Lessons E06 Whole Grain Sourdough: Fermentation, Microbiology and Adding More Whole Wheat

What actually changes when you start adding more whole grain to sourdough?

In this Lessons episode of Saving Bread, Allison White breaks down what happens when a familiar country loaf moves from mostly white bread flour toward 40, 50, 60, or even 100 percent whole grain.

Whole wheat is not white flour with a little extra color. It is a different raw material, and as the percentage increases, it can change water absorption, gluten development, fermentation speed, starter activity, dough strength, pH, handling, and ultimately what a successful loaf looks like.

We begin with the wheat kernel itself and look at the role of the bran, germ, and endosperm. Then we move into the basic microbiology of sourdough, including what yeast and lactic acid bacteria are doing during fermentation, how naturally occurring flour enzymes help make sugars available to those microorganisms, and why changing the flour can change the behavior of both your starter and your dough.

We also get practical with inoculation and pre fermented flour. Why does adding more levain usually shorten fermentation? How can lowering inoculation help when freshly milled whole grain is moving too quickly? Why can two bakers both say they use 20 percent levain while actually working with very different amounts of pre fermented flour?

Then we bring it back to the country loaf and talk through how to begin increasing whole wheat without changing every variable at once.

The goal is not to make 100 percent whole grain bread behave exactly like a loaf made with strong refined bread flour. At higher percentages, you are allowed to redesign the bread.

We also touch briefly on pH and why a target developed for a mostly white flour dough should not automatically be applied to a high whole grain dough. A full Lessons episode on pH is coming soon.

At the end of the episode, I challenge you to choose one whole grain flour and bake with it for ten loaves. Keep the other variables as consistent as possible, take notes, and learn the flour in front of you instead of chasing one universal hydration or fermentation number.

This Friday, Baylin Speidel joins me again for the companion conversation. We will talk about hard red wheat, hard white wheat, extraction rates, flour terminology, flour blending, and how to choose a grain based on what you actually want it to do in your bread.

This episode is the fermentation and dough side. Friday is the flour selection side.

RESOURCES

• Andrew Janjigian and Wordloaf: Wordloaf

• Preorder Andrew Janjigian’s Breaducation, publishing November 17, 2026: Breaducation from Ten Speed Press and Penguin Random House

• Thomas Teffri Chambelland: Thomas Teffri Chambelland

• Sourdough Baking: A Treatise by Thomas Teffri Chambelland: Sourdough Baking: A Treatise

• Sourdough Panettone and Viennoiserie by Thomas Teffri Chambelland: Sourdough Panettone and Viennoiserie

• École Internationale de Boulangerie, founded and directed by Thomas Teffri Chambelland: International Bakery School

• San Francisco Baking Institute classes: SFBI Classes

• Modern Bread and Viennoiserie with Thomas Teffri Chambelland at SFBI: Modern Bread and Viennoiserie

• Hanna Instruments HI981038 Bread and Dough pH Tester: Bread and Dough pH Tester

• Listen to my first conversation with Baylin Speidel on stone milled flour and whole grain sourdough: Saving Bread with Baylin Speidel

• Chimacum Valley Grainery: Chimacum Valley Grainery

• Follow Baylin Speidel: @thedustedstone on Instagram

• Saving Bread: Saving Bread Podcast

• Follow Saving Bread on Instagram: @savingbreadpodcast

Questions for an upcoming Lessons episode? Send me a message through Saving Bread or contact me through Matriarch Bread.

