40% Wholegrain Middlings Bread

Profile picture for user albacore
albacore on 14 Jan 2026 at 13:21
mids crumb

Another bake using my middlings levain technique. The original post is here.
This time I increased the wholegrain content to 40%: 20% was home milled Einkorn; for the other 20% I used Marriages Golden wholegrain flour which is a white whole wheat flour. I used this as it has a milder flavour than most of the whole wheat grains/flours available in the UK. It's also nice and strong, which I wanted as the Einkorn is pretty weak.


Einkorn is an unusually shaped grain - rather small and flat in appearance, apparently because there is only a single grain on each side of the rachis (stem). After milling I normally use my coarse kitchen sieve to separate the bran, but this caught hardly any bran and I had to resort to a finer mesh sieve to get the bran.


Dough hydration was 73%, but I could easily have gone to 75%. Bulk fermentation went very quickly and was finished in 2 1/2 hours.

I was very pleased with the loaves from this bake - good loft, good ears, soft crumb and good flavour. 40% wholegrain is as far as I want to go with this style of recipe - for me a good balance of eatability and healthiness. I will bake this again soon with the only change (for once!) being that small increase in hydration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lance

Profile picture for user trailrunner

trailrunner on 14 Jan 2026 at 16:09

I love the word “ middlings”. I have no idea why but I can’t read it and not smile and see a little cottage with a wisp of smoke coming out of the chimney and flower beds along a brick path. 

Ahem.. back from the whimsy to the bread! Everything looks perfect especially the melty butter. 

My last Pullman was 100% home milled wheat. It’s so fun to push the envelope with our various grains and see what we get. c

Thanks Caroline - I love your metaphor!

You are the Pullman Meister (Meisterin?) and your 100% wholewheat puts my 40% attempt to shame!

 

Lance

I muddle along lol. When I sliced the current Pullman with the unmentionable side I simply said “ be gone” and sliced that all off cleanly. It made slightly smaller slices but did the trick and the hunky chunks tasted the same 😊. 

I look forward to your next middling loaf. 🙏

Now that's a smart-looking loaf! Really well done. I love einkorn myself too. And yes - 40% gives exactly the sweet balance there that you're talking about.

Lin

Looks like you nailed the fermentation on this one.  Great looking crumb as well.

Best,

Ian

The fermentation moves fast with the middlings levain, as I mentioned. I called it a day on the bulk at 36% increase, 15min bench rest and no ambient proof before the fridge - I had a few overproofs before I got the technique right.

Lance

Gorgeous loaf Lance! You are really fine-tuning the technique. 

Need to get back to it too. I really enjoyed the experimentation and results. I still have some Allinson's bread flour, but need to get some more wholemeal wheat.

Came back from Italy after Christmas with some packs of rimacinata, so gone down a Matera-inspired rabbit hole with my loaves this month. Also involves turbocharging the fermentation process, but in a different way. 

Thanks Rene, the Einkorn certainly added great flavour; I bought 3kg of grain, so I'll be using it for a while!

At least in grain form it should keep well.

Lance

I was inspired by your beautiful loaf here to try your middlings technique again Lance, and how rewarding it was. 

I found a nice looking stoneground wholemeal wheat flour at Waitrose from an old Welsh watermill and couldn't resist getting some to use with your technique. 

So this loaf is 50% Bacheldre wholemeal and 50% AP and the Allinson's in the preferment at 70% overall hydration. Thinking I might be able to go a bit higher with it.

The family have become bread aficionados, so when half the loaf goes the same day I make it, I know it is a good bake. 

Going to make another one this weekend. Let's see if I can improve on this one.

A good looking loaf for 50% WW, especially considering the wholemeal flour came from an artisan stoneground mill - they don't always supply the strongest of flours.

My latest middlings effort was more or less a carbon copy of the Einkorn loaf, but using Mockmilled Kamut instead at 20% plus the 20% white wholewhat (Marriages Golden bread flour, the only white wholewheat you can buy in the UK). The combination of two flours both with light coloured bran gave a very "blonde" loaf - I would have guessed at 10% WW, if I hadn't known.

