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I have been having inconsistent results using the following wholemeal bread recipe:

https://robynonthefarm.com/blogs/news/1-hour-honey-wheat-bread-%F0%9F%8D%AF%F0%9F%8C%BE%F0%9F%8D%9E-quick-easy-homemade-bread-recipe-1

This recipe only requires one rise in the bread tin before baking.

The enhancer and gluten I've used are the following:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09TWP2P2Z

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07YDZC53R

The first batch of bread I made turned out really well, although I did have to add some more flour to the recipe to get the dough to break away from the food mixer bowl. It was quite a lot more than 1/2 a cup, but I didn't take note of how much. The dough rose beautifully, and the texture of the resulting loaf was perfect.

My second attempt was a disaster. I was using the same ingredients as before, but the wholemeal flour was a new package. The initial mix was extremely soupy, and I had to add 4 more cups of flour to get it to break away as previously. The resulting bread didn't rise anywhere near as much and the resulting loaves were heavy and very disappointing.

One thing I did notice both times was when I added more flour, a dough ball would start to form, and then quickly collapse to a sticky mass. This doesn't seem to happen when using ingredients without the enhancers etc.

Is this normal behavior and is there any special techniques or gotchas when using enhancers and gluten?

Also, is it common for wholemeal flour to have a wide range of absorbency between batches of the same brand?

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  • What kind of wholemeal flour were you using before and what are you using now? Commented 5 hours ago

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Robynonthefarm is a USA site; I've found that USA bread recipes don't convert well to non-USA with differences in flour and measurements - USA cup is 236 ml, UK is 284 ml. However, if you are using 1:1 in terms of measurement, then it shouldn't matter much (i.e. keeping all units consistent), as it doesn't alter the final concentrations of each. The things to watch out for there are that the "spoon" measurements in the USA and UK are different fractions of a cup.

However, having to add an extra 4 cups to get a dough forming indicates you probably either mis-measured the liquid content or mis-measured your first lot of flour; there's no way you'd get that much flour into that little water otherwise; you are going from 84% hydration (with 7 cups in the original recipe) to 53% (11 cups); which is way too low for wholemeal flours and would result in a very very firm dough. In the case of wholemeal, the dough should be quite soft and sticky.

Be aware, and this is particularly a problem when opening fresh large (10-20 kg/22-44 lb) bags of flour, is that the density is significantly less than bags that have been jostled around in your kitchen and had time to pack down a bit. This means that volume measurements (e.g. cup) can be off by some percentage compared to weight (I've never measured it, but I would estimate maybe 10-15%). Weight works consistently!

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