wholemeal bread

i always pride myself that i'm baking 100% wholemeal bread, and not that wholemeal flour mixed with white flour nonsense you see people peddling and passing it off as wholemeal bread.

you see, baking wholemeal bread is quite challenging. it's so wet you need different way of handling it. and there aren't that many wholemeal recipes out there. i can't even think of any bakery doing wholemeal bread the purist way.

until one day....

i was late to work as just collected my old car (from the best car air con man in kuala lumpur!) and was rushing to work when i caught "open for business" on bfm.my, the thinking man's radio station. this episode features madam june lim, "spreading the message of a macrobiotics diet". click on the link for the podcast.

[i wish other radio stations would feature more intelligent and useful shows rather than those "what would you do if zombies rule the world" nonsense.]

and madam lim mentioned about her bakery employing slow fermentation whole wheat flour... hey! that got me interested!

a day later, went to their outlet, woods macrobiotics, in bangsar and managed to try out their 100% wholemeal flour bread.

hmm... not bad. i like it!

they use 100% organic wholemeal flour and sourdough fermentation. great!

now i'm tempted to have another go at sourdough again. previous attempts yielded "funny" results. a friend, mark, tried and asked, "did you put banana in it? it tastes like banana.". my sourdough attempt results in banana flavoured bread!

more sourdough bread!

got to retry our other breads with sourdough now!

on the left, rosemary raisin bread. on the right, multi-seeds which we have done countless times.

both were done using sourdough starter.

i realized some folks don't like the tangy sourness of sourdough bread. one of the way to control this is not to use a pre-ferment and let it sit overnight. unfortunately i realized this after baking these 2 loaves. so will explore this next baking time.

i think sourdough bread will compliment savoury fillings, say ham or bacon etc, where the saltiness from the meat neutralizes the sourness of the dough. oh well, so many things to try, so little time!