Happy baking and long live real bread.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi friends, welcome back to the Saving Bread Podcast. First, did you know that Andrew Janjigian, yes, I asked him how to pronounce his last name. Andrew, who writes the bread-centric newsletter Wordloaf, has a bread book coming out on November 17th. It's called Breducation, which is just really fun to say. And it's a manual for anyone looking to bake professional quality breads in a humble home kitchen using both white flour and whole grains and yeast and sourdough alike. It contains nearly 100 recipes, many of which were inspired by or borrowed from some of the best professional bakers we know and love. Pre-order it at your favorite bookstore either online or locally, or find a link to it at wordloaf.org. I'm so excited for you, Andrew. I cannot wait for my copy and congratulations on your book. It's so exciting. I can't even imagine how wonderful that must feel to have something that you've worked on so hard come to fruition. So let's all support him. Let's go ahead and pre-order the book and we can chat about it on the podcast when it comes out. I would also like all of you to know that Andrew and I will be doing an interview pretty soon about the entire book and his career, and that will be coming out a little bit closer to when the book actually releases in bookstores. Today is a lessons episode. We are going to begin the conversation about sourdough microbiology. We're focusing on whole grains and we're going to just barely scrape the surface of pH. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with all of you today. I'm Allie White, and this is Saving Bread. Even when you feel like you follow the formula, we've troubleshooted a lot of the problems that have come up, and hopefully all of you are practicing and have made quite a few loaves by now and are starting to get the hang of repeating the same formula over and over. Today I want to build on that by talking about flour, but I want to keep this very practical. We will go over the basics today, and I have a special bonus episode coming out this Friday. I'm going to have an amazing conversation with Balin. She's back, and we talk about grain choices, extraction rate, lots of wonderful things that I know you will love. And the next lessons episode, I will tell you all of my pH things, which I know a lot of you want right away. It's important not to introduce pH early because sometimes people can just rely on it and forget about all of the other things. It's just a bonus tool, especially when you start working with a lot more whole grains. It can be very helpful, but I don't want to bring it into the picture too early. So today we will talk about flour increasing our whole grains in our country dough and what to expect when that happens. A lot of people start sourdough with mostly white bread flour. Then at some point, they want to add more whole wheat. Maybe they want more flavor. Maybe they want to use locally grown grain. Maybe they are milling at home, or maybe they just want to understand whole grain better. So they add it into the dough, and then the dough changes. It may feel tighter, it may absorb more water. Fermentation likely will move faster, and the crumb will likely look different. The dough may not tolerate the same amount of fermentation when you add a lot of whole grain. And people often assume that they've done something wrong and then they become upset and then they don't want to continue working with whole grain. And I really just would love for everyone to avoid feeling frustrated and understand that this is a learning process and with practice, it's something that you can master. So today I want to explain why those changes happen. We are going to talk about the basic parts of a wheat berry, what each part contributes to flour, what you may notice as you increase whole wheat in a formula, and what is actually living inside of a sourdough starter and how inoculation changes fermentation. Again, this is not going to be a deep dive into microbiology just yet. I just want you to understand enough of the science that when your dough behaves differently, you have a reasonable idea of why. For the microbiology portion of this episode, one of the references I leaned on and learned so much from, I cannot credit any of my work without crediting this person and pointing you all in his direction. Tomas Teffrey Chambellan. I hope that's how you say his last name. C-H A-M-B-E-L-L-A-N-D, Chambellan. Um, my French is zero, but truly a visionary, an incredible person, a talented baker. I took his five-day course at SFBI, Modern Bread and Venoiserie. Cannot recommend this class enough. Um he has multiple books out sourdough baking, modern bread and vinoiserie. These books are the deepest deep dive into sourdough microbiology, and they're they're just a gift to the baking world. So if you would like to, on your own time, um learn more from his books, please. I cannot recommend them enough or even consider going to his school or taking his class at SFBI. It it changed my whole, my whole baking world. So yes, I must, I must credit him for much of what I learned. Again, he's a biologist and a baker, and his work is a very good bridge between bread science and practical baking. And so I'll be sure to include all of his books and classes in the show notes. And again, this Friday, we will go a little bit deeper into different flour and grain types in a conversation with Balin. So I'm not going to repeat all of that here. This episode is about what happens once that flour actually goes into your dough. So let's begin. What is actually in a wheat kernel? Before we talk about whole wheat, we need a basic picture of the grain itself. A wheat kernel