How to Make Half Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread
This site contains affiliate links, which means that I may make a small commission if you purchase a product using those links. However, please know that I only provide links to products that I actually use and wholeheartedly recommend!
There’s a few things I store in excess in my apartment. Massive bars of chocolate from Trader Joes (10 out of 10 would recommend). Rice, because Loml doesn’t seem to realize you can buy bags of rice that aren’t 500 lbs. And flour. Not just any old flour though, I store at least 5 different types of flour. Because I’m a complete weirdo. But the upside of this strangeness is that I always have the ingredients on hand to make a lovely little loaf of half whole wheat sourdough.
This loaf is my vague attempt to be a bit healthier. Yeah I know, it’s a bit of a reach…
5 Reasons You Should Try This Whole Wheat Bread Recipe !
- It’s Healthy (Or healthier…) using half whole wheat flour makes the recipes healthier than just using white flour.
- It’s a small sourdough loaf, I love that this makes a small loaf of bread instead of a massive one. It’s perfect for a small household
- Easy: This loaf takes time, I’m not going to lie, but it is a lot of waiting time and not a lot of active time. So make it while you’re working from home or hibernating in your home during the winter. (I will definitely be hibernating this winter.)
- Flavor: I think that using half whole wheat flavor lends some real depth of flavor to this bread. Plus it’s sourdough, so that’s always nice.
- Texture: Crackly crust, soft interior. Need I say more?
Tips and tricks for this whole wheat sourdough bread:
The Starter
Start by making sure your starter is nice and active. You should see bubbles in your starter before you mix your levain. You definitely want to make sure that the levain is super active with visible bubbles before you incorporate it into your dough.
(The levain is a little piece of starter that you then feed with more flour and water. This then gets added into your bread dough to give it some nice litter sourdough yeasty things and make it rise.)
How to Develop Gluten in Sourdough Bread
Once you’ve made your dough you spend some time stretching and folding it in order to develop the gluten structure. In order to do this, you need to grab the edges of the dough and pull them out to the side before folding the dough back over the middle. This doesn’t really need to be too perfect, just kind of randomly stretch the dough and fold it a few times.
After a couple of sets of stretching and folding the dough, you should notice that the dough is significantly more elastic and smooth.
How to Shape Sourdough Bread
I shape the bread as a batard (an oval loaf), which I show how to do in way more detail in my Small Batch Sourdough Loaf. If you don’t want to venture all the way over there, then you can use the photos below as a guide. The key is to fold all four sides into the center until you get a rectangle (not a square).
Baking this Small Sourdough Loaf
My favorite way to bake this loaf is in a dutch oven (I use this one* but if I were to get a new one I’d go with this one* because the long handles are nice!).
Using a Dutch oven allows you to capture steam in the pot during the initial baking stage, which helps the dough rise nicely. After about 20 minutes, you take the lid off of the pot and let the crust crisp up. While you can achieve similar results using other methods, I find the Dutch oven to be the simplest.
Eating your half whole wheat bread
Just kidding, you probably don’t need instructions for this part. Just slice it and eat it. Or don’t slice it and just tear pieces off. Who am I to judge?
More Sourdough Recipes to Try
If you want to try more sourdough recipes, I have a few other ones you might like!
- My same day sourdough bread
- My Whole Wheat same day sourdough bread
- My favorite small sourdough loaf made with mostly white bread flour
- My Seeded Sourdough recipe
If you have questions about scoring sourdough, I have a whole post looking at scoring in detail! Check it out here
Half Whole Wheat Sourdough Loaf
Ingredients
Levain
- 15 g starter
- 15 g rye flour
- 15 g bread flour
- 30 g water
Dough mix 1:
- 150 g bread flour
- 150 g whole wheat
- Levain
- 190 g water
Dough mix 2:
- 1 tsp salt
- 5 g water
Instructions
Morning of Day 1:
- Around 7:30 am (or whenever you wake up) mix the levain by combining all the ingredients and stir it. Loosely cover the levain and leave it somewhere warm for about 5 hours until you see bubbles.
- Around 1 pm mix together the whole wheat flour, bread flour, water, and levain. You should have quite a shaggy mess at this point. Don’t worry it will smooth out later on. Cover the mess lightly and leave it somewhere warm for an hour.
- For the second mix add the salt and the last bit of water (1 tsp or 5 g) and mix it together by stretching and folding the dough for 3 or 4 minutes until the salt is mixed in.
- Now we’re going to develop the gluten structure of the dough. To do so you want to stretch and fold the dough every half hour for two hours (i.e. 4 times) remembering to recover the dough between each set.
- Once you’re done stretching the dough you should cover it again and then leave it on the counter for another two hours.
- Time to shape the dough. Flip the dough onto a lightly floured counter and leave it uncovered for 10 minutes. Meanwhile prep your proofing basket. If you don’t have a basket place a kitchen towel in a bowl or a loaf pan and flour the cloth.
- Returning to the dough, flip over the dough and then shape it into a round or a batard. To make a round loaf, simply stretch all of the sides into the center, flip it back over and use your hands to rotate the dough on the counter till you have a nice round loaf. For the batard, you want to stretch each of the four sides and fold them into the middle. Then pinch along your seam to create an oval loaf. There are pictures of this process in this post and better pictures of it in my small batch sourdough loaf.
- Place the dough, messy side up, in the proofing basket. Cover it and leave it on the counter for half an hour and then refrigerate overnight.
Day 2:
- The next day pre-heat the oven to 475°F with the dutch oven in the oven for at least half an hour.
- Flip the dough onto parchment paper and then score the loaf.
- Loaf the dough into the dutch oven, cover it, and bake for 20 minutes.
- Uncover the dough, lower the temperature to 450°F and bake for another 15 minutes.
- Allow the bread to cool for at least an hour and then enjoy!
very easy to follow!