Very sticky dough from 100% whole wheat flour
Hello baking community!
I'm one of the many people who decided to try baking my own sourdough bread during this quarantine and I've tried a few times already, never quite getting my bread the way I wanted it.
I'm using my own wheat, I'm grinding it with an electric mill and sifting it, and the dough I'm getting is always very sticky, almost impossible to work with by hand.
Last time I followed this recipe https://www.theperfectloaf.com/100-whole-wheat-sourdough/ and on 70% hydration my dough already didn't resemble the one in the article at all, visually it's darker, it very much sticks to the sides, is quite runny and doesn't have a smooth skin, but more of a rough surface.
The temperature in my house may be quite colder than the one in the recipe, so I set my dough outside on a sunny day but covered to avoid direct sun light.
The starter I got from a friend some days ago and I've been feeding it with my whole wheat flour. a couple of hours after feeding it doesn't pass the float test even tough it clearly rises and is full of air, I've read online that whole wheat is heavier and thus it's more difficult to get a whole wheat starter to float.
Since I'm really new to this whole baking thing I'm a bit lost on what to try next to try and improve my dough for the next time. I really want to be able to bake with my homegrown wheat, so switching to white flour is out of question. Maybe I could try sifting with a finer sifter? The last time I sifted out 170g of bran from 1,200g of flour.
Should I lower hydration or raise it? I've read that whole wheat generally needs a higher hydration, but at 70% my dough is already quite runny and I've also read that a lower hydration makes the dough more compact.
Anyone with some experience baking with whole wheat have some suggestions on where I can improve to get a better dough?
(BTW, As soon as you sift parts out, it is no longer whole wheat.)
Plenty of TFL users are home-millers: DanAyo, Danni3ll3, barryvabeach, SheGar, ifs201, MTloaf, pmccool, dabrownman, deblacksmith, UpsideDan, and others.
Very few of us use 100% home-milled 100% whole wheat, even if it is just 10% store-bought white (refined) flour. 75% WW with 25% store-bought white flour is a common combination.
What type of wheat, exactly, are you milling? That makes a big difference. And what are you doing with the sifted out part, if you are still using it?
As I like to repeat, WW is a whole different animal from white flour. And home-milled WW has enough differences from store-bought WW that major adjustments in hydration and timing are needed.
so, right off the bat, any formula using store-bought WW will need to be adjusted for home-milled WW.
Here's one, but not the only thing: home-milled wheat needs a good 30-60-90 minute autolyse, just flour and water, prior to mixing in levain/yeast.
I've written comments elsewhere detailing my home-milled whole wheat journey, some of it may be applicable to you.
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/62044/issues-gluten-development-freshmilled-sourdough
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/451521#comment-451521
Two good books about whole wheat bread:
Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004IK8PFU?tag=froglallabout-20
Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book, updated edition, all whole wheat formulas:
https://www.amazon.com/Laurels-Kitchen-Bread-Book-Whole-Grain/dp/0812969677?tag=froglallabout-20
Good luck, and welcome to the home-milling club.
I think you just need to learn how to handle fresh flour. I have done 70% hydration and all fresh milled flour and it's totally doable.
Fresh milled flour takes on water slower so I also do an autolyse with just flour and water. 1 hour is plenty to get the water absorbed. Make sure you are mixing well after but not overmix. Lean on stretch and folds and watch gluten development.
You can sift if you want to. Either remove some of the bran all together or add it later back to the dough after gluten has developed.
For an easier transition maybe work with half store bought white flour and half fresh milled at first and slowly increase the whole grain flour as you learn about the dough and flour.
Hello bakers, thanks a lot for the tips, I've tried implementing them as best as possible but my dough is still sticky and almost impossible to work with.
Here is a picture of what my dough looks like, it's still sticky, maybe slightly less than my previous attempts at 100% home milled
I'll describe all the steps:
I followed the suggestions and lowered the sifted home milled flour amount to 50%, I let that soak in water overnight and added the other 50% of white type 00 flour in the morning, with the total amount of water being 60% of the flour weight. I then waited another hour to autolyse the dough and then added the quite active starter (20% of the flour weight).