has three main parts that are useful for us to think about as bakers. And it's almost like an egg. If you can imagine an egg in your mind right now, the egg has the outer shell, the white, and the yolk. A grain is very similar. It has an outer shell called the bran. It has an inner fluffy white part, which is similar to the white of the egg, and that is called the endosperm. And it also has a third part, which is very similar to the yolk, a little piece at the bottom called the germ. The endosperm is the largest portion of the kernel. It contains most of the starch and a large portion of the proteins that become gluten when the flour is hydrated and mixed. When you buy a very refined white flour, you are working mostly with the endosperm, that large white portion of the grain. The bran is the outer protective layer of the kernel, similar to the eggshell. It contains a lot of the fiber, minerals, and other compounds found in the grain. It's also physically different from the fine endosperm flour. Bran particles can interfere with the gluten network, especially when they are coarse or not well hydrated. And the germ is the part of the seed that can develop into a new plant. It contains oils, vitamins, minerals, and enzymes. Because it contains oil, flour that includes the germ is also more perishable than highly refined white flour. Whole wheat flour or whole grain flour or full extraction flour, however we want to call it right now. Again, we will get into these terms more thoroughly on Friday, but for now, let's just let's just call it whole wheat. Whole wheat flour contains the bran, the germ, and endosperm in the same general proportions as the original kernel. That is the first thing that I want you to understand. Whole wheat is not white flour with a little extra color. It has more parts of the grain. Those parts force that flour to behave differently. It has different physical and chemical properties. It just does. So it's not going to behave the same way as white flour because it's not the same product. So when you replace white flour with whole wheat, you are changing the formula in a very meaningful way. So what changes when you add more whole wheat? Let's start with the changes you can actually feel and see. The first is water absorption. Whole wheat flour often absorbs more water than refined white flour because the bran and other parts of the grain bind water differently. So a dough that felt soft and comfortable at 75% hydration with mostly white flour may feel and likely will feel much tighter when you increase the whole wheat. You might not notice this at a 10 or 20% addition of whole wheat, but as you begin to increase your percentage of whole wheat, you will notice the dough becomes more thirsty. That does not automatically mean you should add a huge amount of water. Give the flour time to hydrate first. If you are using an autolase or another rest before the final mix, you may notice that the dough changes a lot during that period. I prefer to start from a hydration, I understand, and then add water if the dough shows me it can take more. That is much easier than starting with too much water and trying to recover the structure later. So start low and slowly increase the water. The second change is gluten behavior. The gluten-forming proteins are still there, especially if you are using a strong, hard wheat. But now the gluten network is developing in the presence of bran and germ. Bran can interfere with that network, and the effect depends on the wheat, the milling, the particle size, hydration, and your mixing method. But for a beginner, the practical takeaway is that higher whole wheat dough may not feel or stretch exactly like your white flour dough. You may need to build good strength early and then handle the dough more carefully as fermentation continues. The third change is fermentation. Whole grain flour often means very active fermentation. This also is dependent on how fresh the flour is, if it's roller milled or stone ground, but generally, once you introduce whole wheat or whole grain flour into your dough, generally fermentation will speed up. It contains more of the mineral-rich outer parts of the grain, more enzyme activity, and a different nutrient profile than refined white flour. That does not mean every whole wheat dough will ferment at the same speed. Temperature, starter strength, inoculation, hydration, and flour choice all still matter. We have those levers that we can push and pull at any given time. But if you move from 20% whole wheat to 50% whole wheat or more, and your dough suddenly seems to move faster, that should not be surprising. Please expect that. You changed the flour, so you changed the fermentation environment. What should you expect at a different whole wheat percentage? I think percentages are helpful because the changes become more obvious as the amount of whole wheat increases. Let's say you already make a country loaf with 20% whole wheat. You've been working on the formula from the baker's math episode and the country loaf episode, and you're very, very happy at 20% whole wheat. But now you're ready to increase that percentage because you're inspired, you want to support your local farmers, you want to use freshly milled whole grains, you want to increase from 20% all the way up to 30 or 40%, or maybe even more. If you're at 20, 30, 40, the dough may still feel familiar. You may notice more flavor, more water absorption, a slightly different color, and potentially faster fermentation. Your crumb may still be quite open if your base flour is strong and the dough is handled well. As you move towards 50, 60, or even 100% whole wheat, I would expect the differences to become very, very obvious. The dough will likely be quite thirsty. The