What is Bread Flour?
Bread flour is a high-protein wheat flour (typically 11–13%), milled from hard wheat. The extra protein forms more gluten when mixed with water, giving dough the strength and elasticity needed to rise well and hold its shape — resulting in a chewy crumb, open texture, and crisp golden crust.
Quality matters too. Good bread flour is milled from strong wheat, less processed, and naturally richer in the nutrients and enzymes that feed your starter and improve fermentation. Low-protein or poor-quality flours tend to produce dense, flat loaves and inconsistent results.
Simply put — better flour, better bread.
What Bread Flour is Best for Beginners?
If you're new to sourdough, we recommend starting with recipes using only white high-protein bread flour — something like Kialla Pure Organics High Protein White Flour. It's more forgiving and gives you the foundation to develop your skills before moving on to more complex recipes.
Our Classic Organic Wheat Sourdough Starter Kit is a great place to start, including 2kg of Kialla Pure Organics High Protein White Flour, essential tools, and beginner-friendly tutorials and guides.
Once you're comfortable, a great next step is our Country Loaf — a naturally flavourful bread that introduces wholegrain flour into the mix at around 10–20%, with the remainder being high-protein white flour.
If you'd like to bake with wholegrain flour from the start, our Deluxe Organic Wheat Sourdough Starter Kit is well worth the upgrade.
As your confidence grows, you can gradually increase the wholegrain content. Adding 50–100% wholegrain flour — wheat, spelt, or rye — will significantly boost both nutrition and flavour.
Ready to experiment? Try our Country Sourdough Bread Recipe or 100% Whole-Wheat Sourdough Recipe, or browse our full range of recommended bread flours.
Maintaining a Healthy Starter
Proper maintenance is just as important as your choice of flour. Fresh stoneground and wholegrain flours are ideal for feeding your starter, as they provide more natural nutrients to keep it active and healthy. A simple 50/50 blend of white bread flour and wholegrain flour — whole rye, spelt, or wheat — works well and encourages the growth of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria.
A healthy starter contains both of these organisms and performs best at temperatures between 24–26°C.
Good bread isn't about how long you've had your starter — it's about consistently refreshing it and making sure it's active before adding it to your dough. Read how to maintain a healthy wheat starter.
What About Supermarket Flours?
We understand that not everyone has access to some of the above flour suggestions, so we have found Laucke Wallaby Baker’s Flour to be of workable-quality for making bread at home, available at most local supermarkets. Please do not use supermarket cake/plain white flour or premix flours to make sourdough bread as it does not contain enough gluten strength or nutrients to maintain a healthy starter. For information on keeping your starter healthy, please visit our Starter Maintenance page.
Common Flours for Bread Making
Baker’s White Flour
A high protein white flour used in bread/pizza making.
Wholegrain Milling Organic Stoneground White Bakers Flour 5kg
Wholegrain Milling Sustainable Premium White Bakers Flour 750g
Organic Bread & Pizza Flour 700g
Whole Wheat Flour
Stoneground or milled whole wheat grains with both the bran & germ still present.
Wholegrain Milling Stoneground Wholewheat Bakers Flour 5kg
Organic Stoneground Wholegrain Flour 1kg
Whole Spelt Flour
Spelt has a nutty & heartier flavour than wheat. It also has a higher proportion of gliadin proteins, which makes it more extensible rather than elastic (instead of the dough springing back, it will stretch until it breaks). For this reason, when using spelt, extra folds or two will be required to build up strength.
Wholegrain Milling Stoneground Whole Spelt Flour 5kg
Whole Rye Flour
Rye contains less gluten than wheat so will usually require more starter to achieve a nice active dough. Rye breads are better baked straight after the final prove as they do not hold well under fridge retardation.
Wholegrain Milling Organic Stoneground Whole Rye Flour 5KG
Khorasan Flour
Closely related to wheat, it has a sweet taste with no hint of bitterness.
Keep it Local
We are a big believer of sustainable food systems. Buying and supporting local farmers who not only grow grains for taste & nutrition, but nurture & understand the relationship between soil & plant health. This understanding ensures residue-free, non-GMO & fewer green house gas emissions, which is better for the planet & better for you.
We highly recommend using local bio-dynamic & organic flour/grains grown & milled in your local state/territory. The less “miles” it needs to travel to get to you, often means it will be freshest!
Let us acknowledge some of Australia’s trail-blazing farmers growing nutrient dense grains & millers providing quality flour to our community of bakers here in Australia.
