A Sour Recipe: Freshly Milled Whole Wheat Sourdough
Learn how to mill your flour at home and bake wonderful soft and airy whole wheat sourdough bread.
Working with whole wheat and especially freshly milled whole wheat can be fun but also painful as the dough will be very different from your normal white bread dough and if not treating in a certain way will lead to a dense and dry crumb. The bran will prevent your dough from building as strong and stable of a gluten network and it will also drink away your water so you’ll need to add more and this can often be somewhat of a hit and miss as it can be anything from 5-15% more. It’s best to start low at the beginning and work your way up. It will also help you create a stronger gluten network.
When it comes to whole wheat, there is many ways to mill and use it. Even the ones to buy in a store come in very different states. Some are rather finely milled and give you all of the wheat grain in a very similar grind size. Some whole wheat flours on the market come in a very coarse state and some have the inner part of the grain finely milled and add the bran in a coarser state. To achieve a soft and rather open crumb it is best to mill them as finely as possible. The coarser the grain, especially the bran part, the more corrupted the gluten will become. The bran part is the outer part of the grain and while it holds more nutrition than the rest, it is the hardest to digest and bake with, but there is many ways to make it work.
If you have a mill that manages to mill very finely you can probably try and use the whole wheat flour as is, but how I usually go about it is to mill the grains to lower medium setting, sift out the bran and then mill both parts as fine as I can. By milling a bit coarser first you will be able to sift out more of the bran. This bran I usually soak in 2 to 3 times hot water or I just put it on the side and reintroduce it later once the dough and gluten is already developed. If I do the latter I don’t even mill the bran to a fine state but just use it as is. You can also just use the bran you sifted out and coat the loaf with it after shaping, it’ll make for a super nice and crunchy crust!
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