Homemade Whole Wheat Pasta

[tino27]

I found some freshly milled whole wheat flour at my farmers market yesterday and bought a bag with the intention of making some whole wheat fettuccine noodles out of it. Which, in fact I did with a 50/50 blend with AP flour. The noodles came out quite lovely and really the only thing different between the 50/50 blend and using 100% AP flour was that I needed to add in some extra water to the recipe and had several hydration / relaxation waits between various steps of making the pasta.

So naturally, I began to think last night, how would I alter my recipe / technique if I went to 100% whole wheat flour? Would I even want to? My current recipe calls for two large eggs per pound of flour. To that I added about a tbsp of olive oil, two pinches of kosher salt, and probably about 1/4 cup of water.

Any thoughts on doing 100% whole wheat pasta?

BTW, if you want to see the results of my experiment, check out the link in my signature.

[dougal]

I think you'd be wanting the bran to be very finely milled - which it usually isn't!

You might try sieving out the coarsest bits of bran, which should leave you with some (fairly fine) bran, but more importantly all the flavour and nutrition of the wheatgerm.

I don't know whether you'd want to add back more bran (I suspect you'd end up with rather heavy-when-cooked pasta), but you could try blitzing the coarse stuff that you have sieved off (blender, food processor, ... ?) and sieving it again to get some more fines to add to your pasta dough.

I like sieved wholemeal (ie 100% going into the sieve) as a bread flour. And its always astonishing to see the quantity (or rather volume - there's not much dry weight) of the bran flakes removed by an ordinary (not specially fine) kitchen sieve.

There's a couple of other things maybe tenuously connected here. Indian Chapati flour is often wholegrain with finely milled bran (but its usually pretty low protein, so maybe not ideal for pasta). And French bakers use a magic ingredient, for example on their peels, which is called "remoulage" - finely (re)milled bran.

Oh, and an English millers' word for sieving off the bran is "bolting".

Edited June 14, 2010 by dougal (log)

[nextguy]

I only make my homemade past with WW flour. I used to use a cheapo brand from my grocery store that had pretty large bran flakes. I found that by adding maybe 25% more water to the recipe the dough rolled out well after a bit of rest. Angel hair pasta was out of the question since the noodles kept breaking but anything larger was ok. For the last few years though I have been using a higher end organic flour which is much finer. Ironically this flour actually needs more water than the cheaper one I used to use and requires a bit more resting. I am able to get thinner noodles though.

[dougal]

... For the last few years though I have been using a higher end organic flour which is much finer. Ironically this flour actually needs more water than the cheaper one I used to use and requires a bit more resting. I am able to get thinner noodles though.

One of the French bakers' other uses for remoulage would seem to be holding water in the loaf, so that they can hit their target minimum weight with less flour! Finer milled bran does take up more water more quickly.

Yes, I was thinking that large bran flakes would reduce the mechanical strength of the pasta.

[tino27]

So it sounds like unless I'm willing to sift out and finely grind the bran from the product I found at the farmers market (which did have some fairly good sized pieces of bran in it), I should probably stick to a blend of whole wheat and AP flour.

Thanks for the advice, however. I may just try the techniques mentioned one of these days when I want to shoot for 100% whole wheat.

[Blether]

You may well find that it makes wonderful lasagne or tagliatelle, even with grainy bran in (I love & prefer the grainy w/w flour for bread, and was disappointed the first time I bought the Indian 'atta' flour for that purpose).

How fine a pasta you can make will depend on the strength / gluten content of the flour, as well as the sizes of the bran pieces. "How expensive is flour anyway - why not give it a try ?" is a motto that made a lot of difference to my pastry-making (I wish I could take the same attitude to butter !).

Edited June 14, 2010 by Blether (log)