Sourdough Bread - My Conversion to Fresh Milled Flour

Last week - probably week before last now - I showed the picture of the giant loaf of sourdough bread I had made using this recipe - Same Day Sourdough Wonder Bread.

I normally use my two Lodge cast iron bread pans but I wasn't sure if the dough was going to be enough to make two loaves so I went ahead and used the large USA bread pan, which is about 4" wide x 13" long. It has straight sides and a lid if you want a flat topped loaf. 

When I make a recipe for the first time, I try to follow the recipe as closely as possible. Because I don't use store bought flour, I did switch to fresh milled flour but I stayed pretty basic - I used all hard white wheat berries and I sifted the bran out of about half of the flour. The recipe calls for 515 grams of high protein bread flour. I did add a total of 515 grams of fresh milled flour the first time - about half being with the bran and about half being without the bran. I did add more water because, at least for me, fresh milled flour takes more water. I was in a bind for time - I think that was the day I was canning pears, so I didn't weigh or write down how much water I was adding. Once you've been making bread with fresh milled flour (FMF) is that after a while, you realize how wet the dough needs to be before the dough starts rising. It has to be quite a bit more "wet" than dough made with store bought flour.

At that point, I wasn't even sure we would like this bread. We totally loved this bread and both decided this is the only sandwich bread I'll be making until we change our minds.

Today I made the recipe again. Obviously from the size of the one loaf, there was plenty of dough to use my two cast iron pans. They are 8.5 x 4.5" so two pans equals about 16" (because I think the measurement on these pans is the outside measurement), vs. the 13" for the long USA pan. 

These loaves are much better for us than one super tall loaf.

For comparison, here's what's left of last week's load with today's loaves.

Here are the changes I made:

Flour:

I still used 515 grams of flour. I left all the bran in - didn't sift out anything. I used:

• 400 grams of hard white
• 50 grams of hard red
• 15 grams Einkorn
• 50 grams of Kamut

You can see that the hard red changed the color of today's loaves - made them a little darker. I'm not a fan of a bread made with all hard red but I do like a little added to my flour mix.

Obviously from my first time making this recipe, you can use only hard white or any combination of hard wheat that you like.

Sunflower Lecithin:

I added 7 grams of sunflower lecithin. This is the one I use. If you don't have it or don't want to use it, I don't think there would be a problem.

Water:

The recipe calls for 195 grams of cool water. I dumped in the 195 grams, then weighed water in 10 gram increments and added it to the dough. I added a total of 270 grams of water (195 grams called for and an extra 75 grams). I would suggest that you add the extra water in small increments to be sure you don't end up with a dough that is too wet. The extra 75 grams worked perfectly for me.

That's it. Except for the changes listed, I followed the recipe exactly.