My whole wheat recipe that behaves like white bread
I'm new here but I've been home milling and baking bread for ages. I never had any resource like this forum before and all my bread techniques are simply the result of trial and error and making it up as I go. And when I read most of the posts here - I have no idea what you guys are talking about most of the time :) It has me very interested to read more and start to understand all these techniques you use. By comparison, my methods are primitive - I don't even measure anything - but my bread always comes out terrific and slices easily and makes great sandwiches (I live on sandwiches - haha). I'm excited to read more posts here and start branching out into all these exotic loaves and techniques you use.
But here is how I bake a loaf of wheat bread that cuts and behaves like white bread - I usually only do one loaf at a time and bake a fresh loaf again tomorrow - unless I'm giving loaves to the neighbors. So this is my single loaf recipe - I wrote down measurements but I don't measure, I just eyeball it and go by texture. This gives me a 1 1/2 lb loaf. many of the ingredients are optional - but give me a flavor and texture I like:
1 cup warm water
1/2 of a small left over baked potato mashed with fork (about 2-3 Tbsp)
1 or 2 Tbsp olive oil or butter
1 Tbsp sugar (I use coarse "sugar in the raw")
1 or 2 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp dry milk powder
2 Tbsp. non-diastic malt (Just for the flavor)
1 to 1 1/2 tsp. sea salt (I use pink Himalayan)
1/2 Tbsp. liquid lecithin
If you are new to whole wheat - you might want to add 3 Tbsp. bread flour to help until you get used to working with whole wheat.
I mix the above ingredients together as a sweet and soupy mixture to dissolve the yeast in - should be warm but not hot.
1/2 Tbsp yeast stirred in
Then while the yeast is dissolving, I go to my impact grinder and grind about 1 1/2 cup wheat berries (I use Montana Wheat Prairie Gold) and that yields about 3 cups of flour. I grind pretty fine.
I mix the warm flour with the liquid and let it absorb for a few minutes. I recently heard about diastic malt powder and I've been adding 1 tsp just before I knead. I like the results so far - but I'm new to using it. This will be a moist and sticky dough - I only add flour until I can just barely handle it but is still sticky - it will dry up as it rises and the flour absorbs the liquid. I've been reading posts here and apparently most of you "autolyse" which I'm not familiar with but sounds like it would make things easier - I've just been doing it my way forever and I can handle working with sticky dough.
I either knead by hand until it feels right ... or run it in my bosch on low for 5 minutes
I put it in a covered bowl in a 105 F oven (light on) to rise for about an hour - knead it down and let it rise again if I feel like it or if I'm in a hurry I shape it and put in a loaf pan to rise in the warm oven. When it has nearly doubled (yes, I let it get pretty high and don't get a hollow top) I turn the oven on (I don't pre-heat) to 350F for about 37 minutes (center of loaf reads about 200F).
My favorite variation is to take 2-3 Tbsp each of golden flax seed, sunflower seed and pumpkin seed and run them a couple of pulses in a blender just to crack them into smaller pieces and knead them in just before I shape the loaf.
That's it ... now I want to learn how to make all the different types of bread you guys make.
if you are able to bake bread that looks like that without a recipe or without measuring anything, and to do It with wholewheat on top, that is simply amazing!
I think that you could teach us a thing or two!
By the way, welcome to TFL. We are happy you decided to join and post!
Thanks for the kind words. Only reason I can pull it off without measuring is that I've been baking my bread the same way for nearly 50 years (except the diastic malt is brand new to me). I promise you the first 100 or so loaves of bread I baked didn't look anything like what I bake now :).
I started out with a Vitamix (the old stainless steel ones) and ground the wheat in that - so you can imagine the flour was pretty coarse ... and I only used wheat, water, yeast and salt back then. The flavor was always great but the texture was pretty scary. The potato and other ingredients I use now were just happy accidents when I had something on hand and wondered how it would work in the dough. Sometimes I use applejuice instead of water and sometimes I put sourcream in it. As long as I don't kill the yeast and I don't overwhelm the gluten by adding too many odd ingredients, it usually turns out good.
Looks really really great, thanks for sharing.
I bet this is a favorite loaf, if i could make a 100% whole wheat loaf that looks like that, it'd be a staple in my house :)
Enjoy
Does the addition of liquid lecithin help keep it fresh longer? I know it is probably just used as a dough conditioner, but I have never used it before. Also, I bet the non-diastatic malt adds some good flavor and color. Usually we talk about the benefits of diastatic malt, but I think the idea of using non-diastatic allows you to add more. I wonder how molasses would compare. That is a great recipe. I will have to try it. Of course, I might have to sift the whole wheat flour to get it that fine since I don't grind my own.
I don't think the lecithin helps it keep any longer (the honey does though). This bread will mold pretty quickly but I usually eat it quickly and then bake another fresh one.
I often bake without the lecithin and I would say the difference is I'm more likely to have a bubble when I don't use it and the bread is a bit more moist (and I like to toast my bread - I notice I have to toast it longer) and it's more chewy and less crumbly with the lecithin. If I use less lecithin (or omit it completely) and grind the wheat coarser it will taste more traditional WW (hearty, crumbly) but the recipe I posted will give a loaf that is springy and stretchy (you can squeeze it and it will spring back), you can slice it and bend the slice in half without it breaking almost like wonder bread. My suspicion (just a guess) is the lecithin lubricates the dough so the gluten doesn't tear when kneading and becomes more elastic (?)
