We never used gluten until we bought a bread machine that called for it in WW bread. I didn’t notice that it made a whole lot of difference.
Gluten helps WW flour have more elasticity, and helps with the rise; this may be more true in hand-made bread than machine bread but I’ve never used it in hand-kneaded bread.
Any WW loaf is always going to be much denser; you’re not going to get that airy-ness of grocery-store white bread, by any method. Most of mine have had almost a muffin-like denseness. When you buy so-called whole wheat bread in the grocery store, and the texture is just a little denser than the better white breads, it usually means that it has *some* whole wheat in it; it’s not 100%.
I have not tried whole wheat sourdough; and I haven’t baked with the white whole wheat flour that you can buy now. I did buy a loaf of bread made from white WW once, and it didn’t agree with my innards ;-)
The 100% WW breads that you can get in a good health-food store are generally very good, not as dense as most home-made ones. I suspect it’s the more industrial machinery and the thorough kneading that make it so.
-JT
Agree with you on WW bread density. But the ones I could make with a few different recipes are particularly very dense. I’d like to see if the result with white whole wheat would be any different.