Making bread with a sourdough starter is usually a lean bread. Don’t get me wrong, those are great. I love a wonderful sourdough bread with a crunchy crust, a chewy crumb and great tang and super developed taste. Sometimes you’d like something else. Something sweet. Something chocolaty. This is my recipe for a sourdough babka with a chocolate filling.
Baking enriched doughs with a sourdough starter is a bit next level. In the beginning of my sourdough career I had a hard time with these types of doughs, simply because I underestimated how long you need to ferment a dough like that. So follow the instructions on proofing, because that is imperative to get a wonderful result.
You just love bread, but like most other peopleyou worry that you may be eating too much of the good stuff. Staying healthy is all about moderation, variety and getting your fibers. A wonderful source of fibers is whole grains, plus they have lots of minerals and vitamins that are good for you, but whole-grain bread? It’s that hard, tough stuff that tastes like cardboard, right? Well, not if done right. Using spelt gives it wonderful nutty notes and a perfect sandwich crumb. This is my recipe for a whole-grain sourdough spelt loaf.
I have many recipes with spelt flour. I really like it, but this is the first time I’ve ever tried to make a recipe with the entire bread using spelt. Not just regular spelt flour, but coarse whole grain. I must say I was surprised what I great bread you can produce using this. Not at all like the whole wheat stuff our Moms tried to get us to eat when we were kids.
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In short, yes. But like any other flour, it should be consumed as mainly whole grain to get the full health benefits.
Nutritionally it’s not much different from modern wheat. It’s high on carbohydrates and fiber, and also has a reasonable amount of gluten.
About 80% of the protein in the flour are made of glutenin and gliadin, which are the proteins that form a gluten network when they are hydrated. So spelt isn’t suited for people with a gluten intolerance, Coeliac disease or allergy to wheat.
People with Irritable Bowel Syndrome need to eat food with a low amount of FOODMAPs can normally not eat bread, but they can eat bread that has been fermented for a long time, like sourdough, because it breaks down the FOODMAPs.
This bread is designed to have 100% whole-grain, a long fermentation and a delicious taste, so that you can eat bread without feeling guilty. Although eating should never make you feel guilty.
The dough in this sourdough spelt loaf recipe
Vitals
Total weight
1385 grams
Prefermented flour
6.3%
Hydration
75.0%
Yield
1 large loaf
The dough
The dough is made with 100% coarse whole-grain spelt flour. I use one from Kornby Mølle that has some of them most amazing flours I’ve ever tasted. You’ll have to find your own, unless you live in Denmark though.
The salt content is 2%, which brings the sweet and nutty flavors of the spelt flour.
Weight
Ingredient
Baker's Percentage
750g
whole-grain spelt flour
100%
550g
water
73.3%
15g
salt
2%
100g
starter (100% hydration)
13.3%
The hydration is 75%, which is on the high side for a spelt bread, if you plan to replace the whole-grain with sifted spelt flour, you probably shouldn’t go any higher than 70%.
If you want to play around with the formula, change quantity, weight, hydration or inoculation, you can do so here in my Bread Calculator.
The conclusion of this sourdough spelt loaf recipe
So what I set out to do when I created this recipe was the following:
Lots of whole-grain, preferably 100%.
Using spelt instead of whole-grain wheat, because it can be very bitter and off-putting for a lot of people.
A great crust and a wonderfully soft crumb that makes this bread great for sandwiches. A perfect weekday bread.
This bread has a wonderfully delicious taste, sweet and nutty and not at all bitter. It doesn’t have an overpowering taste, so it can be paired with any topping of your choosing.
The crumb is soft and tight, making it very suitable for sandwiches. The crust not tough and crunchy, like a regular sourdough bread, but still gives you a satisfying chew.
I think it delivers everything it sets out to, and it will definitely be on my weekly schedule. I think it could be on your schedule too.
Please share this recipe for sourdough spelt loaf on social media
This is my recipe for a sourdough spelt loaf. If you like the recipe please consider sharing it with like-minded bread lovers on social media.
If you make it and post it on Instagram, please tag me as @foodgeek.dk so I can see it. That would make me very happy.
To a medium bowl add: 750g whole-grain coarse spelt flour and 15g salt.
Mix them together with your hands.
Then add: 100g sourdough starter, fed and grown to its peak and 550g room temperature water.
If low FOODMAP is important to you you should use a spelt starter, otherwise any kind will be fine.
Mix the dough together with your hands.
Cover and leave to rest for an hour to develop the gluten.
Bulk fermentation
Do three sets of stretch and folds spaced out by 30 minutes.
Then put the dough in a see-through container with straight sides and level the top of the dough.
Mark the top of the dough and where your dough has finished fermenting. If you don't mind the dough cracking during baking, go for 50% growth, if you prefer an even top go for 100%.
Pre-shape
When the dough has grown, remove it from the container and let it fall out onto the kitchen counter. Prepare a dish towel with some whole-grain spelt flour on top.
Then shape the dough into a ball using your bench scraper, or you can even use your hands. Let the dough rest on the counter for 20 minutes.
Final shape
Then grab your pan and spray it with some baking spray.
Flip the dough over and tease it out to a square. Fold up the bottom to about the middle.
Fold each side over top of each other the roll the dough from the top. It doesn’t have to be super tight.
Grab the dough and flip it over with your hands and roll it in the flour so that the the top gets covered in flour.
Then flip it over again and add it to the pan. Then add the lid or cover it in some other way and let the dough final proof.
Final proof
You can choose to do a warm final proof, which is described in the rest of this section, or you can cold proof it for at least 8 hours, but up to 48 hours.
It should pass the poke test, which means if you poke the dough with a wet finger the hole should fill in slowly and leave a small indentation.
Baking
When you start to see signs of the dough being ready, heat your oven to 230°C/450°F with a pan at the bottom you can use for steaming. Use fan-forced or convection.
When the dough is ready to bake, boil a kettle of water and add the dough to the oven.
Pour the kettle of water into the pan, and turn the oven down to 210°C/425°F.
Bake for 20 minutes, and remove the steaming pan and bake for another 25 to 30 minutes.
Remove the bread from the pan and bake for another 5 minutes to give the sides some color.
Remove the bread from the oven and let it cool on a wire rack until the center is room temperature. It takes at least a couple of hours.
Everybody loves pigs in blankets. They usually come in a bag from the freezer section in the supermarket and you just heat them in the oven. It’s super easy and convenient and those are fine, but if you want to take pigs in blankets to the next level you should try my recipe for sourdough pigs in blankets. They are the bomb.
Pigs in blankets exist all over the world. They are not a particular American or even Danish thing, although they probably originated in the United States.
Some of the more funny names that exist are:
German: Würstchen im Schlafrock meaning small sausage in a dressing gown.
When you have people over, finding a delicious snack can be a daunting task. It needs to be something that everybody likes, something that’s relatively easy to make, and something that so freakin’ delicious that it’ll knock everybody’s socks off. Well, Foodgeek to the rescue. Here’s my recipe for sourdough pizza bread.
Pizza is one of the most universally beloved foods. Probably because it contains bread and cheese and it can be infinitely varied by changing the toppings. So that of course means that everything that tastes like a pizza, is awesome. That is how this bread came to light.
If you’ve never experienced toasted sesame seeds, you are missing out. I keep a bowl of toasted sesame seeds in my kitchen at all time. Like other people will add salt and pepper, I will add salt, pepper and toasted sesame seeds. Making a bread with toasted sesame seeds is a no brainer. This is my recipe for toasted sesame seed sourdough bread.
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