Easy Fresh Milled Wheat Bread Recipe with Sourdough

Learn how to make this easy, everyday soft sourdough sandwich bread recipe with fresh milled wheat. No complicated shaping or proofing, this is a perfect beginner recipe that will quickly become a family favorite!

Our family loves a good loaf of soft sourdough bread, fresh out of the oven. Trust me, when you bite into that soft, chewy wholesome slice of whole wheat sourdough bread for the first time, you will never go back to store-bought bread again. And if you need a friendly recipe for homemade sandwich bread with a depth of flavor, look no further.

Why add fresh milled wheat to a sourdough bread recipe?

Because combining the benefits of sourdough and the benefits of fresh milled wheat into one bread recipe is so satisfying for the body and the mind. Let’s talk about the benefits of both.

Benefits of sourdough

There are so many health benefits to sourdough like the beneficial bacteria for gut health, not to mention that sourdough has less of an impact on blood sugar levels than many commercially produced breads. There is no need to use active dry yeast in this recipe because the natural wild yeast produces carbon dioxide, making your bread rise. Lactic and acetic acid gives the sourdough its unique flavor and the enzymes that are produced by the bacteria predigest the flour, making it a microbial powerhouse.

But once you go down the road of baking homemade sourdough bread, you might think to yourself, what is in the flour that I am using for my bread? Is it wholesome? Is anything added or taken away? And then, before you know it, you own your own grain mill ready to mill your own wheat!

Now, incorporating sourdough with freshly milled whole grains is a whole different journey. But it is one worth taking. Adding fresh milled wheat to a sourdough bread recipe is taking your baking to a whole different level of delicious. Fresh milled flour not only adds an amazing, nutty, rich flavor to your bread, it also has countless nutritional benefits.

Benefits of fresh milled wheat:

There are 3 parts to a wheat berry

• The Bran. It is loaded with fiber and nutrients
• The Germ. It offers vitamins, protein, minerals, and oil.
• The Endosperm. This is the part of the wheat berry that is full of starch.

After traditional processing, you are left with mostly the endosperm, which is basically starch. Gone are the fiber, nutrients, vitamins, protein, minerals, and oil. Why would they remove them? Because they are oily and turn rancid quickly, which is the opposite of shelf-stable. That is why they have to ‘enrich’ the flour and add synthetic vitamins and minerals back in. But if you mill your own flour, you get to keep all that natural goodness and incorporate it into your diet. Sounds like a win-win to me!

With this recipe, you will also be using unbleached white flour. Using only 100 percent fresh milled wheat with sourdough can be very tricky and can result in a very dense, heavy loaf. The bran in whole wheat flour weakens the gluten strands by cutting into them. This decreases the overall elasticity of the dough and it can’t hold on to as much carbon dioxide. This is why this is the perfect recipe to begin your sourdough bread journey with freshly milled flour!

Tip for adding more fresh milled wheat

If you would like to incorporate more freshly milled flour than the recipe suggests, I would add 2 tablespoons of vital wheat gluten into your dough. Vital wheat gluten is made from wheat flour that has been hydrated to activate the gluten and then dried and ground into powder. It is almost pure gluten, which improves the elasticity and rise of the bread and is important to incorporate when you are using a larger amount of fresh ground whole wheat in your recipe.

How to make Sourdough Bread with Fresh Milled Wheat

The first thing you need to start with is a bubbly, active sourdough starter. If you are new to sourdough, you can check out how to feed your sourdough starter here.

