Nutrimill, wheat, whole-wheat sourdough starter

My friends joke about Whole Foods being called Whole Paycheck but not everything there is expensive. Where else will you find whole wheat grain in bulk bins? Tell me. I'd like to know. 

Now, this really is the best whole wheat flour. 

The gent in South Africa who provided the starter for Sourdough International's whole wheat sourdough starter said that his starter was raised on whole wheat flour and it made sense to do things that way. Whatever thrives on whole wheat specifically is selected naturally that way. 

This is two tablespoons foamy whole wheat flour sourdough starter fed with this fresh flour and new water and brought to nearly one cup. 

I'm ready to bust a whole-wheat move.

Microscopically and sometimes molecularly things conspire in whole wheat to prevent the formation of gluten molecules. And when they do form they are cut by other sharp bits in dough. Because gluten is inhibited then skin on the loaf is impossible to form. It does its own crusty thing. 

I will attempt to bake a whole wheat loaf without kneading, just baked sponge in a pan. I expect it to be heavy and odd and difficult to get out of the pan and to taste like nothing else on Earth. I expect it might be possible to slice thinly and used for exceedingly thin but powerful sandwiches.  

100% of whole wheat bread

This is 100% of whole wheat grain milled at home. The grain is soft white Spring wheat of moderate protein value. It does not behave the exact same way as hard red Winter wheat, which I prefer.

I'm disappointed in 100% of whole wheat loaves because they simply do not rise in the way we expect when a considerable percentage of refined flour is included with the dough.

Having said that I must add this is among the most delicious bread I have ever tasted, and I do believe this is the bread of history. This is the bread pictured on the walls of numberless ancient Egyptian tombs in a wide variety of shapes. See Gardiner's hieroglyphic sign chart section X 1-8. (Incidentally, after 100 years of concurrence that first sign, the small semicircle that stands for the phonetic "t", it is finally being disputed as representing a small loaf of bread due to it usually being painted black when the walls are painted with a full palette of colors. It is now thought by some present-day experts to represent the primordial mound. Colors do mean something.) But this is all a little bit off the point.

It's impossible for me to believe the ancients had any more success than I do in getting loaves to rise much more than this, given their mills were more rudimentary and their yeast cultures were no different. There is no way they could have kneaded the dough as thoroughly as I can do right here at home with a machine that can work far beyond what any person could do by hand. I'm saying throughout history right up to modern era, it was not possible to mill grain as finely or work the dough more thoroughly than I can do right here at home. That's my story, and I'm stickin' with it.

In fact I think damage to the teeth of ancient people shows that it was not uncommon for tiny stones to make their way into the dough, being abraded by the mill stones used to crush the grain, either huge ones or small home types. Can you imagine what a drag that must have been, and how coarse their standard bread must have been? I'm certain if they were presented with a loaf of, say, Wonder bread, they wouldn't even consider it to be bread at all.

I only got as far as I have because I didn't add salt. My second failure, pictured below, taught me that salt was retarding the progress of the yeast and bacteria. One way to avoid that is to add the salt later after the organisms have multiplied but that risks forgetting it altogether which I've done several times, and it deflates the loaves, which isn't usually a problem unless it took a day to rise the first time, in which case I'm reticent to start over.

Even without salt, I almost didn't bake this salt-less loaf pictured above because it failed to rise to the top of the bread pans which would have doubled its size. It rose less than double. It rises fine as a wet sponge in a jar, but hardly rises at all as a dough with much more weight bearing down on it, flattening it. The yeast really does need a lot of liquid to multiply effectively. There was no oven-rise either as expected with refined flour loaves.

The loaf was not fermented either, save for the unusually long period it took to proof.