March 20, 2006 - 8:27pm
Whole Wheat French Bread
Can anybody advise me about how to make whole wheat french bread? Obviously it would be a portion wheat, not the whole content. I've been using the French Bread recipe from "The Bread Baker's Apprentice"...should I replace the bread flour in the second portion with wheat? And I'm leaning toward the white wheat from King Arthur, rather than Graham flour. Also, do I need to presoak it at all, if so?
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I'm just starting to tinker with more whole wheat breads. The rustic bread is probably the closest thing to a whole wheat french on this site. It is good, but probably not as wheaty as what you are looking for.
I don't think a presoak would be required, but it might help. I'd say give it a shot and, if you don't get what you are looking for, try again without.
Why not try Mr. Reinhart's Pain de Campagne? It's 15.8% whole wheat flour, and just delicious.
-Joe
Reinhart's "Poolish Baguettes" recipe in BBA is a whole-wheat French bread. I just made some this weekend and it's great. The recipe calls for sifting the whole-wheat flour to remove most of the bran but the mesh on most sifters is too coarse. So I just used a strainer we had around the kitchen ...something like this:
http://www.cooking.com/products/shprodde.asp?SKU=138039
...simply vibrate it back and forth to make it "sift" the flour and separate out the bran - it worked perfectly.
Patrick