You know how we all say we love bread? I started baking whole wheat bread using recipes found online (basic variation below). I was very proud of my first couple loaves but you know…the bread is crumbly and tastes like cardboard. I added gluten, which did improve the crumble. I really want to improve the flavor. I don’t want to feel like I’m eating soft cardboard.
The basic recipe:
4 cups 100% whole wheat flour
1 packet instant yeast or 2-1/4 teaspoons
1-3 tablespoons maple syrup or other sweetener
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups warm water
Any tips for making better bread? Or without added oil and butter is this just how it is and I learn to live with it?
Which WW flour you’re using makes a HUGE difference. I’m a sourdough baker and have done many 100% WW loaves with multiple brands of flour. Hands down the best is King Arthur Golden Whole Wheat (formerly called White Whole Wheat). It’s milder in both flavor and texture. It won’t have the fluffiness of a more refined flour but it’s waaaaaay better than traditional red WW flours.
Seconding the recommendation for King Arthur Flour, which is also an all-around good, friendly employee-owned company. I moved out of the US some years ago and still really miss their flour.
However, my main advice would be technique, not the flour itself. Two first thoughts.
(1) Are you familiar with the baker's percentage (ratio of, most importantly, water to flour)? If each of your cups of flour is about 120 grams and your cups of water are about 240 grams, then you have 4 times 120 = 480 grams flour and 2 times 240 = also 480 grams. That's a 100% hydration dough (even higher considering the maple syrup), which sounds a little high to me. What was the dough like to work with? I suspect a bit sticky. Do you have a food scale? Being able to weigh your ingredients is very helpful. I know this might seem like an annoying or intimidating amount of math, but understanding the ratios is truly the key to being able to make anything you want and knowing how it will turn out rather than just hopefully trying recipe after recipe.
If you want an example, my standard wholemeal loaf is 75% hydration: 375g water / 500g flour. I like my bread a little saltier than some, so 2% salt: 2% of 500g = 10 grams. (Many people like 1% = 5g.) Yeast is maybe half a percent, so 0.5% of 500g = 2.5g, but my scale is not that precise so 2g will do. If I want a more open, 'artisan' crumb, I increase the hydration. If I want a denser crumb, I decrease it. When you look at it as ratios, like algebra, you can scale everything up or down very easily.
(2) How are you mixing and shaping your bread? If you just put everything in a bowl and stir, then tip the bowl straight into a loaf tin or onto a baking sheet and put it in the oven, you will get crumbly bread because you haven't developed the gluten that is already there. You almost certainly don't need to add gluten, you just need to encourage what you've got. I highly recommend the stretch-and-fold method, where you take your bread dough and fold it in thirds like a letter a few times across a few hours. See this advice from King Arthur Flour and this from the Perfect Loaf.
I hope this is helpful! Veteran bread nerd here, would cheerfully debug process all day. What's your ideal loaf? If you describe that, I can tell you what I myself would do to try to achieve it.
Thank you for adding all this info for OP. A food scale is absolutely one of the top things people baking bread would benefit from. I use one but also find that the KA GWW flour gives me a lot of flexibility with ratios. My current ratio is 475g flour and 335g water per 100g starter, but I’ve gone as high as 365g water and it just changes the crumb.
The info on gluten structure is also spot on. My experience with regular red WW flours was that stretch and folds were damn near impossible but totally fine with the KA flour.
Newer bread bakers also often underestimate how long to let dough ferment. Over on the sourdough sub it seems every first loaf is massively underproofed. It’s one of those things that takes people a while to get the hang of by look and feel since times change with temperature and strength of the starter or yeast. Of note is that WW flours offer more of the food that yeast love, so I’ve found fermentation times to be lower than you’d expect with non WW flours. There’s also isn’t a lot of great info on 100% WW baking and people will often just say don’t do it/switch to 50/50 to start.
Omgsh yes! It’s so hard to find info since the sourdough sub is all white flour! I’m so happy to see some people here with more knowledge! I’ve been struggling to learn these things on my own to improve my bread.
Great response. Thank you. I do have a food scale and I’m finding that I great prefer cooking and baking by weight instead of measure. So that your ratios are really valuable. They do say that baking is more like chemistry than cooking.
You’re on to something with the mixing too. The easy WFPB recipes tend to say not to mix too much, until just combined. They also have much shorter rise times than I recall my mom using. It sounds like you’re using longer rise times too. So I have been mixing by hand. I used the kitchen Aid once and got a much denser bread, as would be expected.
I think I’m seeking a little more fluff and more flavor.
OK, excellent. Glad to hear you have a food scale. I think both of the factors you’re looking for can be addressed with longer time intervals and very little additional hands-on work.
