Bread Baking and Flour Substitution Tips (2024)

A lot of people are baking sourdough bread for the first time since the Covid pandemic began, and inconsistent availability of flour in grocery stores has given new and experienced bakers alike the challenge of substituting different flours in bread recipes and for their sourdough starter feeds. As a result, Eric wrote this Newbie’s Guide to Flour for Bread Baking to help people better understand the properties of different flours and wheats, and I’ve written some quick rules of thumb for flour substitutions in bread baking in this article.

Before we jump into the flours, here is a short but important list of fermentation variables to keep in mind as you bake bread and manage your sourdough starter.

• Heat: higher ambient and water temperature will speed up fermentation
• Water: higher hydration dough and sourdough starter ferment faster
• Starch and Nutrients: dough and sourdough starter with more whole grain flour ferment faster
• Fat and Protein: eggs, butter, milk, and oil slow down fermentation

Flour Type and Bread Dough

If you’re following a recipe that calls for bread flour and you only have all purpose flour, that’s fine. The level of gluten-forming protein in all purpose flour is a little lower than in bread flour, but the difference is not dramatic and it won’t cause your bread to be flat. All purpose flour tends to produce a more tender crumb, and bread flour produces a more chewy crumb. Baguettes are usually made with all purpose flour, for example, and many bakers use it alone or in combination with other flours, such as in the loaves in the photo below.

If you’re following a recipe that calls for refined or “white” flour, and you only have whole grain flour, keep in mind that the dough will probably ferment faster and you’ll probably need more liquid than what the recipe calls for. Commercial whole wheat flour and stoneground hard red wheat flours absorb more water than refined flour. This recipe for yecora rojo wheat sourdough breads shows the difference in water needed for a 100% whole wheat flour dough versus a 50% whole wheat flour dough. (You can also see results of a no knead approach vs. active gluten development.) Exceptions to this whole grain thirstiness include, einkorn, white sonora, and other soft white wheats.

How about pastry flour and soft wheat flours? These flours usually have significantly less protein than all purpose flour, bread flour, and conventional whole wheat flours. Similarly, ancient or heirloom varieties of whole grain wheat like emmer, durum, Kamut, einkorn, and warthog tend to be low in gluten strength. You can use a loaf pan to bake bread with these flours, relying on fermentation alone for airiness and the side support of the pan. You can also mix these flours with a higher-gluten flour. This blog post shows the difference in outcomes between using a mix of bread flour and whole grain einkorn flour and using whole grain yecora rojo flour and whole grain einkorn flour.

You can also use a low-gluten flour alone, and while the resulting loaves are usually not tall or airy, they can be soft and delicious. This article, Baking Bread with Low Gluten Wheat, explains how to assess different wheat flours and bake beautiful breads with them. Here is an example of a whole grain Kamut sourdough bread baked freestanding and a naturally leavened einkorn bread baked in a loaf pan to prevent the dough from spreading.

Rye is another wheat with little gluten development potential. Here’s a recipe for tourte de seigle, an all-rye, relatively flat freestanding bread that is traditional to the Alps region of France, Germany and Switzlerland. You can also use a loaf pan for this bread as is discussed in the comments of the recipe. This Swedish-style artisan rye bread uses a 50:50 mix of rye and bread flour, and is one of the most popular recipes on Breadtopia.

Another option for working with low-gluten flour is to add vital wheat gluten. Here is a calculator tool from our Naturally Leavened Panettone recipe by @DanDee to help you determine how much vital wheat gluten to add to get the percentage of protein you’re targeting. The link to the tool is in the paragraph labeled High Gluten Flour and I recommend you read the entire paragraph.

In the photo below, you can see some of the amazing variety of wheat flours.

In my experience, non-wheat flours like oat, quinoa, and buckwheat can be used at up to 25% of the total flour weight with basically no volume issues in the resulting bread if the other 75% of the flour is bread flour, all purpose flour, or a hard red whole grain flour. If you go for higher percentages of these non-wheat flours, you may want to bake the dough in a loaf pan. For example, here’s a buckwheat bread made with only fermented and food-processed buckwheat groats. Note that non-wheat flours with high fat content e.g. coconut, flaxseed, and almond, will cause your dough to ferment slower. Here’s a recipe for sourdough bread with flaxseed meal.

Tips On Gluten Development

If all your calculated substitutions still result in a dough that feels too wet or slack, like in the photo above, you have a few options. You can stiffen the dough with more flour, plan to bake the dough in a loaf pan, and/or develop the gluten strength in the dough through methods such as stretching and folding, depicted in the video below.

Gluten strength develops over time. When a dough’s bulk fermentation is short (a lot of starter in the recipe, warm temperature), the dough often needs more rounds of stretching and folding, or other methods of active gluten development. When a dough’s bulk fermentation is long (a little bit of starter in the recipe, cold temperature), the dough can develop strength on its own, with few or even no rounds of stretching and folding.

Strength can be built late in the process. Stretching and folding during the beginning of the bulk fermentation is great for gluten strength, but if you skipped doing this, you can still work strength into your dough later. If at the pre-shape stage, I feel that a dough is floppy, I stretch it into a very large rectangle before rolling it up tight. And after the bench rest, depending on how the dough feels, I might shape it twice in a row to build enough tension that it doesn’t splay outward.

Last minute trick for making your dough more manageable: Put your proofing basket in your freezer for 20-30 minutes before baking. This will stiffen the dough for scoring and transfer, and possibly help it retain some height once it’s out of the basket.

Flour Types and Sourdough Starter

It is fine to feed your sourdough starter any wheat flour (all purpose, bread, einkorn, rye, emmer…etc.) and probably many non-wheat flours. It’s also fine to switch flours regularly. Maybe you’ve always fed your starter rye flour and now only have all purpose flour. No problem. Though your starter may take longer to peak, and it may have a different texture, it will peak and it will leaven dough. This even applies to bleached flour; though I’ve only tested it for a week on vacation, my starter thrived.

Tips for Starter Management and Discard

If you love pancakes, crackers, naan flatbreads and other ways of using sourdough discard, it makes sense to feed your starter a lot of flour and water, and to refresh it multiple times before each bake. But if you prefer to run a lean starter system with rare or no discard, you might try the starter feeding protocol I’ve been doing for several years, or try that of @homebreadbaker described here which produces discard at most about once a month.

I use most of the ripe starter in my jar when I mix up a dough, then I feed the remainder. The feeding amount varies, but I aim for about 100g starter in the jar after feeding. I let the fed starter expand just a little bit before refrigerating. Then, the next time I bake bread (usually 2-3 days later), I use this starter after bringing it to room temperature and full expansion (a few hours). Or, if I am making more than one loaf, I feed the starter to make it larger, let it ripen (a few hours) and use most of it. Occasionally, I do make too much starter, and my preference is to immediately mix up a batch of dough for naan or crackers.

You can learn more about Breadtopia’s experiments using different amounts of starter in different states of dormancy in this article: Challenging Sourdough Starter Convention.