Whole wheat in sourdough bread
Hi everyone!
Due to the pandemic there is basically no good wheat flour in the shelves anymore (only high extraction type 405). I still get good loaves out of what I have, but I also want to get some kind of nutritional value out of them.
So I want to use whole wheat flour or at least have a certain amount in my bread (30%+). My question is, what adjustments do I need to make and what to look out for? I kinda know about higher hydration and my book is also giving some tips, but I also would like to hear some advice from the fountain of bread knowledge that is The Fresh Loaf :)
(I wanted to do this already for some time, but wanted to perfect my standard loaf first. Now is a good opportunity...I've already worked with small amounts of barley flour and cracked wheat, works great!)
WW ferments quicker than white flour. Fresh-milled even more so. I have to reduce either the percent prefermented flour, or ferment/proof times, or both, compared to white flour loaves.
The autolyse is more important for ww. The bran needs to hydrate. I usually go an hour or overnight. I have heard advice to autolyse white and ww flour separately, or the white steals all the water before the ww can soak any up. I only use ww so I haven't seen that myself.
If you a overnight autholyse of ww do you leave it on the counter or in the fridge.
If have tried a overnight a few days ago and leave it on the counter and it was a disaster.
I did it with a very high hydration 80% so that was not a good combination.
For now i stay with a 1 our autolyse.
What I wanted to try next time is sifting the bran out of the flour soak that overnight and the rest for a our.