Baking a Rustic Sourdough Loaf with Wholemeal Flour

Why Wholemeal Is Worth the Fuss

Wholemeal flour is not simply white flour with the good bits left in. Those bran shards are sharp little flakes that slice through gluten strands as you mix, and the germ carries oils that turn rancid if the flour sits in a warm cupboard for months. Buy stoneground wholemeal from a mill within reasonable reach of your kitchen, keep it in the freezer if you bake slowly, and smell it before you use it — it should be sweet and wheaty, never dusty or bitter.

The trade-off is real: a 100% wholemeal loaf often bakes up dense and sour in a way that isn't always welcome. The trick is to keep the wholemeal high but not absolute. A blend of 400g wholemeal and 100g strong white bread flour gives you all the nutty depth you want while leaving enough gluten to hold an open crumb.

Building a Lively Starter

Everything depends on an active starter. Keep a jar of it in the fridge and feed it 50g wholemeal flour and 50g water for every 50g you keep, at least once a week. Bring it to room temperature and feed it daily for two or three days before you plan to bake.

A starter is ready when it has doubled within four to six hours of feeding, is domed rather than flat, and smells of yoghurt, apples and fresh-cut grass. If it smells of nail varnish, it is starving; feed it twice a day until it sweetens up. If it smells of nothing much, it is sluggish; a spoonful of rye flour in the feed will wake it.

Build a leaven the night before. Mix 50g starter with 100g wholemeal flour and 100g water, cover, and leave somewhere cool-ish — around 18°C is ideal. It should be peaked and domed in six to eight hours, just as you come down for breakfast. Use it at that moment; a leaven that has collapsed is already hungry and will give you a tight, sour crumb.

Mixing, Resting and Salting

Weigh 400g wholemeal, 100g strong white flour and 375g water into a big bowl. Mix until no dry flour remains, cover, and leave for 45 minutes. This rest, the autolyse, lets the bran soften and the flour hydrate fully, and it makes everything afterwards easier.

Add 100g of the peaked leaven and squelch it through with a wet hand. Rest 20 minutes, then add 10g fine sea salt with a splash of water and work it in. The dough will feel slack and sticky — that is normal. Don't add flour. Water is your friend with wholemeal; aim for 75–80% hydration against the total flour weight.

Folding and the Long, Cool Prove

Give the dough four sets of stretch and folds, spaced 30 minutes apart. Wet your hand, lift one side of the dough, stretch it up until it resists, and fold it over the middle. Turn the bowl a quarter and repeat four times. By the fourth set the dough should feel smooth and hold its shape for a moment before relaxing.

Then leave it, covered, at room temperature for two to four hours, until it is visibly puffed, jiggly and dotted with bubbles at the edges. Shape it — a light preshape, rest 20 minutes, then a firm final shape — and drop it seam-side up into a well-floured banneton.

Now the fridge. Twelve to eighteen hours at 4–6°C is the single best thing you can do for flavour. The cold slows the yeast and lets the bacteria carry on, building that gentle tang, and it firms the dough so it holds its shape on the peel. Take it out only when the oven is ready.

Baking on a Hot Stone

Put a baking stone or a cast-iron pot on the middle shelf and heat the oven to 240°C (gas mark 9) for at least 45 minutes. A stone needs every minute of that. Put a roasting tin on the floor of the oven, or the shelf below, to heat through too.

• Turn the loaf out onto baking parchment and score it at a shallow 45-degree angle, about 1cm deep, with a sharp blade.
• Slide it onto the stone, then pour a cup of boiling water into the hot tin and shut the door fast.
• Bake 20 minutes at 240°C, then drop to 220°C and bake another 20–25 minutes.
• It is done when the crust is deep mahogany, the loaf sounds hollow, and a probe reads 96–99°C in the centre.

If you are using a cast-iron pot, bake with the lid on for the first 20 minutes and off for the rest. If your oven runs dry, a second splash of water at the ten-minute mark helps the crust set glossy and blistered.

Reading the Crust, Crumb and Keeping

Cool the loaf on a wire rack for at least two hours. Cutting into hot wholemeal bread gives you a gummy, gluey crumb — the starch is still setting. Patience here is not virtue, it is technique.

A good loaf has a crisp, chewy crust that crackles as it cools and a moist, open crumb flecked with bran. If it is heavy and tight, your leaven was underactive or the prove too short. If it is sour and collapsed, you pushed the cold prove too far. Write down what you did; the next bake will be better for it.

Keep it cut-side down on a board for two or three days, or slice and freeze what you won't eat. Toasted, it is the finest thing in the kitchen with butter and a little marmalade, or under a bowl of soup made from whatever the garden gave you that week.