bran is now a much larger part of the system. Fermentation may not match your old schedule. The dough may start strong but soften more during bulk, and the crumb may become a little tighter or more even depending on your flour and your process. When you're really up high towards that 75 to 100% whole wheat, I think it's useful to stop thinking of the bread as your white country loaf with more whole wheat added. Honestly, I think you can probably let that go around 60%. This point, you're developing a predominantly whole wheat bread. It's going to behave differently. It's comparing apples and oranges. This is a new type of dough. It will likely want a much different hydration. It might require a different amount of lavan to slow down fermentation. It might have a different bulk fermentation endpoint. It may respond better to different grains blended in. It might require a different shaping approach. We cannot simply repeat the same techniques that we used over and over again from our country loaf once we're switching all the way over to 100% whole grain. A lot of things translate, but not all of them. And truly, the final loaf may not have the exact same height or crumb pattern as a loaf made with very strong, refined white bread flour? And that is fantastic. That is not a defect. That doesn't mean you've done anything wrong. It just means that we are using mostly whole grain, and the way that our crumb looks and the way that we handle our dough will likely change a bit. So the question becomes: is this bread well fermented, well baked, flavorful, and appropriate? Is it an appropriate and expected outcome for the flour that you chose? That's a much better way to evaluate it versus comparing it to an open crumb white flour loaf. They are not the same thing. So let's get into the starter. Let's get into the basic components of a sourdough starter. What is a sourdough starter? Some of us might know, some of us might not know. Why don't we talk about it? At the most basic level, a sourdough starter is flour and water that supports a community of microorganisms. The two groups that we care about the most in bread are yeast and lactic acid bacteria. In my brain, I have to divide these into two separate columns. The yeast are important because they produce carbon dioxide during fermentation. That gas is what inflates the dough and contributes to the rise. Yeasts also produce other fermentation compounds, including ethanol and aroma compounds. The ethanol will evaporate eventually, so it's really not that big of a deal. But the primary job of the yeast inside of our sourdough, their job is to make gas, fill up the gluten bubbles. Okay, so that's in one column in my mind. The other column are the bacteria, the lactic acid bacteria specifically. The lactic acid bacteria produce acids, especially lactic acid, and depending on the microorganisms and conditions, acetic acid, and those acids lower the pH of the starter and the dough, contributing to flavor, dough behavior, microbial stability, and the character of what we know as sourdough. There are also enzymes in the flour. No human has put them there. They are already existing in the flour. This is important because the microbes are not just chewing directly through giant starch molecules. That is not how it works. Flour enzymes help break down starch into smaller sugars that the microorganisms inside of your sourdough starter can use. We don't need to make this overly complicated. The main takeaway here: sourdough starter is mostly two things: yeast, bacteria. When we add our sourdough starter into our mixer, the flour that's already in there when it combines with the water, there are enzymes that are going to work right away. Those enzymes are breaking down larger starches into smaller sugars. Those smaller sugars are being consumed by the wild yeast and bacteria inside of that sourdough starter. And the yeast are producing gas and the bacteria are producing acids. It's fairly simple. You don't need to know all of the fancy names or much more than that to be a good sourdough baker. You might not even need to know any of that to be a good sourdough baker, but it's fun to learn and it helps us understand who's doing what, who's got which job and how is it working, how is it functioning, and it helps us understand a fermentation a little bit better. So why does flour change starter behavior? So let's connect this back to whole grains. If you normally feed your starter white flour, or in our case, 50% whole grain, 50% white flour, and then suddenly you feed it all whole wheat. The same things are going to apply that we just spoke about. You may notice that it matures differently, it might rise faster, it might become acidic faster, it may have a different aroma or texture. And this is because you changed its food and its environment. Whole grain brings more of the original grain into that culture. So there are going to be differences. There's differences in minerals, in enzymes, in fiber, in nutrients compared with refined white flour. That doesn't mean that one feeding completely replaces the microorganisms in your established starter. Mature starters are much more stable than that, but flower choice does affect how the culture behaves. This is why I want beginners to get out of the habit of expecting a starter to peak at exactly the same number of hours, no matter what they feed it. If you change your flower, you have to start watching your starter again and learning its new behavior. Look at the rise, look at the texture, smell it, track the temperature. If you use a pH meter, you can collect that information too. The schedule is a result of your entire system. So if you change your starter at this point, if everyone has been cruising along with Queenie, 