Adventures with Whole Wheat

I've been playing around with whole wheat pastry flour quite a bit lately. Just substituting small amounts to different things that I regularly make to see how it affects taste and texture. I make biscuits often for my boys and I always feel somewhat guilty about it because, other than the fact that they are homemade, there isn't much in the way of wholesomeness to redeem them (the biscuits, not the boys.) So I decided to try them with whole wheat pastry flour. The cool thing about WWPF is that you can substitute it for white flour 1:1, which makes it easier to work with in a recipe. Of the flour called for in the recipe, I used 1/3 WWPF. I was worried that the heavier wheat might keep them from rising but they puffed up nicely. They came out more golden brown with tiny specks of brown instead of lily white but nobody noticed and of course, I didn't say anything. They slather honey or jam on them anyway so I figured I'd get away with it.

The next thing I decided to try was pie crust. I made a cherry pie using my Barefoot Contessa's Perfect Pie Crust recipe and again, substituting 1/3 ww pastry flour. Here the switch was hardly detectable at all. The only place where I could detect it was on the thick edge. It may have been little more dense but not by much. I used frozen sour cherries for the filling and used my favorite recipe from Fine Cooking for this pie.


Next up, pizza. Again I used my regular pizza dough recipe (from FC) and substituted 1/3 with wwpf. Here is where I noticed the addition. The crust was just not as crispy and crackly as I like it. There was a definite chew. Thinking about it more, it may have been the fact that I used pastry flour and not regular whole wheat. Pastry flour is not meant to develop gluten. That's why it gives you a tender flaky pastry crust. But for things like bread and pizza dough, you want the gluten strands to develop. The whole point of kneading is to develop those elastic strands. So I might try this again with just regular whole wheat. But if I'm making it for the whole family, I'm going to stick with regular flour. The boys couldn't express why but they were less enthusiastic about this pizza than normal.