On Whole Wheat

 Why Whole Wheat?

I hope y'all had a good Thanksgiving! It was an unusually busy time for my family because we hosted some family friends for the first time in a few years. We all spent the week before Thanksgiving day cleaning the house and cooking some dishes ahead of time; fortunately, I was able to make my Whole Wheat Apple Cinnamon Cake ahead of time, and it was a big hit! Of course, cleaning up after was its own chore and, like many of you, we were eating turkey leftovers for several days afterward.

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I've had a lot of people ask me why I put myself through the trouble of baking only with whole wheat (WW) flour, and I don't blame them. People usually think of tough, dry breads and very stiff doughs when they think of WW, and they certainly don't think of cakes or sweets. There must be a reason that people began to exclude the bran and germ of the wheat berry from flour, right? 

Regular white flour is composed of only the endosperm of the wheat berry; this is primarily starch, a carbohydrate. By only using the endosperm, white flour becomes a very energy-dense and homogenous substance which, in baked goods, translates to high versatility, simplicity of use, and a nearly addictive nature. These features are the reason white flour became so predominant in much of the world, especially after the Industrial Revolution led to augmentation of wheat yields and crop variety standardization. However, energy-density of food is not quite as important in the Western world anymore, and is a contributor to the increasing prevalence of obesity and related disorders. That's why fiber is such an important and often-overlooked part of a person's diet; it is indigestible and yet also a crucial component of the human digestive system. Whole wheat flour retains the germ and fiber-bearing bran, making it a much more suitable flour for the modern diet.

Not all whole wheat flour is made equal, though. I use stone-ground flour, which means that wheat berries are milled and bagged directly; stone milling also tends to result in larger particle size and coarser flour. Compare this to roller-milled flour, which separates the wheat berry into its major endosperm and bran components and then recombines them later along the production line. It's not a huge difference for the average consumer, but it gives the flour producer more choice over how much of each kind of flour to mill. My personal preference is the simpler production line of stone-ground; I just think there's less opportunity to remove anything that would otherwise naturally be present in the wheat berries.

Besides nutrition and health, I think it is also worth mentioning that stone-ground whole wheat flour is the most affordable flour available at my local bulk store. The last bag I bought was 50lbs for $16.50, compared to about $20 for the same quantity of white flour. It's not a major difference at those quantities, and the cost generally evens out anyway because most bakers need to add conditioners, gluten, or improvers to whole wheat flour. However, I don't need to use those at all, so there's some good savings!

Long story short, there's nothing particularly different about whole wheat flour. Just like people, it simply has different needs, and meeting those needs will yield great results!