A somewhat related pair of questions: I use a breadmaker machine (this is not a paid, unpaid, or other endorsement, but the machine I have, and find acceptably satisfactory for my use, is the Hamilton Beach BM07, and of course, YMMV), and I have so far only seen recipes using dry milk powder in whole wheat bread recipes (not white bread recipes, French bread recipes, or pizza dough recipes).
I presume the reason that the dry milk powder is very useful for whole wheat bread recipes, and not at all for white bread recipes, is because that the whole wheat flour is more dense, and the yeast in those doughs need all the help it can get to rise?
Second, the whole wheat bread recipe included with my machine (one using 100% whole wheat flour, not 1/3 whole wheat flour with 2/3 white bread flour) calls for the dry milk powder AND vital wheat gluten. I'm so not a baker, but IIRC, adding the vital wheat gluten to whole wheat bread recipes also provides more of a rise, and thus, a less dense loaf, than otherwise?
I just tried making a 1 1/2 pound loaf of whole wheat bread, using solely King Arthur Golden Wheat Flour (not KA whole wheat flour, or regular bread flour, or (gasp!) white enriched flour). The included recipe called for both 4 t (20 ml) vital wheat gluten and 2 T (30 ml) dry milk powder - neither of which I had on hand.
I did not use any milk to replace the dry milk powder, solely using the quantities of water and oil specified in the recipe.
The loaf turned out OK, about as dense as I could have expected - but this is making me wonder if either the vital wheat gluten, or the dry milk powder, or both, would have made a noticeably better everyday loaf of bread?
(In case anyone is wondering why I use "t" and "T" - when I was a teenager, way back when, Sherman Kaplan, then a radio reporter from WBBM-AM in Chicago, when I was growing up, also trebled as their film critic and their recipe giver, and he always read teaspoons in his recipes as "little t", and tablespoons as "big T", and that stuck with me for all these years

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