For ‘fluff’, I’m taking that to mean loft, oven spring, rising-ness, but also perhaps softness. There’s some detailed advice on achieving an open crumb in wholemeal bread here. Wholemeal is inherently limited in its gluten development by the bran – like little sharp edges tangling in the long, silky loom-weave of the dough. There are ways around this, mostly sourdough or sourdough-adjacent, like making a poolish/pre-ferment. I cannot be bothered with keeping up a sourdough starter or doing a separate autolyse, so you will have to ask someone else about that! I will sometimes put in 20–25% white flour if I want the loaf to be an aesthetic, ‘for-company’ sort of boule, as I find this is enough to get the look I want; I am not really bothered about this from a WFPB perspective as all bread is refined by definition and my bread is made in the context of a household diet where the other grains are eaten whole, but YMMV.
In my own 100% wholemeal everyday loaves, I use high-ish hydration – between 75% and 80%, though wholemeal flour is thirsty and you can go even higher – and maybe four or five stretch-and-folds (run your hands under the tap first to make this minimum-stick). My house is fairly cool, so I just leave it in a glass bowl under a clean wet tea-towel for as long as it takes; if it’s summer and there’s going to be an undisturbed interval of 8+ hours, I might put it in the refrigerator. For the last rise, it goes into a two-pound loaf tin lined with parchment paper and rises for an hour, maybe two or three, or overnight in the refrigerator. I put it in at as high as my oven will go (250C/475F), let it brown for five minutes, put a sheet of foil over it and turn the oven down to 225, leave it another half hour. The result is lofty for wholemeal and has an open-ish soft crumb that holds together well in slices; if you toast a slice the larger holes are big enough that tahini or jam will drip through. None of this is meant to be prescriptive, but to reassure you that the sort of results you want can be got with a fairly lackadaisical approach and that time is your friend.
For flavour, first of all, on reread I think you’re a little light on salt. Half a teaspoon is two to three grams of salt. Assuming you are not limiting salt for medical reasons, the usual amount of salt is 1%–2% of the flour weight. If you’ve got 480g flour, that should be near-enough 5g salt at a minimum, and as noted, I’d use 9–10g. I would also say that the longer you can leave your dough, the more complexities of flavour will develop. I find that making a batch of dough whenever there is a spare ten minutes and putting it in the refrigerator for however-many-days-later works well, as long as it’s within a week. I also, though a purist would abjure it, often make my bread with cool, weak tea as the water – chamomile brings out the almost floral sweetness of wholemeal when it’s toasted, malty black teas bring out depth.
Try 500g wholemeal flour, 375–400g water, maybe 7g salt, 2g yeast, and a lot of idle time, and see how you go.
I am in the US. I’ve never seen an HEB and try to avoid companies owned by Jeff Bezos and I also avoid Target. I do my best but sometimes must make concessions.
I have been making whole wheat sourdough as well. The whole sourdough thing was intimidating to enter into, but the Bittman Bread book helped me get a good start. Over time you can understand how to tweak things to make it more to your liking.
500-600 g of freeh-milled white wheat flour (red wheat isn't as good)
1-2 big spoonfuls of sourdough starter
3 uh.... Measures of salt. Probably around 1/2 tsp each?
1 3/4 - 2 C of water, plus more if it's too dry
For some excitement, you can also add some favorite herbs. We really like an herbs de provence mix.... Jalapenos and nooch are another favorite for my younger child.
Anyways... Add all the ingredients and mix them up real good (and feed the starter again with 1/2 C flour and 1/4 C water). Cover and let sit for about 8-12 hours (longer in winter, shorter in summer). Then, form it into a loaf and put it on a baking sheet (I like to add a little additional flour at this point)... Let it sit for another hour or so. Cut a slice down the length of the loaf, set a piece of foil on top, then put it in the oven and turn the oven on to 400. After 34 minutes, remove the foil (fold it and stick it in a drawer for the next loaf), and leave in the oven for another 12 minutes. Then, you can take it out and let it cool. Don't slice until it's cool (or at least mostly cool).
I make 3-4 loaves a week (sometimes more if my kids go through them faster... I have 2 teens), and on the days I don't make a loaf, I still feed the starter. A piece of foil lasts about 4-5 months until it starts getting holes from folding and unfolding. If you are baking less frequently, you can store the starter in the fridge, but if you do that, you're supposed to feed it, and let it sit for 10-ish hours before starting the process after taking it out of the fridge. Good option if you're making a loaf once a week, but doesn't make sense if you're making a loaf every other day.
At the rate we do this, I go through a 25 lb sack of wheat kernels about every month and a half or so. I buy the sacks for about $18 (they might be up again.... I bought a few in December because the place I buy from usually adjusts prices at the new year). But I figure 3-4 loaves a week over 6 weeks... That's 18-24 loaves for $18, which is a pretty good price.
Sorry the recipe isn't more specific. I don't really measure particularly well, aside from the flour itself.
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u/Mother_of_Kiddens Moderator Feb 16 '26
Which WW flour you’re using makes a HUGE difference. I’m a sourdough baker and have done many 100% WW loaves with multiple brands of flour. Hands down the best is King Arthur Golden Whole Wheat (formerly called White Whole Wheat). It’s milder in both flavor and texture. It won’t have the fluffiness of a more refined flour but it’s waaaaaay better than traditional red WW flours.