 

Interestingly, quite a few bread flours in the UK are listing hemicellulase as an ingredient now, eg Asda and Lidl. I'm sticking with Allinson's for now as I know it gives the results I want.

Next time I will try 75% hydration - this was 73%.

Lance

 

That looks stunning Lance. As you say, it could pass for a low WW content loaf. Great oven spring and crumb,

I am just proving my latest 50% WW loaf and hoping to bake it in about 1h. The overnight preferment with the middlings was spectacular. I would say it more than tripled in volume and had a lovely grassy/over ripe fruit smell I have only previously encountered from my shaggy bigas.

OK. Here is the final loaf. 

Pretty much the same as the previous one (50/50 stone milled WW/AP-Alanson's), but tried to up the hydration a little. Not sure exactly how high I managed to go as I was adding a little at a time and forgot to weigh before adding, but probably around 72-73%.

Cold soak with salt overnight for the bran and the middlings mixed into the 80% hydration preferment with Allinson's bread flour which grew impressively overnight to more than 3x volume. 

This is proving to be a very reliable and repeatable way of making great high wholemeal content bread which feels like a lower WW content bread. 

Next time I might try an overnight autolysis with salt for the entire WW flour content minus the middlings, which has worked well for me in the past. Maybe also add some seeds. 

Another good looking "Middler", Rene. What's next for us? For me, I might play the tune with another grain, probably Emmer, which I haven't used for ages. I once got a bag of Doves Farm Emmer flour and it baked into great loaves. Then I got some Emmer grain and it didn't work as well; maybe variety makes a difference?

BTW the original idea for the middlings levain came from a Finnish scientific paper I read about bran preprocessing; the best results came with bran prefermented with SD starter, xylanase and alpha amylase (or malt). My progression was to make the whole thing into the levain with extra flour and use the middlings rather than the "true" bran.

Lance

Such gorgeous breads and excellent write up. I gave my sifters away. It’s so interesting to me what happens to the crumb and texture when you “ super-treat” them. I’m going to have to think on this . 

Right now I’m planning on poolishing ( not sure that’s a word lol) my baguettes. JMonkey posted way way back on it . I’ve got the formula reworked. Will be a while since I made 6 yesterday. 

Excellent posts on middlings by everyone. c

Thanks Caroline. I'm also surprised at how much difference these middlings make to the preferment. It's really spectacular. Well worth trying of you get your sives back. Wondering where Lance got the original idea from. Clearly the nutrients in the wheatgerm give a massive boost to the yeasts in the SD.

Looking forward to see what you do with your reworked baguette formula.

I have several sieves just not numbered. How much salt do you use? 

As far as baguettes, these latest I just posted have 2 flours and non diastatic malt. I’m very pleased with them. 

The cutting with the pizza roller seals the edges so shaping per se isn’t needed. It’s so fun to find new ways of doing things. 🙏

Always use 1% salt. Need to watch my sodium intake....

Never made baguettes. Only boulles and battards. Insecure about baking anything that doesn't go into my Dutch oven.

Profile picture for user trailrunner

trailrunner on 14 Feb 2026 at 11:37

So you use 1% by weight of the siftings/ middlings and then the rest of the salt goes in as usual into the dough?

1% of total loaf flour which went into the cold soaker for the bran  (widest sieve wholes). Over hydrated the bran and subtracted the water soaked up by the bran in the final dough water calculation. No other salt added to the dough at all 

Thanks everyone; it looks

albacore on 4 Feb 2018 at 16:56

Thanks everyone; it looks like the finest setting is the way to go. I've just milled 200g of spelt grain and got 38g of bran held back by a #40 sieve. I'm doing a bran levain with this which I will add to my main dough along with a normal flour levain tomorrow.

Isand66 do you add your bran back or discard it?

Lance

I have in the past added a nice % of it back in the levain.  Lately, I have not been doing that as much.

I don't find the small % of bran I remove (3% for WW and 5% for Spelt) to be an issue nutrition-wise.   I use a #30 so it doesn't remove as much and then re-mill in my Mockmill at the finest setting.  I only sift twice with a #30 and #40 when I do Durum, as that needs to be light and soft, or you end up with too gritty a flour.  I've been on a scald kick lately (just posed one I baked last week), and with the scald flour, I don't sift at all.