At my conference last week I discovered a pastry shop that makes exquisite danishes. I'm a pretty decent cook but I can't make pastries. However, once I got home, I decided it was time to try again. I pulled out my copy of
King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking and attempted their Cheese Danish recipe. They didn't turn out horrible, but neither were they fantastic.
The pastry dough was too tough. I can't decide if I kneaded too long, added too much flour, or the toughness was the natural result of including some whole wheat flour in the recipe. The whole wheat flour I use is the
King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour. It's one of my favorite flours to bake with. In most items, such as cookies and sweet breads, I can use at least 50% of the white whole wheat without a noticeable difference. The recipe did specify whole wheat pastry flour but I've made these substitutions before without any issues. It's also possible that I just need more practice making danishes before they come out right. However, it's such a labor intensive process I probably won't try it anytime soon. After all, donuts are much easier to make and just as tasty :)
If you bake and are looking to increase your use of whole grains, I strongly recommended going to your library and seeing if they have a copy of
King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking. My cheese danishes notwithstanding, almost every recipe I've tried from this book has turned out great. I've made Hazelnut Waffles with Pear compote, Chewy Oatmeal Cookies, Lemon-Oat Squares and Baked Oatmeal. They aren't necessarily the healthiest of recipes but they taste great and you can pretend they're healthy with the various whole grain flours the recipes use.
Another baking book I love is
The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. She provides very detailed directions for all of her recipes. In addition, Bernabaum adds little "understanding" notes explaining why certain ingredients work the way they do within the recipe. Most of her recipes call for using bread flour. However, I've had very good luck substituting half of the flour (by weight) with white whole wheat flour and adding about 1 tbs of vita wheat gluten per cup of whole wheat flour (to compensate for the protein differences between the flours). Bernabaum is a stickler for precision and would probably be horrified to see how I mutilate the recipes. However, the recipes still turn out great. Her Cinnamon Raisin Loaf recipe is particularly good as a base for French Toast.