Reddit reviews Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor
We found 8 Reddit comments about Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Ten Speed Press
for starters, you can take any crust recipe and substitute 1/3 of the white flour with whole wheat and be pretty confident that all will be well. beyond that and you need some new technology, such as adding gluten or peter reinhardt's epoxy process (http://www.amazon.com/Peter-Reinharts-Whole-Grain-Breads/dp/1580087590).
Dave's killer bread, the power seed one in particular. Really good stuff.
You could also make your own. Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor had some really good formulas. You can find some of the formulas on various blogs as well.
I make all my own bread. Organic WW bread here costs $5/loaf. I buy 25 kg (55 lb) of local organic WW flour for $32. The recipe I use (from this ) makes 1 loaf/lb (though I make smaller loaves, 4 per 3 lbs), so about 60 cents/loaf for flour. The recipe also calls for ~75 cents more worth of ingredients (milk, oil, sugar, yeast). All told, it's under $1.50/loaf. I make 4 at a time, and freeze 3 to eat during the week.
However, even if quality store-bought bread was a similar price, I would still make my own, because it's fresh and tastes fantastic.
Yes, I believe you should knead it more.
The main purpose of kneading a bread dough is to develop the gluten which works like a web to trap the gas bubbles that the yeast produce to give it a rise. If you don't knead enough, there will not be enough gluten to trap the gas bubbles and it won't rise properly. Make sure your dough passes the windowpane test (image) before you are done kneading. It is unlikely that you will over-knead a bread dough.
High protein content in your dough is very important for making bread. If you are able to determine that, you should be able to figure out if you need to add any vital wheat gluten to your dough.
Also, you say you are using whole wheat flour. Whole wheat flour contains bran which is sharp and actually cuts the gluten, making it more difficult to make whole wheat bread than white bread. Peter Reinhart has a book that I would highly recommend if you are interested in making whole grain breads.
Good luck!
Take a look at the following books which your local library may possibly have. All deal with whole grain breads and breads made using non-standard flours.
Tartine Book No.3: It's the Tartine round loaf in a million whole grain variations, while also including some interesting pan loaves.
Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: Recipes for pretty much every type of whole grain bread. Uses a lot of specialized ingredients, and complex multi-stage recipes, and contains a ton of information.
Peter Reinhart's Bread Revolution: Not familiar with this book but it looks neat, probably advanced if you're just learning about using alternative grains to white flour but still interesting.
Home Baked: Nordic Recipes and Techniques for Organic Bread and Pastry: This is a personal favorite book, and the vast majority of the recipes use whole grains. Everything I've made out of this has been excellent, although some recipes are lacking in how-to type details that might not be obvious to a novice baker.
If he is relatively newish to bread bread baking then I think Bread Baker's Apprentice will be the most helpful though.
Agreed. If you must only own one, go for Bread Baker's Apprentice. If you want an intro to whole-grain baking (the reason I started making my own bread a few years ago), go for Reinhart's other book Whole Grain Breads.
Check out Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads
I'm working through it right now and it's all about getting a good, flavorful whole grain bread. This guy wrote some of the bibles of modern bread baking.