[Sca-cooks] was Libum recipe now whole wheat bread

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Samrah:
>Thanks for the recipe Ardenia!  It got me thinking...  I bake a lot 
>of yeast bread.  If it is whole wheat, usually half whole wheat, 
>half bread flour.  I tried my recipe with all whole wheat flour, but 
>as you can expect, it needs more leavening.  I had a cousin suggest 
>a teaspoon of baking powder.  It was OK, but does anybody have a 
>recipe for bread with 100% whole wheat flour with just more yeast 
>perhaps?

My own experience has been that most of the whole wheat flour you're 
going to encounter has (naturally enough) a lot of bran in it, and 
the bran interferes with gluten extension (sort of). Essentially 
introducing a lot of little flakes with semi-sharp edges into a mass 
of strands cuts a lot of them.

If you're dedicated to using 100% whole-wheat flour, you might try 
adding extra gluten (Arrowhead Mills sells this, and, I assume, the 
King Arthur flour people), or you might find some whole-wheat 
chappatti flour in an Indian market, which is fine whole-wheat flour 
ground from hard durum wheat: the milling process is powerful enough 
to reduce the size of the bran particles, and the hard wheat has a 
lot of protein and produces a little more gluten than some other 
whole wheat flours. Bread made from chappatti flour (not to mention 
chappattis) have something of the texture of semolina bread. Maybe 
not cloud-light, but lighter than most whole-wheat breads.

Adamantius
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