Working with Whole Wheat White Flour

Premium White Whole Wheat Flour — “Our 100% whole wheat flour is grown on select farms in Southern Idaho. From there we take it to an organic mill in Logan Utah where it is ground extra fine, which makes it bake like other bread flour. It has a lighter and sweeter flavor, but it is 100% whole grain, nothing added, nothing removed, and packed with all the vitamins and minerals for better nutrition.”—Martha Levie

It has been ten months since Abigail’s Oven Premium Whole-Wheat White Flour was delivered to Abigail’s Store at the bakery in Spanish Fork.

Like many of you, the pandemic has driven me to baking as my outlet hobby. I am already on my seventh 50-lb bag of this excellent flour and I can report that it is pretty amazing stuff.

However, I have had to make some adjustments from my previous bread flour and my baking rhythm had to be changed to get a great loaf of sourdough. Not that these are troublesome adjustments, but an enjoyable part of discovering how to use a new kind of flour for sourdough bread making.

This article is the first in a series of three that explores how to work with whole-wheat flour in sourdough and what the benefits are.

Whole Grain Flour Requires Higher Hydration

Just-milled whole grains handle differently than refined wheat flour. Baking with whole-wheat flour, Martha Levie, chief baker at Abigail’s Oven explains, “requires higher hydration. This was the first thing we had to learn.” In fact, she says, “the hydration level for Abigail’s Rustic wheat loaf is 79%.” This is because “the bran and the germ absorb more water. So that’s the first thing you need to do, add more water than you do for your other loaves of sourdough bread.”

I’ll go into much more detail on hydration in whole-wheat sourdough in the second post of this series.

Enzymatic Activity in Whole Wheat Accelerates Bulk Rise

The second lesson they learned at Abigail’s Oven is that the enzymatic activity and number of bacteria available in finely-ground whole wheat will accelerate bulk rise. Martha explained, “There are millions more bacteria in whole wheat flour than in white flour. More bacteria means processing (fermenting) faster.”

“Because your bulk ferment is the magic of sourdough, you’ll want to give it that long time so the bacteria can process everything. You don’t want to shorten it!”

Faster processing also means you may lose some health benefits of sourdough, which include breaking down gluten into a digestible form of protein, dissolving phytic acid to make wheat’s powerhouse of vitamins and minerals more bioavailable, and consuming many sugars and starches, which promotes a lower glycemic response to the bread. In all, to get the nutrition you deserve, you will need to slow down the fermentation process when using whole-wheat.

Martha suggests:

“You can ferment it in the fridge or we found a better option is to make your dough colder from the start with cold water so that it can process slower.”

There are tips and trade secrets that we and many other sourdough bakers have discovered to make great bread—bread that allows, as Peter Reinhart explains in his Whole Grain Breads, “the flavor and mouthfeel of whole-grain bread… that people will actually want to eat—not just because it is good for them but because it brings them, and us, joy with each bite.”^[1]

Learn more about working with this whole-wheat flour in Part II: “Hydration and Sourdough Whole Wheat Bread,” and Part III: “Enzymes, Wild Yeast, and Bacteria in Whole Wheat Flour”

ENDNOTES

¹Peter Reinhart, Whole Grain Breads, Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale (Kindle Edition), 2011.