I have a friend that is somewhat gluten intolerant, and I decided to see if he could cope with spelt bread, since many gluten-intolerant people can. I will use 30g of my standard starter, which is made with wheat, but only half that is flour, so it represents only 15g out of 1115g of flour, or roughly 1%. Last night I created a leaven of spelt flour (100g of spelt flour, 100ml of water, 1 tablespoon of my starter). I then made the standard country loaf recipe but purely with spelt flour:
- 800ml water
- 200g leaven
- 1000g spelt flour
- 20g salt
The spelt flour was stoneground organic. It was interesting. The flour is smoother to start with than the normal wheat flour, but has a rougher consistency in general. I baked them normally, and the resulting loaves look pretty good. One of the two took some damage when it flopped into the combo cooker, and it deflated on one side, but other than that it all looks good. I am going to have to find better containers for the last rise to make it easier to get the loaves into the pan.
First Spelt Loaf - Cut
The resulting loaf is a bit darker, but the same structure is visible. The bread also tastes quite delicious!