The BF and I ventured into baking with whole wheat flour this weekend. We used our nice and healthy sour-dough starter, which was fed with white flour. I fed it a little whole wheat after portioning out a little for levain. Whole wheat bread is notoriously heavy, so we just used a portion of whole wheat flour and mixed it with white flour for the actual dough. The recipe we were loosely following also asked for rye flour, but we couldn’t find any at the markets near us, so we had to leave it off.
The resulting bread is denser than the white bread we’re used to, but oh man is it good and flavorful. Because the starter was fed so recently before baking, it wasn’t too tangy. Strangely, the crust tasted sweet when I ate it with some strong, stinky goat cheese.
The recipe we used produced a less wet dough, which was a relief to me because after dealing with such wet dough for so long, dry dough was incredibly easy to work with. It’s amazing how easly cleanup is when the sticky dough doesn’t stick to everything.
ps – This is a rough interpretation of the traditional French levain recipe from Daniel Leader’s “Local Breads”. We didn’t have a stiff dough levain, so we cheated and just altered the proportions to make a stiffer levain. Of course, the flavor would probably be different if it had been stiff levain from the start.
I liked it, though it didn’t really have quite the taste I was looking for. But it was good to start helping out with the baking instead of just feeling like a lamer on the sidelines.
What a beautiful loaf!