something so large that I would seldom use.

I followed the recipe on the bag of King Arthurs Flour except as noted I used milk instead of water. I don't have a bread machine or a stand mixer any longer and I thought there might be too much flour for my small cuisinart so I kneaded the dough by hand as I did 30 years ago. The only problem I ran into was that I discovered that my kitchen was cool when I punched the dough down the first time. I turned the oven on and after shaping the dough and placing it in a loaf pan I placed on top of the stove covered with a dish towel for the second rising.

The loaf rose at it should to the top of the pan and baked beautifully. We had it for dinner last time and contrary to belief from above the loaf was not heavy or small. It came out with good texture and great flavor. My only regret is next time I'll double the recipe and make two loaves at once or maybe not because it was fun.

Thanks for the advice.
Paulette