About 2 to 3 days before you plan on baking bread, start feeding your starter. If your starter is kept in the fridge between baking, this is an example;

How to feed a starter before baking

• Monday afternoon
• Take the sourdough starter out of the fridge
• Let it stand on the counter to come to room temperature and start to get bubbly. About 4 to 6 hours.
• Monday night
• Take out your kitchen scale and measure 20 grams of starter, 40 grams of water, and 40 grams of white flour. That is a 1-2-2 ratio. (you can feed it with freshly milled flour, but it will ‘eat’ it a lot faster) Stir vigorously and let sit on the countertop at room temperature.
• After approximately 12 hours, the starter will have doubled, and started to fall down. It is ready to be fed again the next day.
• Tuesday morning
• Measure 50 grams of starter, 50 grams of water and 50 grams of flour. Stir, let sit on counter at room temperature until doubled or tripled for approx 8 to 12 hours. (put leftover or discard starter into a jar and refrigerate for discard recipes, or discard it)
• Tuesday night
• Feed starter again, 150 grams starter, 200 grams water, 200 grams flour
• Wednesday morning
• Ready to bake!
• Starter has now doubled and started to fall, or is on the brink of falling. It should have large bubbles and a firm texture, not runny. To know if it is ready, you can perform a float test. Take a glass of cold water, add a spoonful of starter. If it floats, it is ready to bake with. If it sinks, you need to feed it for another day so it is strong enough to rise a loaf of bread.

How to store starter in the fridge

Storing your starter in the fridge slows down the fermentation process. You can get by with only feeding it once a week or even every second week. After you have measured the correct amount of starter you need for your recipe, always remember to feed it again for the next use. If you aren’t planning on using it in the next few days or weeks, store it in the fridge. I use the 5 g starter-25 g water-25 g flour ratio to store my starter in the fridge.

Time to mill the flour

For my sourdough bread recipe with freshly milled wheat, I mill the wheat right before I knead the dough. This is an easy recipe beginner recipe, so I don’t pre-soak the flour.

We use and love the Komo Classic flour mill.

Measure 2 cups of hard white wheat berries (or hard red wheat berries), and 1/2 cup spelt berries and mill them on the finest ground setting on your mill. Doesn’t freshly milled whole wheat flour smell amazing? Just wait until it comes out of the oven!

Kneading the dough

Set your stand mixer on the counter with the dough hook attachment, (since this recipe makes 3 loaves at a time, I recommend the Bosch Universal Mixer) and add the warm water, oil of choice, sourdough starter, sugar or honey and salt.

Next, slowly mix in approximately 5 cups of unbleached white all purpose flour and all the freshly milled flour (total of 505 grams). Add the 6th cup in slowly until the dough has pulled away from the bowl and is not sticky to the touch. Knead for 8 minutes on low speed. As the dough kneads in the mixer, it creates healthy gluten strands. (Gluten is what helps the mixture create gas, which helps the bread rise and build texture. Kneading will help your gluten form properly.) You should have a smooth, well mixed dough. If not, slowly incorporate more flour until you get the desired result.

First rise

Grab a large mixing bowl and rub the sides of the bowl with olive oil. Place bread dough into the bowl, cover with plastic wrap or lid and put it in a warm place or warm oven for the first rise for 2.5 hours. Set a timer on your oven so you don’t forget.

After 2.5 hours, take the dough and fold it over. Give the bowl a quarter turn and fold it over one more time.

Second rise

Place it back into the same warm place for 1.5 hours. This is the second rise.

How to shape fresh milled wheat bread

After the second rise, divide and shape the dough into loaves. Take 3 loaf pans and grease them or line them with parchment paper. Weigh the entire bread dough and divide it into 3 separate loaves.

On a lightly floured surface, shape the dough by rolling it into a rectangle shape with a rolling pin. Try not to go wider than the length of your loaf pan. Fold 1/3 of the dough into the middle and then fold again. Pinch it to close and tuck the sides under.

Place dough into prepared bread pans.

Cover the loaf pans with plastic wrap and place into a warm oven until the bread has risen approximately 1 inch above the pan. It will be 3 to 4 hours, depending on how warm your kitchen is.

Bake at 350 F for 30 to 35 minutes or until the bread reaches 195 degrees F internal temperature.

Tip: If you are making the bread dough at night, after the loaves are in the pans, you can place them into the fridge for bulk fermentation. Just take them out of the fridge as soon as you wake up and let them rise in a warm place. They will be ready to bake around noon.