Substituting AP Flour with whole wheat flour

[Chopstix]

If I want to substitute the All Purpose flour in the original recipe with whole wheat flour when making bread, is it a simple one-is-to-one subsititution? My dad and I tried this with the our lavosh recipe and the lavosh came out tough and dry.

I hope somebody out there can help. Thanks!

[merstarr]

Substituting whole wheat for all purpose flour, 1 to 1, will almost always result in a very tough bread. I suggest experimenting with half whole wheat and half all purpose for better results. And it would be even better to use a whole wheat bread recipe in the first place, since it would specifically call for whole wheat flour and would be designed to work using that type of flour! :)

[Chopstix]

I'll try that 50-50 substituion Merstarr! Thank you! :)

[subfuscpersona]

Originally Posted by Chopstix

If I want to substitute the All Purpose flour in the original recipe with whole wheat flour when making bread, is it a simple one-is-to-one subsititution? My dad and I tried this with the our lavosh recipe and the lavosh came out tough and dry.

Are you using a yeast-rising recipe or not? I'm unfamiliar with lavosh but some quick 'net research for this yeilded some recipes using yeast but most did not.

The 1:1 AP/WW substitution already given is a good rule of thumb, but If the bread you're making is some form of flat bread (which, essentially, doesn't use yeast) then, in the future, you might want to use a finely milled whole wheat pastry flour, which is milled from soft wheat and has less gluten than the whole wheat flour commonly marketed for bread making.

Some other ideas are to
> substitute some cake flour for the portion of AP flour to further reduce the gluten content (if I were to guess, I'd say 25% cake flour, 75% AP to make the total quantity of AP flour called for)
> sift the whole wheat flour through a fine seive to get out larger bran particles (bran doesn't absorb liquid as readily so that could contribute to "dry" tasting bread).

If you live near an Asian/Indian market, get chapati flour, which is a very finely milled whole wheat flour made from soft wheat.

There is a real taste difference between stone ground whole wheat flour and commercially milled whole wheat so go with stone ground whole wheat if possible.

Hope this helps :)