Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread

This recipe assumes that you already have a sourdough starter and it is made with whole wheat flour. If using a white flour starter you will probably be fine if you reduce the hydration a little, and of course the final loaves will not be 100% whole wheat but near enough.   

This is a link to one description of making a starter, but you will find many more on the internet.

https://www.eatingwell.com/recipe/265890/whole-wheat-sourdough-starter/

Once you have an active starter you don't need to discard anymore, I keep about 500g of starter in the fridge and use what I need to bake, when I am down to around 50-100g remaining I feed my starter to bring it back to 500g let it start to ferment again and once you see it is getting active return to the fridge until you need it for your next bake. I keep an 80% hydration whole wheat starter (80g water/100gFlour) but this works for 100% hydration as well. Others just keep 20-50g of dormant starter in the fridge and take it out and feed it the day before they are going to bake, this is commonly known as the scrapings method.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj6YpNCUYYQ

To make 2 900g Sandwich loaves

 

200g of 80% hydration whole wheat starter ( if you use 100% just adjust the water to account for the extra in your starter. 

 

800-840g of water (depending on how high hydration you want, I use 840g) 1000g of Whole Wheat bread flour (mine is 16% protein, but anything over 13% is good, although you may want to dial back the hydration a little if on the lower side.

 

20g salt

EDIT: - I've started to reduce the hydration by reducing the water to 800g and adding 40g of extra virgin olive oil to the mix. This gives a softer final crumb and adds a day or so before it starts to stale, if it lasts that long.

 

Method

First Morning I make a sponge with all the salt, water and starter and 400g of the flour mix well and leave covered for 1-2 hours to start fermenting (if you need to leave for longer store in the fridge until you are ready to go to the next stage)