Whole Wheat Dutch Baby

Simple recipe with impressive results, and nearly irresistible for the little ones . . .

It is giant, slightly sweet, puffy bread, covered in butter! And a frequent dinner request from my daughter.

Adapting the Dutch Baby to Whole Wheat

Typically, Dutch babies are made with all purpose flour and sugar. They get super puffy and beautiful, and they taste absolutely delicious. But I’ve been trying to make whole wheat the default flour we use in our house (ideally stone ground – the reasons for this below).

I’m not placing a ban on white flour by any stretch. I like desserts, and I want to enjoy my life. My goal is just to save the white flour for those recipes that truly need it to turn out well. Similarly, I’ve been trying to replace cane sugar with a whole-food sugar (a sweetener that occurs as-is in nature, rather than a sugar that is extracted), such as honey, when I can get away with it.

So I took a Dutch Baby recipe and played around with it to see if I could replicate the results using whole wheat flour and no cane sugar.

Happy to report success!! I’m not sure whether I like the whole wheat or the all purpose flour recipe better at this point. And if there is any debate on the topic, why not go with the healthier option?

The challenge

To make a whole wheat Dutch baby, I needed to think about the impact of swapping out all purpose flour for whole wheat. Whole wheat flour is a bit denser and thirstier than all-purpose flour. To counteract this, I’ve added an extra egg yolk and more milk. The extra milk helps hydrate the flour, and the extra yolk adds some moisture, richness, and tenderness.

You may be asking – fine, so maybe it works to make the recipe with whole wheat. But why bother with a whole wheat Dutch baby in the first place? Is it actually that much better for you?

Is Whole Wheat Flour Actually That Much Healthier?

I grew up hearing that whole wheat flour is so, so much better for you than white flour. But I stopped thinking this, or at least caring about this, sometime in my 20s.

The problem was that I started to find that foods made with whole wheat often (not always) had similar or more calories than those made with all purpose flour. I think this is probably because if a bakery makes something with whole wheat flour, they still want it to taste good so you won’t blame them for your less-delicious healthy food choices. To make it taste better, they’re going to market it as whole wheat and silently add more sugar and/or butter. The added sweetener or fat adds more calories, and might also counteract the healthiness of eating whole wheat flour in the first place.

In light of this information, 20-year-old me thought, why on earth would I eat the whole wheat version of a food! Even when it still tasted good, it probably wasn’t exactly what I had been craving. It may even be less healthy! And have more calories! So good bye whole wheat, and good riddance.

Food Labels

Another issue I had was that changing a flour from all-purpose to whole wheat doesn’t dramatically reduce the number of calories or add a ton more fiber to the food. For example:

• 1 cup of all purpose flour (455 calories) –> 95 carbohydrates and 3-4 grams of fiber;
• 1 cup of whole wheat flour (410 calories) –> 87 carbohydrates and 13-15 grams of fiber.

Woo, 10 extra grams of fiber you might say? But I’d probably not be eating more than about 1/4 – 1/2 cup of flour in a serving, so we are talking maybe a 3-5 grams of fiber difference. Out of like 25 grams recommended for adult women under 50 (38 grams for men) per day. That’s not actually that much more fiber. It’s about what you’d find in 1/2 a cup of raspberries.

I’d rather eat the tastier pastry plus a handful of raspberries, thank you.

So goodbye whole wheat for me. And I stopped eating whole wheat flour thinking it really didn’t make that big a difference. It was a lovely time, filled with croissants and baguettes and raspberries.

Going full suburban mom

But then I had kids. I started getting paranoid about our food supply and overthinking what I was feeding to the kids. It’s a right of passage in suburbia.

I read a couple of books on healthy eating, but one of my favorite was the book Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine. Highly recommend. It’s written by the pediatric neuroendocrinologist, Robert Lustig, who practiced medicine for 40 years, focusing on childhood obesity and diabetes for 24 of those years.

His book pushes two proposals:

First, eat healthy food (obviously) – it’s a healthy food if it protects your liver and feeds your gut.

Second, to check if a food is healthy, you need to look at what has been done to it during processing to see if processing affects how your body digests the food. The ingredient list is not enough information.

There is lots of good information in that book, but because this is a post about a whole wheat Dutch baby recipe, let’s focus on his argument as it relates to fiber and flour.

The Importance of Keeping Fiber Intact

According to Lustig’s first proposition, foods are healthy if they protect your liver and feed your gut. Fiber is critical to both of these things. When food enters your body, fiber:

1. Protects your liver by forming a protective barrier in the gut (think Vaseline on the inside of a colander – yes, this is an illuminating example provided in the book and not at all gross to think about). This slows down your body’s absorption of food. If you eat sugar, the fiber blocks some of the sugar absorption, reducing the rate that sugars can reach your liver (if too much reaches your liver at once, this can cause harm). It slows down digestion in general, which improves your feeling of satiety and stabilizes blood sugar.
2. Feeds your good gut bacteria. You don’t want your microbiome to get so hungry it starts eating the mucin barrier off of your intestinal cells. This can happen and contributes to conditions like IBS, Chron’s disease, and other metabolic disorders.

