TBB - 100% Whole Wheat Walnut Loaf

It's been a while since I baked along with Rose's Alpha Bakers, and right away there are two things wrong with the title of this post:

• I cheated and used some bread flour. So, it's really an 87% whole wheat loaf.
• Yes, I'm allergic to walnuts but I love my husband. So, I decided to make the dough without nuts, and add them later to his half of the dough. I made rolls with "my half".

I used my bread machine to make this bread which worked out perfectly.

Dinner rolls (nut-free) and sandwich bread

Light and soft

This recipe uses a starter (a sponge). Even so, I was able to make this bread in one day.

Starter/sponge

I let the starter sit for a couple of hours only, and then let the bread machine do the kneading. The dough was very wet and tacky which is why the dough goes through an autolyse phase. This allows the flour time to absorb the moisture in the dough. After that, I let the bread machine run its regular kneading and rising cycle.

Before the final rise. Hubby's loaf is in a 7.5" x 3.5" pan.

After the final rise

Right before shaping the dough, is when I divided the dough in half and added toasted walnuts to one half. The other was going to be a sandwich loaf for me, but then I decided to make them into rolls instead (I was cooking Moroccan and needed bread to serve with that).

Inside view of the dinner rolls

Light and airy texture!

Final thoughts/tips:

• Hubby loved the bread, especially toasted. He gave it a 9 out of 10 rating. He had a couple of suggestions for next time:
• Add a little bit more nuts next time.
• As a variation: try pecans instead of walnuts.
• Fearing that the bread might be "blah" without the nuts, I changed up the recipe a little bit (are you surprised?). Please see my entire list of changes at the end of this blog post.
• I can only judge the nut-free dinner rolls I made and I really liked them. They were light and airy with a slight chew to them.
• Changes made to the Sponge:
• Used King Arthur Flour White Whole Wheat flour exclusively.
• Replace honey with agave nectar.
• Changes made to the Dough:
• Used King Arthur Flour White Whole Wheat flour exclusively.
• Used 70% whole wheat flour and 30% bread flour.
• Reduced the amount of vital wheat gluten to 17 grams.
• Reduced the amount of salt to 7 grams.
• Reduced the amount of oil to 45 grams.
• Added 23 grams of non-fat dry milk powder.
• Added 25 grams of ground flax seeds.
• Added 25 grams of ground millet.
• Baking:
• I used a 7.5" x 3.5" pan for hubby's loaf which is smaller than the required pan size.
• After the first 15 minutes, I reduced the oven temp to 375 F.
• Skipped the pizza stone. Baked the loaf and rolls directly on a large (non-preheated) cookie sheet.
• Rolls: adjusted the baking time to about 20 minutes.
• Loaf: adjusted the baking time to about 30 minutes (the internal temp measured 204 F).
• This baking group doesn't post recipes. You can find the recipe in Rose's book: The Baking Bible.
• Oh, and here are the Moroccan dishes I made (white beans in spicy tomato sauce, spicy chopped purslane from the Farmers Market with Moroccan olives and preserved lemons, and fried cod fillets):

Bon Appetit!