I used to buy the Carnation Malted Milk Powder (any grocery store carries it but it has sugar and other stuff in it) because I love Malt with ice cream (I grew up when you could still get a real malt at the burger place). And I just wondered how the taste of malt would affect the loaf. It's very subtle, you don't notice a lot of difference with or without it - but I like the little difference it gives. Then I found I could by plain malt powder and I liked that much better than the Carnation mix. And it was only a couple of weeks ago (when I was trying to order some more malt powder online) that I learned there was such a thing as diastic and non-diastic. So I ordered some of both and I've only baked a few loaves with the diastic malt so far.
Molasses works great too. I used to use that all the time and just haven't been using it lately. I think I'll look for some at the store and give it a try again.
Most of the bread I make is for sandwiches too.
Welcome and happy baking
Several years ago, I started out making bread badly (esp. WW) and came to The Fresh Loaf to learn why I baked bricks. The good news is I can now make delicious WW because of everything I learned from the many good people here. Better yet, I have a pretty good understanding of how ingredients behave and how they affect the loaf.
I think you skipped the whole "baking bricks" part of the process and are baking beautiful bread but need to understand why it is happening.
I would make a few observations based on my experiences. WW,esp. newly milled, needs a lot of hydration and time to hydrate. Also, being freshly milled, will raise more quickly than aged flour. So making a sticky dough and allowing it to raise twice gives the flour, with all its branny bits, plenty of time to absorb the water you provide. This way, the branny bits won't rob the crumb of moisture after it is baked and make the bread slice crumbly. Don't you hate when a sandwich crumbles in your hands as you try and bite it?
The leftover potato (and the potato water, if you use it) will provide a little extra starchy gel so you have a nice soft crumb. Alternatively, if you left the potato out, you can knead/mix the WW to windowpane or use a tang zhou (use the search), or even add a low gluten flour or even corn starch.
The lecithin adds a nice smoothness. You might or might not notice much difference if you use another fat-like oil, lard or butter or just increase whatever you use. Lard can add a really nice smoothness but has fallen into disfavor. Frankly, I'm not sure how it can be any worse than butter,nutritionally. I never use margarine or other artificially hydrogenated fats. I use liquid lecithin and oil (equal parts stirred together) as a pan release. My loaves and cakes always release beautifully and never stick to the pan.
Non-diastatic malt- I have never used. No comment there. Non or regular diastatic malt were not easily available so I never pursued using them. I have used molasses and honey (my favorite).
It looks like you use about 1 1/2 tsp yeast for 3-4 cups flour. That is a low enough amount to give you a little longer bulk ferment. Because the flour is freshly milled, there is a good amount of fresh food available for the smaller amount/population of yeast to devour and develop plenty of the fermentation flavor.It is also enough time for some of the yeasts to die off so the bread doesn't taste like raw yeast.
SO now imagine how the loaf would be if you change some of these things. Use the information as tools and experiment. Leave the potato out for one bake and see what the difference it. Do you like it? How did it affect the moisture level? Less yeast? More yeast? Overnight,cold rise in the refrigerator (cold retard-my favorite). Autolyse? You are only limited by your imagination.
Have fun!
Thanks - yes, I am very curious about why and what is happening so that's very interesting.
You said WW needs to hydrate "esp freshly milled" - and I don't know but I always assumed my freshly milled was more moist because of being freshly milled. I think that because the surfaces of my grinder container develop a crust where the flour has stuck (my guess is the moisture released from the grain condenses on the surfaces and then the flour sticks to the moisture - I'm probably wrong, but that's my guess). It sure seems to me like I use less water with fresh milled flour than if I were to use store bought flour or flour that I milled a week ago. But this is all "seat of pants" guesstimates --- it would be much more scientific if I actually weighed my ingredients. But I just go by how the dough feels.
The different malts have always been hard for me to find - there was a great produce stand (Andy's north of Sebastopol, California) where I could buy malt powder. But I don't live near them anymore - so I'd been baking without it for the past few years. It was a couple weeks ago that I thought to look on Amazon and got confused because there were two different types of malt and I didn't know which to order. In fact, that's how I ended up here at this website trying to learn what the difference was.
This is the diastic malt I got:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013ADVPZC
Those branny bits are more like bark than sawdust and just need time to actually absorb the water into itself rather than just sitting on the surface. That is why many WW loaves (esp 100%) becomes crumbly-after being baked, the dry inside of the branny bits actually pulls moisture from the crumb which then....crumbles.
I usually mix my WW dough in the evening, put it into an oiled,large container and refrigerate overnight. it goes into the bowl pretty sticky and wet and becomes soft and silken by morning. All the water sitting on top of the branny bits is fully absorbed. It also tends to rise double or more. Let it finish rising, if it needs to, shape, proof and bake.
Delicious.
Hello AndyPanda: This is not the whole wheat bread that I saw. It was a November 2017 post but I am exhausted trying to find it!!! I was looking for it for about 25 min. Anything whole wheat bread would be fine for me. I am sad and disappointed because that bread was the queen of all the whole wheat bread.
Thai chef,