I was making a samosa pie the other day, and the pastry recipe called for a cup and a half of flour. I only had a cup of white flour, so I used a half cup of whole wheat flour. Then I cooked the pie at 400° for an hour, as called for by the recipe.
The pastry came out pretty tough. The filling itself was fine - nice and spicy. But the pastry wasn’t worth eating.
Was it the whole wheat flour? the temperature (I’m used to cooking pastry at 350°.)
Good pastry uses low-protein, low-gluten flour. For home baking, all-purpose is a little higher than it should be, but serviceable. If your ww flour wasn’t ww pastry flour (which is hard to find) it may have just been too high-protein to produce a good crust. Still, 1/2 cup in a 1.5 cup recipe isn’t that big a deal, and you shouldn’t go above 1/2 the amount most of the time anyway.
There are a lot of other factors that go into a good pastry – light handling, adequate resting, good ratio of ingredients, etc. Was 350 what the recipe called for, or did you just bake it at that temp because that’s what you always do? IMHO, 350 is typical for cakes, cookies, etc., but high-fat pastries (pie crust, biscuits) are usually baked at around 400 or higher. Was the crust blind-baked, or baked with the filling? Was this a recipe you’d made successfully with all white flour before? It could be just a not-very-good pastry recipe. OR, maybe the end result was OK, you’re just not used to pastry with some ww flour in it.
Cooking is an art. Baking is a science. Follow the instructions exactly. There are several different kinds of flour, and if your recipe names one, then use it. I can’t tell if your recipe named a specific kind, in which case you should use All Purpose Flour, which is a white flour.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Good Eats, it’s that you can’t replace flour types willy-nilly and expect identical, or even similar, results. There are all sorts of factors that differ depending on what the flour is made of, one of the most important being gluten levels. Heck, IIRC, even non-baking recipes I’ve seen on that show spent time showing why other types of flour than the one being used wouldn’t work.
I definitely get the sense that there is no one type of flour that will work in every single baking recipe; there are just too many different kinds of structures and textures involved in different baked goods. So yes, barring some other serious deviation from the norm, I’d say that it’s entirely possible that using the whole wheat flour was your problem.
My cousin got very healthful at one time and made banana bread, muffins, and such using all whole wheat flour, and they were AWFUL. I’m pretty sure one should use part all-purpose flour and part whole wheat - half and half, or one third WW to 2/3 AP.
Alton Brown also stresses weighing the flour, cup measurements are notoriously inaccurate. Look for bread recipes that use weight instead of volume.
That being said, making a loaf of bread using ALL whole wheat is very rarely done, the flour is just too…heavy? Maybe heavy isn’t the right word. It makes a much stiffer, harder dough, lacks the gluten of regular AP flour. I make bread fairly often, although not much lately and introducing whole wheat into a recipe changes darn near everything. I can’t imagine that it would have anything other than disastrous results for a pastry.
www.thefreshloaf.com is a great site for bread baking. I’m sure someone there has figured out how to make a whole wheat pastry, if anyone has. Baking911.com is a good resource also.
I make individual oven baked, rather than fried, samosas and use only whole wheat flour (atta) for the pastry. It is just a traditional Indian recipe apart from the brushing with oil to bake them rather than deep frying them.