Then I started working the dough at 30 min intervals using the slap and fold technique which I saw on this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euPwDmgF5lQ
Through the slap'n'folding I definitely noticed a change in the structure of the dough, it tightened up, but it never got any less sticky and the way I was doing it definitely didn't look like the video, because of the stickyness my fingers were covered in dough and the dough didn't keep its shape.
I'm going to bake it tomorrow, it's in the fridge now.
At this point I'm getting a little frustrated because every attempt I made with my home milled grain always resulted in a sticky dough.
I'm guessing it's the type of grain (I don't know the name of the variety sadly).
Anyone have any further suggestions on what variables I could change for my next attempt to get my dough to stick less? Maybe type 00 flour wasn't a good choice? I only had that at home so I figured it'd balance out the home milled.
Maybe my best option if I want to keep using my home milled flour is to go no-knead?
Does that include the weight of the flour and water in the starter? If it does not, your hydration may be more than 60%.
Even if there is a calculation error, I don’t think it would yield a dough that wet. One thing that caught my eye in the recipe write-up is that the author uses a flour with 14% protein. A flour like that can absorb a lot of water. From all appearances, your flours probably have a much lower protein content and, therefore, cannot absorb nearly so much water.
For your next attempt, drop the overall dough hydration to 50%. It may turn out to be too dry. If it does, you can add water a little bit at a time to achieve the consistency you want. Or, if still too wet, add flour. It may take a bit of experimentation and adjustment to find the sweet spot.
When I moved from the US to South Africa, I didn’t know the characteristics of the new-to-me flours. So, I made some mini-doughs using 100g of flour each and different hydrations to learn how the flours behaved. That was very helpful. Perhaps a similar experiment with the flours you have would be helpful, too.
Paul
I don't have any experience with fresh milled flour, but I frequently bake with 100% WW. Whole Wheat (and what I've heard about fresh flour) is very thirsty, and at 60% hydration I would be worried about it drying out (I live in a super dry area).
Are you sure you are accounting for all flour added and all water added? That dough just looks like a much higher hydration.
It sure looks very wet, and now that I think of it the starter which I'm adding at 20% is quite wet, but that would not boost the hydration level by any really significant amount, maybe the real hydration is at 65% or 70%
I'm going to try and follow pmccools suggestion and do some small experiments with 100g flour samples and report back my results
Generally, most of us Loafers include the water and flour in the starter/levain in the hydration calculation. 100% hydration starter makes it easy to calc, but for those who use spreadhseets, any hydration % for the starter can be easily plugged in. Suppose your formula is:
500 g flour
350 g water
100 g of 100% hydration starter.
11 g salt. (11 / 550 = 2% salt.)
Your overall hydration would be (350+50) / (500+50) = 72.7%
You could say that you used "20% starter@ 100% hydration", or "9.1% prefermented flour" (50/550).
Are you weighing the flour after it is milled and sifted?
If you don't mind having another "helper"....
I think you and the other helpers are making some assumptions, that are not being explicitly stated, and that is causing you and the helpers to go in the wrong direction.
Your title says "100% whole wheat", but as soon as you sift out some bran, it no longer behaves like 100% whole wheat. Are, or were, you planning on putting it back in like the recipe on theperfectloaf.com ?
So....., let's start at the very basics.
What country are you in?
i just read the comment about you not knowing the type of wheat that you planted and milled. I'm afraid this is a critical bit of information. It could be that you are not using bread wheat. Can you trace this back to where you got the wheat seed and find out? If it is not bread wheat, that is "hard red" or "hard white" in North American terms, then it won't make decent bread at all. Knowing what country you are in may also help track this down.
What is the name/type and brand of the 00 white flour you are using?
--
I think home-milling is a great thing, so therefore I don't want to see you give up in frustration. But, I bet there are some basic (and incorrect) assumptions going on, that are blocking your progression.