Work Whole Wheat Bread Dough

Work Whole Wheat Bread Dough
My name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you how to make whole wheat bread. We've got our giant bowl of wheat dough here. What we're going to do is we're going to smash it out. What we want to do - see the moisture that came off of that? It's a lot. Which means that things are working the way they're supposed to. There's a little crack right here, so we're just going to work that through. What we're trying to do is work all the air that we can out of our bread. OK, so we've got a nice even texture and consistency. This side is a little crunchier, though, so what I'm going to do is fold it in the middle like this and take my fingers and make like a gigantic empanada take my other hand, fold it back in there on it like that. Get that to really come together. This is the physical part of making bread. You can't do this unless you have a gigantic mixture and it's just not as much fun. So you want to make sure all your edges mesh together really well and you can do that by using your fingers like I'm doing right here. Make sure there's not a seam at all. Really work all up inside the bread, or the dough. Try to get it as even as you can. You can see that I've got a really great texture going on here, but it looks like it might end up getting a little sticky here in a second. Throw some flour on the outside, I'm talking very very little. Rub that around. We're going to pinch these edges together. Just like that. The important part is consistency, making sure that you're always the same thickness or moisture content throughout the entire loaf. Because that'll screw up your loaf of bread. OK, so I've got this shaped out pretty well. We'll roll this edge under. We're pretty even, it looks like. You want to make sure you work your way from the inside out, like this, because that's where you're going to have some thickness issues. Now we move on to our next step, which is splitting.