What's the best wheat for sourdough?

[BedHead]

I can get freshly milled grains now and she has a wide variety of choices. I know nothing about flour - till now I've had to use store bought. I prefer sourdough that's 1/2 to 3/4 whole wheat 'best for bread' flour and the rest I use white 'best for bread' flour.

What types of milled grains would be similar to this? Obviously wheat for one, but what kind?? There seems to be several different kinds available.

[eastkygal]

I use only spelt and rye for the starter as NT suggests.

[Althetrainer]

flour for sourdough

If you're looking for flour to make starter, most flour will do. But freshly ground rye flour is one of the best for that purpose. If you want to know which type of flour makes better sourdough bread, I would say whatever type of flour you like the most will be the best.

I don't know anything about "best for bread". Is that some type of bread flour? Bread flour is designed for lighter and softer texture.Why don't you get some whole wheat and mix it with some white flour or unbleached to see if you can get the same result?

I used rye, whole wheat, and unbleached flour to make different types of bread. Each flour has its own distinct flavor and the end products texture and volume will be different as well. If you like the heavier texture of whole wheat bread yet a bit volume, use 70 - 80% WW then the rest unbleached/white/bread flour. If you like strong flavor rye will do very well. For my regular sourdough bread I use a mix of whole wheat and unbleached flour. But I use rye to mix with whole wheat to make Russian black bread for hubby and little man because they like strong flavored bread. When I make sourdough garlic bread mostly unbleached flour to give the right texture. It's all about your taste and experience.

Once you have your sourdough starter ready, the possibilities are endless. Just experiment and have fun with it.

[Hedgehog Mtn]

just my experience but I found repeatedly that if I fed the starter with bread flour it would go bad. If I used hard wheat it was fine but more than a few times I found that if I forgot to feed it (kept on the shelf out of the fridge) for an extra day or two it would be so horribly bad smelling it would make me gag.

Anytime I feed it hard wheat and forget for an extra day or so it was no biggie but bread flour killed it. Thankfully I had a little backup stored in the freezer just in case but I would have absolutely had to get it replaced otherwise.

I use bread flour to actually bake the bread with and make a sponge from but never to keep it fed. I had this happen over a couple years time with different bread flours from different sources and same results.

Sara