50% whole wheat, 50% white flour, and you decide to completely switch over to whole grain. I love you and I support you in this. Please know that you will likely need a lot more water for that starter to feel the same as it did before. Again, whole wheat, whole grain, it can absorb a lot more water. So be flexible. Allow yourself to lean into your intuition. Decide does it need a little bit more water? Does it need a little bit less seed in order for it to behave the way that I want it to? I'm giving you permission to make changes, to take notes, and to really watch what is right in front of your eyes. Let's talk a little bit more about inoculation or seed, because this is one of the most useful controls we have over fermentation. Inoculation is the amount of mature culture used to start new fermentation. Let's use a starter or lavan build as the easiest example. If I take a small amount of ripe starter and feed it a large amount of fresh flour and water, that is a lower inoculation. If I take a large amount of ripe starter and feed it the same amount of flour and water, like a one-to-one-to-one, that is a higher inoculation. A higher inoculation, you may remember this from the starter variables episode. A higher inoculation generally means that you are beginning with more microorganisms and more fermented material. So the build, that new starter jar will usually mature faster. A lower inoculation generally means the culture has much farther to go before it reaches maturity. So the build that new starter jar that is going to take a lot longer to reach maturity. For example, a one to one to one feeding is much different than a one to five to five. In a one to one to one, you have one part mature starter, one part fresh flour, and one part water. That is a relatively high amount of mature starter compared with the new food. In a one to five to five, you have much less mature starter relative to the amount of fresh flour and water that will generally take longer to mature under the same temperature conditions. Neither one is better, they're just different tools. If I need a lavan in a few hours, I might choose a higher inoculation. If I need a lavan to mature overnight, I may choose a lower inoculation. I'd like to interject here and remind you that if I'm using freshly milled stone ground whole wheat, I, Alley White, in my matriarch bread baking situation, I will likely do one to 100 to 100 or 1 to 100 to 120. And what I mean by that is one gram of mature starter for every 100 grams of freshly milled whole wheat flour. And I typically will hydrate that at 100% hydration or all the way up to 120% hydration because that flour can absorb a lot more water. And I want the starter to be a little bit more liquidy. So keep in mind if you're milling at home and you're wanting to use fresh flour, you just grabbed a bag from your local miller, you might need to significantly, significantly decrease your inoculation in order to minimize your risk of over fermentation. Okay. That usually gives me about 12 hours between feeds, by the way. The more mature lavan you put into a dough, the more microorganisms and fermented flour you are bringing in at the beginning. So if you think about it as a graph, right? Fermentation is just where are you on the graph? And where you are on the graph will depend on your inoculation. If you have a very low inoculation, you're going to be at the very, very beginning. Let me give you a better example, actually. Let's all think about a roller coaster. Okay. When you're on a roller coaster, you have the beginning. You have the part where you climb all the way up to the top, and then you have the part where you come back down and you go back around to the beginning. So it's down at the bottom, you slowly climb up, and then boom, you go down, right? Fermentation is similar. I'm not saying it's exactly the same, but it's a good visual. Let's say we have a dough and we inoculate our dough at 1%. We are going to be at the beginning of the roller coaster before we've started climbing up anywhere. Okay. Let's say we inoculate it at 20% Levan. We're maybe going to be midway up the climb on that roller coaster. If we inoculated our dough at 100%, meaning the same amount of lavan as flour in our dough, we are going to be at the very top of the roller coaster, ready to drop down to the other side. But we're all on the same roller coaster. It's just where are we? It's the same with fermentation. There are going to be a few differences in the dough, of course, based off of how much lavan you add, but generally we're all going to end up at the same place. It's just how fast are we going to get there based off of where we are starting? I hope that's a helpful analogy. It's kind of the only one I can think about right now and just popped into my mind. So my last note on that would be what we talked about in our baker's math formula about prefermented flour. I'm not really concerned with the percentage of lavan as much as I'm concerned with how much pre-fermented flour we're actually putting into our dough. So please remember if you're using a stiff starter or a liquid starter to consider how much flour is actually entering your dough with your lavan and not so much the total weight or total percentage of your lavan. If you are confused about what that means, please go back a few lessons episodes and listen to the baker's math episode and make sure that you understand what pre-fermented flour is and why that is significant. Again, we don't need to obsess over that today. I just want you to know why people can both say they use 20% lavan and still have different fermentation systems. And that would be because of the amount of prefermented flour. For a beginner, the practical rule is that more