Taxed to come up with a 100 percent whole grain country loaf using Anson Mills Rustic Red Fife Bread Flour, we were doubtful—very doubtful, frankly—we’d ever come up with anything quite as elegant as a simple French country loaf made with unbleached white flour. White flour is far farris non grata around Anson Mills where whole grains rule, but we’re actually pretty fond of it. Freshly milled and screened, white flour is a baker’s best friend. It’s fine, easy to knead, reliable, and capable of producing bread with a gloriously open, moist golden crumb, clean, sweet flavor, and a shattering crisp crust, even at home.

But we don’t wish to malign whole grains: whole grains are simply whole kernels, so every part of their seed architecture—bran, germ, endosperm—is preserved in the milling process, and left in the flour. That means fiber, micronutrients, nutrition, flavor. These are good things, right? Well, yes, but even good things can spell problems for the baker. That fabulous fiber in the bran (that bran, which, if we’re honest, can taste a tad bitter) interferes with carbon dioxide production in the dough and compromises its rise. Many of us have baked whole grain breads that reflect this problem: breads coarse of crumb and diminished in stature, breads that stale within hours. And despite the fact that Anson Mills Rustic Red Fife Bread Flour is an outstanding bread flour, that’s just what was happening to us.

We’d probably still be rubbing dough from our fingers and swearing were it not for the insight and instruction of Peter Reinhart in his book, Whole Grain Breads (Ten Speed Press, 2007). When we finally got our hands on this book and started reading it—deep into the disappointment phase of our baking trials—we were flooded with the relief of finding someone who had experienced our problems personally, solved them, and would teach us to do the same. A diagnosis and a cure all at the same time.

Not to get super specialized about details of Mr. Reinhart’s research and its outcomes—which is long-ranging, far-reaching, and decades deep (plus, you can always buy the book)—suffice it to say that Mr. Reinhart finds a way to capture “the full potential of flavor trapped in whole grain.” He does this by creating conditions favorable to enzymatic activity (and essential for flavor development in whole grain breads) with the parallel creation of two small doughs, or “preferments,” and delayed fermentation techniques. First, a firm starter dough (which he calls a “soaker”) of flour, water, and salt, but no yeast, is mixed together and rests at room temperature for 24 hours. Once moist, enzymes in the soaker-starter become active, hastening the conversion of amylase, a starch closely associated with flavor, to amylose, a sugar. This conversion sweetens the grain mixture prior to baking and produces other enymatic compounds that promote flavor development during the baking process itself.

In conjunction with the soaker, Mr. Reinhart makes a second firm dough, this one containing flour, water, and a small amount of yeast, and refrigerates it for 24 hours—a process that allows fermentation flavors to develop, but prevents the yeast from dying of exhaustion. Longer fermentation times—required to get under-yeasted doughs up to speed—signal a complex set of enzymatic activities at work in the dough. In a dough with minimal yeast, the yeast depletes available sugars in the flour after a couple of hours and is forced to seek fresh sustenance by converting damaged starches (produced in the milling process) to sugars. The longer it takes a dough to rise, the more interesting the fermentation flavors become—and the more interesting the flavor of the bread itself.

On the second day, the two doughs are combined, given a fresh infusion of yeast, a bit of flour, and some salt, and mixed or kneaded like regular bread dough. The activated enzymes in each give the final dough a big jump in terms of flavor and an extra lift when the bread hits the oven. It is a technique that produces a phenomenal loaf of whole grain bread: moist, richly flavored, and nicely lofted with a deep, crisp-chewy crust.

In many respects, our final recipe sticks closely to Mr. Reinhart’s. But Anson Mills Rustic Red Fife Bread Flour, like all quirky new crop heirlooms, hydrates differently than other whole grain flours. Less water is required, and the dough takes longer to absorb it. We were forced to cut back on the amount of yeast in the final dough—the Red Fife flour must have made the yeast giddy with appetite because the dough kept overproofing. We trimmed back the yeast and increased the proof times.

A final comment on this bread: in our head to head trials with other first class whole grain flours to assess flavor and performance, Anson Mills Rustic Red Fife Bread Flour blew the competition away. We were a bit surprised, actually—it wasn’t even close.