The Quest for the Holy 100% Whole Wheat Loaf

Okay here it is, I've done it! After reading this post over a month ago I was inspired... no, challenged to take on the task of finding, or formulating a light, flavorful, nutritious 100% whole wheat loaf. Like many who had read this and then bumped into the author on the street I was never compelled, to her dislike, to post a comment to her blog.

I admit, this is mostly because everytime I would try out a new method or recipe, it flopped (figuratively and literally sometimes). My ego would not let me air my misfortune. I have to say however several of my frankenstein creations tasted really good, in spite of their grotesque brick like resemblance.

Finally I was able to experiment with a long fermentation of a starter (biga or poolish, I don't remember which it would most resemble). It is actually an adaptation from Jim Lahey’s recipe found in an article a friend of mine sent me from the New York Times.

His method is pretty cool but I think it is more tailored to a white bread flour and not 100% Whole Wheat as my first try would have made a nice cornerstone in an old Victorian Style home, but tasted AMAZING!

I brought my water content up near 50% on the second round and was much happier with the moisture in the mix. This is where I made a bold decision. I've been wanting to utilize milk in a recipe as I read that it aides in the rising process, without giving the bread the flavor of corrugated cardboard like when adding Wheat Gluten. I knew however if I substituted milk for water in Jim's recipe I'd have a stinky unhealthy curdled milk mush in my kitchen after 24 hours of sitting around. So I decided to combine my Whole Wheat "starter", which had been fermenting for about 48 hours at 70 degrees, with another "Milk Bread" recipe I got out of a great book from the Library called the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book (A guide to Whole Grain Breadmaking)

So without any further ado....here's the 411

Starter
3 cups Whole Wheat Flour
1/4 tsp active dry yeast (Yep that's all)
1/2 cup warm water
1 1/4 tsp Salt
3 cups Warm Water
In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 3 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be almost runny, I'd say a bowl of mush. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 24 hours, preferably about 48, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

The Day Of - Dough
2 cups fresh whole milk (if this came from the Colorado Grown cow it would be amazing!)
1/4 cup honey
2 tsp active dry yeast
6 cups whole wheat flour
2 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 Tbsp cool butter

Scald milk and cool to lukewarm (use an ice bath in a big pot). Stir in honey while cooling milk (start this right after you place pan of milk in ice bath so honey will dissolve better in the warmth).
Dissolve yeast in the warm water.
Measure flour and salt into a large bowl and stir together lightly. When milk is cooled down to same temp. as warm water mix the two liquids together. Make a well in the flour and pour liquids into it. Stir from center outward, until all the flour is mixed in, making a stiff dough.

*Here's where things get interesting*
Add the 48 hour preferment to the new dough and knead for about 15 minutes without adding more flour. (The dough is going to be very wet and sticky so keep a bowl of water handy for your hands, and I even used it to keep the dough from sticking too bad to the counter I was working on)

After 15 minutes knead in the butter in bits, continuing to work the dough until it is silky.

I put the dough glob into an ungreased bowl (the larger the better this makes 3 loaves) and covered with plastic wrap. Let the dough rise for 1.5 hours, but be careful, my bowl was a little too small and the runny dough started to expand over the sides.

After 1.5 hours I gently punched it down and took a shortcut by skipping a second rise and went ahead and split the dough into three pieces and plopped them into my pans. (I found by accident it didn't make much of a difference if these were greased or not, 2 were, 1 was not)

I proofed these for another hour but probably could have gone with 45 minutes because one loaf began to pour over the sides of the pan. I gently nudged the doughs back within the sides of their pans and put them into a preheated 325 degree oven for 1 hour.

These turned out wonderful, high rise, flavor like I have never tasted, a well structured crumb (at least according to my likes), and a decent carmelized crust. I think that skipping the second rise made the open air pockets in the bread a little bigger than they would have been otherwise, but they were still rather uniform and didn't affect the breads ability to hold together too much, but I think next time it would be worth investing the extra time in a second rise.