lavan usually shortens the fermentation schedule. Less lavan usually lengthens it, or more prefermented flour and less prefermented flour, assuming that the other major variables stayed similar. But I would not turn that into more lavan equals more sour or less lavan equals less sour. Flavor is affected by the entire whole fermentation process, including temperature, time, flour, I would argue mostly lavan maturity, uh, hydration, and how far the dough ferments, how far we push that pH, how far we push that bulk fermentation and that overnight cold retard. A lot of these things can play into sourdough acidity. Inoculation is a timing and fermentation tool. It's not a one variable flavor switch that we can turn on and off. Let's move on to how whole wheat and inoculation interact. This is where these two topics come together. Let's say you have a country dough that contains 20% whole wheat and you are happy with your fermentation schedule. Okay, then because you're listening to the Saving Bread podcast, you're excited to support your local farmers, you want to increase the amount of whole grain in your dough, you decide that you want to increase your whole grain to 60%, but you want to keep the same inoculation, dough temperature, and schedule. So you might find, not always, but you might find that that dough reaches its fermentation endpoint earlier than you expected. One option is to shorten the bulk fermentation and keep the formula otherwise similar. Another option is to reduce the inoculation, the seed, the lavan, so that the dough ferments more slowly and fits into the schedule that you want. This doesn't need to be a significant amount, can be 2%, 3%. And you can also lower the dough temperature, but I would stay away from that. I do think that whole grain dough benefits from a bit of a warmer bulk fermentation, somewhere between 77, maybe all the way up to 83, but that's just been my personal experience. So I would change the temperature last. But these are all ways of controlling fermentation rate. The formula is not one fixed set of numbers that has to work in every kitchen. If the flour changes and fermentation speeds up, you have controls available to you. You have levers that you can push and pull. You can adjust the inoculation, you can adjust temperature, you can adjust time, you can change how much whole grain you use. You do not need to change all of them at once. In fact, I would rather you just change one thing at a time so you can actually learn what happened. The next part that I wanted to touch on briefly is pH. It belongs in this conversation, but it needs its own episode, like all of its own. We're gonna get deep into it. It also gives you time to buy a pH meter if you'd like one. I have the Hannah Instruments bread and dough meter. That one seems to be the most accurate, and it's not inexpensive. It's I think it's $120, but I I use it every single bake day, and so that's the one that I like. I probably wouldn't recommend buying an inexpensive one because then you might not get the exact accurate information that you're looking for, but that's for you to decide on your own. You can research the different ones, but again, I like the Hannah Instruments bread and dough meter. I have no affiliation with them. They've given me a discount code in the past, but I think they have an even better one just on their website all the time. I've never received a dollar from them. It's mostly just been because I really enjoy them and I I've it's a product that I've been using for a really long time. And so just because I like it and it's worked well for me, I've told other people about it. So pH is one of the ways that we can follow acidification during sourdough fermentation. But flour composition affects how dough responds to acid. So whole grain contains more minerals and other compounds from the outer portions of the kernel, and that changes the buffering capacity of the dough. We don't need to worry about any of that right now. For now, all I want you to take from this is that do not assume that an exact pH target from a mostly white dough will transfer to a high whole wheat, whole grain dough. Use pH as one piece of information alongside dough temperature, rise, texture, strength, and the overall behavior of the dough. Again, we will get really deep into this. I'm just not ready for that conversation with everyone quite yet. Thank you for your patience. We'll get there, I promise. So, how would I increase whole wheat in a formula? This is a lot of information that I've given you today, but how do we actually apply it? So let's let's walk it through. If we've been making our country dough from the baker's math and the country dough episode, and we're ready to do this change tomorrow. We're ready to start adding whole grains. We've got a bag of freshly milled whole wheat from our miller, and we've been using that at 20%, but we're ready for more. I would say increase to about 50% to begin with. I think that's a really good place to begin, and you can still keep most of your same times, temperatures, inoculation, everything can stay relatively similar up to about 50%. You may notice that you need a little bit more water, and you may notice that you might you might just have a little less time before you go into the refrigerator, but everything else I would say will generally be about the same. As far as above 50% whole grain, I do think it's important to blend different flowers if you're going to go above 50%. So if you have your very strong, hard red wheat that you've been getting from your miller and you want to now do 100% whole grain, this is the conversation that we will be getting into on Friday with Balin. But just as a little teaser, my personal recommendation would be to find a