Sunny Spelt Sourdough Bread

After lots of cakes, cookies and pies during Christmas time, we thought it was time for a lovely spelt sourdough bread again.

You can make so many great things out of sourdough as there are so many variations. This is our first ever sourdough bread with spelt flour. We used a flour mixture of white spelt, whole spelt and rye. By using spelt flour you have to be carefull during the mixing phase as dough with spelt flour can easily be overkneaded.

It is time for some hearty things now before all the sweets for new years eve come along.

We also used a bit of a different scoring for the dough so check out our gallery for some pictures.

Things to know before you start

Time Schedule

This sunny spelt sourdough bread will be ready in about 24 hours.

Total ingredients

You will have a dough of about 1.194 g in total.

Difficulty

A simple recipe for a sourdough bread. Take a look at our recipe sourdough bread for beginners which contains a lot of details for the different steps if you have never baked one before.

Baking tools

A round banneton proofing basket is recommended to get a nice round shape. Besides that you should be good to go with some of our should have baking tools.

Steps

1. Levain

• Mix your sourdough starter with the ingredients above
• Store sealed for 10 hours at 25°C (77°F)

2. Mix

• Mix all of the mentioned ingredients in a stand mixer for 4 minutes on speed level one and 7 minutes on speed level two
• The dough should be smooth after mixing

3. Bulk Fermentation, Stretch & Fold

• Cover the dough and let it rest for a total of 2,5 hours at 20-22°C (68-71,6°F)
• During that time stretch & fold the dough every 30 minutes (3 times in total) and after the 3rd time let it ferment further for 1 hour until 2,5 hours in total are reached
• After each stretch and fold put it back to the bowl and cover it again so it doesn’t dry out

4. Shape

• Get the dough in shape by rounding it

5. Proof

• Dust your proofing basket with white spelt flour
• Put your previously shaped dough seam-side-up in the dusted proofing basket
• Add a bit of flour on top and cover it with a towel
• Let it proof for 10 hours in the fridge at 5-8°C (41-46,4°F)

6. Score

• Cover a pizza peel with parchment paper
• Take your proofed dough out of the fridge
• Gently take your dough out of the proofing basket by flipping it upside down on the pizza peel
• With a bread lame make a cross cut (about 2-3 cm deep) on top of the dough and 4 smaller ones between the cross if you want like in our images

7. Bake

• Preheat oven to 250°C (482°F) for ~45 minutes with the upper and lower heat function
• Put the loaf in the oven, create steam and bake for 45 minutes
• After 10 minutes lower the temperature to 230°C (446°F), let the steam out by opening the oven door for ~45 seconds and close it again

8. Cool

• After baking take out your sunny spelt sourdough bread immediately
• Let your bread cool for about 2 hours on some kind of grid before you start cutting it

Conclusion

Crust

Nicely crunchy and aromatic.

Crumb

Soft and fluffy with uneven pores. You will find some bigger pores towards the crust.

Taste

As already mentioned under “crust”, this bread is nicely aromatic without being too heavy. You can clearly taste the spelt flour and that there is a little bit of honey in the dough.

Goes good with

This bread is really great for hearty things but – as many other breads too – it also goes good with sweet things. It is very versatile due to the fact that it is not too heavy in it’s own taste. It also goes well with some butter and honey as this matches nicely with the honey in the dough.

Gallery