I have been making Stella’s 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread (and the multi-grain variation) a few times a month for a couple of years now. While it’s my go-to 100% WW bread now, I struggled with it at first, and wanted to share some tips. If you’ve struggled with this recipe too, or if it has been on your to-bake list, I hope this helps! It is 100% worth the effort, it’s rare to come across a 100% WW bread that is so light, fluffy, and delicious!
1. **Hydration** \- depending on the brand of WW flour you have, you may not be able to use all of the water she uses in the recipe. I’ve tried the recipe with 4 different brands of WW flour, and they’ve all had different hydration levels. (More on how to adjust for hydration below). This is the first of the two keys to success. If you use too much water, your dough may be hopelessly sticky and wet, even soupy, and the resulting bread may need to be chiseled out of the loaf pan (speaking from personal experience, lol).
2. **Autolyse** \- Here is the first place you can adjust hydration. If after stirring together the flour and all of the first addition of water, your dough is extremely wet or sticky, add more flour. At this stage it should not be overly wet or gooey. **Check Stella’s Instagram highlights where she makes this bread.** If your dough is much wetter than hers at this stage, add more flour until your dough resembles hers.
3. **Processing the dough**. This is the second key to success: gluten development. This recipe absolutely hinges on getting sufficient gluten development in the food processor. Make sure you look at the photos in the recipe and, again, **check Stella’s Instagram stories** to see what your dough should look like **before** adding in the oil and second addition of water. It should be extremely stretchy, but cling to itself, and you should be able to stretch it very easily into a very thin windowpane. Basically all of the gluten development happens at this stage, so don’t count on the additional processing after the oil/water is added to finish developing the gluten.
4. **Second addition of water** \- You may want to be conservative here at first, and gradually increase the water in future batches. I found the full 55g of water here to be too much for my dough, and made it too sticky and difficult to work with. It also resulted in less rise and a weaker dough which was more prone to collapsing in on the sides after removing from the loaf pan. Again, check Stella’s stories to get a sense of the texture of the dough at this point. I started as low as 20g of water and now use 40g of water.
5. **Adding the oil and second addition of water** \- This should be done super fast, within a few seconds. At first, my dough kept climbing up the inside of the blade and it was a huge mess to clean up. This is also a common complaint in the comment section of the recipe. There are a couple ways you can deal with this. 1: instead of drizzling the oil and water down the small tube while the food processor is running, remove the small tube and dumb the entire portion of oil and water down the larger opening so that the oil/water gets incorporated faster. The machine should only run for a few seconds, otherwise you will get dough climbing up under the blade. 2. You can incorporate the oil/water by hand, using a dough whisk or spatula.
6. **Shaping** \- don’t be too precious here; flatten out the dough evenly otherwise you will get large irregular holes in the crumb or tunneling, neither of which is great for sandwich bread. If you do not have a nonstick loaf pan, **spray the pan with PAM or use parchment paper to line the pan**. This is a wet, sticky dough, and I found just greasing the pan with oil sometimes resulted in the bread sticking to the sides.
7. **Bonus tip** \- if you can get Whole wheat \*bread\* flour (rather than regular whole wheat flour), I find that it produces a SUPER lofty, light bread with a very soft, fluffy interior. Regular WW flour works too, but WW bread flour definitely makes a difference.
Hope this helps!! If anyone has any extra questions drop them in the comments and I’ll try my best to help. This is such a great recipe, it’s fast, easy once you get the hang of it, and honestly so delicious. I hope you all try it!
The photo here is the multigrain version, with oats, chia, flax and wheat germ.
[https://www.seriouseats.com/100-whole-wheat-sandwich-bread](https://www.seriouseats.com/100-whole-wheat-sandwich-bread)
by GallantBluebird