# Substituting AP Flour with whole wheat flour



## Chopstix (Oct 31, 2004)

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!


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## merstarr (Oct 31, 2004)

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!


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## Chopstix (Nov 1, 2004)

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


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## subfuscpersona (Nov 2, 2004)

Chopstix said:
			
		

> 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


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