supporting flower to pair with that strong whole grain that you've been buying from your miller or wherever you're getting it. So I personally like 60% of a hard red and 40% of a hard white. I may also incorporate five, maybe 10% of a different type of flower, maybe a rye or a spelt, but it sort of depends on my mood that day. So now if I've moved to 100% whole wheat, whole grain, my hydration is going to increase significantly. I think 90% hydration is a really safe place to start. And I also think it's a good idea to decrease your inoculation about 2%. So 18% Levan or 9% pre-fermented flour. A dough temperature between 77 and 83, I tend to err on the warmer side between 80 and 83 to really stimulate and encourage yeast production. Out of the mixer, I will likely only do one or two folds. And I will often skip the pre-shape because the dough is really moving quickly towards the end of fermentation. And so, in order to preserve all of the gases inside of the dough, I typically, because Grace and Gill taught me to do it this way, I typically will skip the pre-shape. If you want to do it, you absolutely can. Just know that you'll have a little bit less time to work with. Before we wrap up, I want to put all of this together because we really covered a lot. The most important thing to understand is that increasing the amount of whole grain in your bread is not an even exchange of one flour for another. You are changing the entire dough system, and those changes become much more significant and noticeable once that percentage is around 50 or higher. You are changing how the flour absorbs water. You are changing the physical structure of the dough. You are bringing in bran, germ, minerals, enzymes, fiber, and a different microbial load. You are also changing the environment in which the yeast and lactic acid bacteria are fermenting. That means the dough may need different hydration, different mixing, different fermentation endpoints, and different handling. It may not reach the same pH at the same stage. It may not tolerate the same amount of fermentation. And it may not produce the exact crumb you were getting from a mostly white flour loaf. None of that automatically means the bread is worse. This is where I think bakers get stuck. We add more whole grain, the dough behaves differently, and then we try to force it back into the shape of the original bread, but you are allowed to redesign the bread. Again, at 30 or 40% whole grain, that may only mean adding a little more water or slightly adjusting your fermentation. At 80 or 100%, it may mean reconsidering the flour blend, the lavan, the mixing, and the shape of the loaf. You want to be very gentle with whole grain dough the longer it has been fermenting. So that's a little bit less folds, a really gentle pre-shape, just really soft hands later in fermentation. Most of this will be learned through practice and repetition. A well-fermented loaf with an even tender crumb, good volume for the flour, a developed crust, and incredible flavor is not a failure because the holes are smaller or the crumb is more closed. And you do not need to memorize the names of every organism in a sourdough starter to use microbiology in a practical way. Remember that your starter is a microbial community. Flour is both its food and its environment. The enzymes naturally present, the enzymes naturally present in the grain and the metabolism of the microorganisms are working at the same time. When you change the flour, you have changed the conditions. So you need to observe the fermentation again. My challenge for you is to choose one whole grain flour, especially after listening on Friday, and work with it for 10 loaves. Begin with the formula you already understand. Increase the whole grain by a manageable amount. Perhaps move from 20 to 40. Keep as many other variables consistent as you can and take notes. Pay attention to how the flour takes up the water, how the dough develops, when fermentation becomes visible, whether the dough gains or loses strength throughout the process, how it shapes, how it bakes, how it tastes, and how it keeps, then change one or two things for the next loaf. The goal of those 10 loaves isn't to discover the one correct hydration or the perfect universal formula. No, the goal is to learn that flower well enough that your decisions begin coming from evidence instead of a number that you just found somewhere else. On Friday, Balin is joining me again for that. Again, on Friday, Balin is joining me for the companion side of this conversation. We are talking about hard red, hard white extraction rates, flower terminology, and how to choose a grain based on what you actually want it to do in your bread. This episode is about what whole grain changes inside of the dough. Friday's episode will help you decide which flower to put in there in the first place. And in an upcoming lessons episode, we are going to give PH its own conversation, including what numbers represent, how different flowers can change its meaning and how we use it and where measurement helps us without replacing observation. In this episode, if this episode helped you to understand your dough in a new way, please send it to another baker who is trying to use more whole grain. And if a specific question came up while you were listening, please send it to me through the Saving Bread Podcast DMs on Instagram or our website. You can go to matriarchbread.com and contact me there. And I will do my best to include all of the questions in the next lessons episode. So I will see you all again on Friday for my flower chit chat with Balin. Thank you for listening to the Saving Bread Podcast. Music by Joshua from Dope. I'm Allie White. And as always, happy baking and long live real bread.