Third Bread - 100% Wholemeal Bread aka The Rock (1 Jan 2009)

Following the successes of the first 2 bread, I made my foray to bake a more challenging bread - 100% wholemeal bread to welcome the new year.

Wholemeal bread that are sold in the market usually contains a mixture of wholemeal and bread flour. As the price of wholemeal flour is twice that of bread flour, a 100% wholemeal bread will be very expensive. Little did I know that there's more to that. More about this later.

Unlike bread flour which has at least 3 to 4 different brands to select from, there is only 1 type of wholemeal flour available at the NTUC supermarket. Maybe due to lesser competition its able to commands a much higher price.

The back of the bread flour packaging says that for best results, mix 50% of the wholemeal flour with 50% bread flour. On the other hand, the recipe says you only need wholemeal flour for a 100% wholemeal bread. What should I do? Since the recipe for Honey bread delivered exceptionally pleasing results, I decided to follow the recipe.

To my horror the final product is a small and highly compact wholemeal bread. Unlike the first 2 bread, this one is much darker in colour. Its dough also didn't rise high enough. It tasted dry and hard. The bread is brittle and the ingredient drops off easily.

Here's the picture of that miserable bread. Whoever that tasted it, thousand apologies. I promise better standard next time. Most of the freshly baked bread were finished within 24 hours. I took two days to finish just one slice.