Flour Questions

[rooloo77]

I am trying to make better food choices and so recently I bought whole wheat flour instead of white flour.

Are they interchangable?

I made a roux last night with ww flour and it turned out really good.

Can I use ww in cookies/breads/pizza dough?

 

[B'sgirl]

For the most part they are interchangeable but you may have to adjust by 1/4 to 1/2 cup. I would not recommend using whole-wheat only in cookies, but you might do a mix. I use it in bread and pizza dough all the time. Your breads don't stay together as well when you use whole wheat flour unless you buy a package of wheat gluten and add it to your dough. Eating too much too fast can also give you diarrhea, just so you know. I'd go easy on it at first and use a mixture of the two flours and work up to it so your body gets used to all the extra fiber. (Whole wheat flour also makes pretty good pancakes).

 

[MaryE]

Hi!

Whole wheat flour is flour milled from all three parts of the wheat kernel, but white flour is milled from the center part of the kernel only and that's where the gluten-producing proteins reside. So, whole wheat flour is more nutritious but also grainier and heavier and baked goods produced from whole wheat flour don’t tend to rise as high as those produced from all-white. So, you may want to add white flour to the whole wheat (or add wheat gluten as B'sgirl suggested), at least when you're first getting used to baking with whole grains.
King Arthur has a great cookbook on baking with whole grains that you mihght want to check out. King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking: Delicious Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains.
Good luck!