In order to get these benefits, you need a mix of soluble (jelly-like) and insoluble (structured and stringy like celery) fiber. The two types of fiber must work together to form the barrier.

The fiber must also be physically integrated into your food (i.e., eaten as it naturally occurs in food). You can’t simply take fiber supplements or make up for it by eating other higher fiber foods. You need both types of fiber together, and that fiber needs to be entangled with the macronutrients in the food (especially simple carbohydrates) in order to slow digestion and absorption.¹

Why Can’t I Just Take Supplements?

There are a couple of issues with supplements (like psyllium).

First, most supplements are soluble fiber only. Lustig says that perhaps you could try to add insoluble fiber to a pill, but it’s not compressible so it would require a bulky dosage. Second, and perhaps the bigger issue with supplements is that the macronutrients are not structurally bound up in the fiber. If you eat refined carbs (like white flour) and then take a fiber pill or eat high-fiber foods, the starches / sugars in the white flour are already free and available for absorption. In the ideal situation, fiber physically wraps the macronutrients – which slows down the absorption. This is also why you can’t just make up for fiber-stripped foods by eating them with high fiber foods.

Even a relatively small amount of fiber might actually make a difference in how one’s body processes food.

Evaluating Healthy: What’s Been Done to the Flour?

Okay, so healthy foods are those with the natural fibers still intact and physically integrated with the food you’re eating. Great. This means healthy food should include whole wheat flour, because it still has the fiber intact, but probably not all purpose flour, where the fiber has been mostly stripped away, right? Not necessarily. The ingredient list isn’t all we have to check.

Lustig’s second proposition is about how we need to look at what has been done to the food in processing. Processing changes foods from how they occur naturally, sometimes removing parts of the food, other times just changing its structure . Both these things can affect how the body digests the food. We need to look at whether the food, post-processing, still protects the liver and feeds the gut.

(I discussed one example of this processing issue in my discussion in Salt, Sugar, Fat. In that post, I discussed how “fruit juice concentrate” involves removing pretty much everything from the fruit except the sugar. But you couldn’t know that this ingredient is essentially indistinguishable from sugar simply by reading the label.)

What is flour?

Let’s backtrack for a second and talk about how flour is made. Flour is made from ground up (milled) wheat kernels. A wheat kernel is comprised of the bran (the outside), endosperm (pure starch, inside the kernel), and germ (the nutritious part inside the kernel). During milling, the kernel is crushed. This means that the endosperm, or starch, is more readily available for absorption.

Today most flour is made using industrial roller mills, which pulverize the kernel. The fiber and germ can cause the flour to spoil, so they are typically separated out from the endosperm. When you are buying all purpose flour, you’re buying the ground up endosperm of the wheat kernels.

Whole wheat flour is typically made the same way. The difference is that after it is milled, and the endosperm separated out, it is reconstituted so that it contains proportions of bran and germ like those in the original kernel.

In other words, whole wheat flours are “whole grain” in the sense that all the parts are there. However, the fiber has been physically separated out from the kernel and then added back into the mix.

This means that when you eat whole wheat flour, it may not be functionally all that different (at least from a fiber perspective) from eating white flour plus a handful of raspberries or bran flakes for extra fiber. We discussed above why that doesn’t work.

Should I throw out the whole wheat flour then?

It’s not completely pointless to eat whole wheat. You’ll still get more fiber which is helpful. But the better approach is to try to find a flour that isn’t totally pulverized during processing.

Lustig suggests aiming for a stone ground whole wheat flour. Stone grinding does not completely pulverize the bran and germ. Because more of the wheat kernel’s structure is maintained, it’s going to be healthier for you. Some of the endosperm is still entangled with the bran and germ.

So I’ve been using Bob’s Red Mill Organic Stone-Ground Whole Wheat Flour. It’s not too difficult to find, and I’m trying to make it our default flour.

Okay, now back to the yummy stuff.

How to Enjoy a Whole Wheat Dutch Baby

Savory: My favorite way. I make an arugula salad with shaved parmesan and thinly sliced shallots, topped with olive oil and aged balsamic vinegar. Add a good chicken protein. My favorites right now are orange fennel chicken sausages (to make this a breakfast-for-dinner sort of deal) or a chicken and mushrooms with sherry vinegar (pictured). I pile the toppings on and eat it like a little sandwich.

Sweet: You can also eat this with spicy baked apples and vanilla maple whipped cream (just cut up the apples once baked and dump them in the center). Or whipped cream and berries. Or whipped ricotta and fruit jam. It’s extremely versatile!

This page contains affiliate links.

Print

1. ↩︎