Anyone who knows me from Instagram or my foodbod blog will know that I love grains. I literally love quinoa, spelt, kamut, bulgur wheat, any grain, on its own by the spoonful, or with endless accompaniments…
A recent dish including quinoa
Some of these grains also translate into lovely flours; I’m not a fan of quinoa flour, I find it bitter, but spelt flour and kamut flour are both lovely. They have a lovely nutty flavour to them. They do not translate into strong flours however, they need to be handled with care to bake bread with them.
You can bake 100% spelt flour loaves but my experience has been that they need to be baked in a tin to give them structure.
This loaf therefore is 50% strong white bread flour, 50% spelt flour to give the loaf strength from the bread flour. The spelt flour is very soft and light and the resulting dough is very soft, but still bubbles up beautifully. I used my master recipe in exactly the same way just with the 50:50 mix.
I shared a video on Instagram and Facebook today to show just how light and bubbling the dough was, below is a screenshot of the dough after its overnight proof, it was very light and needed gentle handling. The final proof in the fridge firmed it up sufficiently to be able to score the loaf and it rose beautifully as it baked.
Form this, above…to this, below…
Happy Baking!
I love your website and the information you provide. It’s really helpful, because, as you say, there is so much out there and it’s easy to become confused. So, yesterday I tried your master recipe and was thrilled that everything seemed to go to plan (including how the dough was looking in relation to your photos)! However, this morning after removing the dough from the banneton for baking it seemed very loose and I ended up baking a very flat, heavy looking loaf. Any ideas why??? Thanks, in advance! Ali
Hi Ali, thank you for your lovely words, I’m so glad you like the site.
Can I ask first, what flour did you use?
Did you do the final prove in the fridge?
Ah ha moment!maybe you have a much more bubbly BF because you use 50% spelt flour.I haven’t tried it yet, but it will be my next loaf!
Hi, maybe…but only for this loaf…:)
In your 50/50 spelt & white loaf, do you use white spelt or wholemeal spelt flour please?
In this loaf I used white spelt flour (as you can see by the colour of the loaf), but you could use wholemeal too just as successfully 👍🏻