Multi-Seed Spelt Sourdough Bread

My bread baking so far has been very limited by my inability to procure different ingredients, but a visit from a friend from the UK and my discovery of a Finnish grocer in Fuengirola has made it possible for me to do a few more variations. Further to this I was down for a week with a muscle injury, but now I'm back to my weekly bread baking now.

I used 1 cup of organic whole spelt flour in today's loaf. The starter was 'whole wheat flour heavy' because I mostly fed it on whole wheat flour for weeks. I also kneaded poppy seeds, white sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds and caraway seeds into the dough. The result was a pretty nice looking flavorful bread!

Multi-seed Spelt Sourdough Bread

Ingredients

2 Cups of Sponge (Proofed Starter)
1 Cup Organic Whole Spelt Flour
1 Cup AP Flour + add more flour depending on how wet your dough is
2 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
4 Tsps Brown Sugar
2 Teaspoons Coarse Sea Salt

2 Tbsp Caraway Seeds*
2 Tbsp White Sesame Seeds*
2 Tbsp Poppy Seeds*
2 Tbsp Pumpkin Seeds

*Note: I toasted all the seeds with an asterix separately and mixed them. I did not toast the pumpkin seeds. Maybe they should have been toasted too.



Step 1: Mix 1/2 cup AP flour into your sponge to make the yeast happy. Add the sugar and mix it. The very wet dough should be very bubbly and look 'alive'.

Step 2: Mix in all of the spelt flour and then add the olive oil and salt. Keep adding AP flour as you mix it until you've reached the desired consistency. Remember that the wetness of your sponge and flour varies in absorbency, so trust your instincts on when to stop adding more flour. I tend to work with a soft wet dough in the beginning, because I end up sprinkling it with more AP flour as I knead it anyway. Once the dough is thoroughly mixed and is somewhat solid (not a liquidy mess), let it rest for 25 minutes covered with a cloth. At this stage you haven't done any hardcore kneading yet, but have just 'blended' the ingredients.

Step 3: Knead/fold the dough 100 times or so and let it rest for 30 minutes.

Step 4: Repeat Step 3.

Step 5: Repeat Step 3 again.

Step 6: After kneading the dough for 3 rounds, let it rest covered with a cloth until it doubles in size. This may take 2 hours or longer. It depends on how strong your starter, how warm your room is and how humid it is. So, again, trust your eyes. If the dough has doubled in size, it's time for the next step.

Step 7: Punch the dough down and mix in the seed mixture minus 2 Tbsps of it which you will use to decorate your loaf later.

Step 8: Roll the dough into a loaf and set it on a sheet of oven paper dusted with coarse corn meal and cover this with a cloth and let it double in size.

Step 9: When your loaf is nearly double in size, pre-heat the oven to 230 C.

Step 10: Right before your loaf is about to go into the oven, brush the top with water and sprinkle the remaining seeds on top of it.

Step 11: Bake at 230 C for 20 minutes with steam and then for another 25 minutes at 210-220 C. I use a casserole dish filled with boiling water to create steam.

Sources:

Sourdough Baking by S. John Ross

100% Spelt Levain Bread

Multigrain Seeded Bread

Spelt Flour Sourdough Bread

This is my attempt at incorporating spelt flour into my weekly sourdough baking.

I've been looking at incorporating different grains and seeds into my bread because when you have bread around the house all the time, it can get a bit boring to have the same bread week after week. A German friend had suggested using spelt flour and I happened to find 500g of it at a health food shop in Torremolinos so I snapped it up and it was there sitting in my cupboard waiting to be used.

It was a good thing I did some minor research before I embarked on this attempt as it seems spelt flour has different properties from regular wheat flour. Although it has a much higher protein content which is nice, it apparently has weaker gluten which means that you have to modify your bread baking a bit. Apparently you can overknead spelt whereas this isn't easy to do with wheat flour. I suggest you stop kneading the bread when you think the dough feels good rather than sticking to a fixed time or number of folds any recipe stipulates.

As usual I prepared my bread according to S. John Ross's recipe, but I also incorporated some elements from The Fresh Loaf. Shiao-Ping's baking is very precise and I'm sure that if you followed her instructions to a tee, your bread would be stellar, but I just pulled out easy to incorporate elements into my routine because following every detail was a bit too overwhleming for me.

The only modification I made to S. John Ross's recipe was that I let the bread rest and knead/folded it 3 times before I molded it into a loaf for the final proofing. I also wet my hands when I kneaded/folded the somewhat harder dough (due to the spelt?) to keep it from sticking to my hands. I did this alternately with dusting it with a bit of AP flour.

Anyhow, my spelt flour seemed to absorb water more readily than AP flour (even though spelt is supposed to be less absorbent), so I only added 1 cup AP flour and 1 cup spelt flour to the starter to form my dough this time. The type of spelt flour I used was organic and unbleached.

Further to this, I thought I'd try baking this loaf with a preheated oven and used Shiao-Ping's baking temperatures and times. This meant baking the bread with steam for 20 minutes at 230C and then baking it for another 25 minutes at 220-210C. Before the loaf went into the oven, I dusted it with a bit of AP flour.

The result?

The bread had a much thicker, crunchier crust with a lot of flavor.

However, as a result of introducing too many variables, I'm not sure whether it was the repeated kneading/folding, the preheated oven, the spelt flour or a combination of all of these that created this nice thick pleasantly crunchy crust.

Maybe someone can enlighten me.

Note: I feed my starter sometimes with whole wheat flour and sometimes with AP flour. Sometimes it's half and half. Because I fed my starter with 100% whole wheat flour last week, the starter itself was already pretty thick and dark when I started.