You only need a little time and four ingredients. Making your own homemade bread is simple and rewarding. Do you dare to try this spelt loaf?
Those who try to make bread at home are often hooked: not only for the incredible pleasure of savoring a good homemade bread, but for what is enjoyed and learned with the process. A step further is to do it with sourdough. It requires a little more waiting and patience, but the payoff is huge.
The result when using sourdough is a much tastier bread, with an acid point, which remains fluffy for much longer. A bread like those of before and like that of good bakers, who prefer the flavor and personality that sourdough gives to bread over yeast.
In addition, bread made with sourdough is assimilated and digested better.
Below you will find a very simple spelt bread recipe to get you started. Many people tolerate spelt flour better than wheat flour. You can also try making your own sourdough. Below you will also find the sourdough recipe.
WHOLE GRAIN SPELT BREAD RECIPE
To make this recipe for homemade bread you can use your own sourdough or buy fresh yeast. Another great advantage of making your own sourdough is that you can use it for this bread and all those you dare to make later.
Ingredients:
- 100 g spelt sourdough (or, failing that, 15 g fresh yeast)
- 300 ml warm water, not too hot
- 500 g 70% whole spelt flour
- 8 g fine salt
Preparation:
- In a large bowl, dissolve the sourdough with the water. Add the flour and mix it with a silicone spatula, until a homogeneous dough is achieved.
- Let it stand for an hour, covered with a cloth.
- Remove the dough from the bowl, put the salt and knead it 10-15 minutes. To do this, push it with the palm of your hand out, and when you return, you fold it on itself and give it a quarter of a turn. Then, form a ball of dough and let it sit for another 5 minutes covered with a clean cloth.
- Repeat these movements two more times.
- Once all this is done, let the dough rest in the bowl for 3 hours covered with a cloth, until it ferments and doubles its volume.
- Preheat the oven to 250ºC. Remove the dough from the bowl carefully and give it one last soft kneading.
- Put it on the tray with baking paper. Give it a round shape and make a cut in the center with a blade. Let stand for 15 more minutes.
- Put it in the oven at 220 ºC for 40 minutes. Put in the same oven a plate with water, to get a crispy crust.
- Take out the loaf and let it cool on a rack.
HOW TO MAKE SOURDOUGH
Sourdough can be made in many ways and the result is always a unique dough, because it feeds on the bacteria of the environment where it develops and gives the breads a flavor of their own.
Here we tell you how to make a very simple spelt sourdough. Once you make it, keep what you have left in the fridge and go refreshing it to reactivate it and make bread again, that is, add half of flour and water again, stir and let it rest.
- Day 1. Mix 100 g of eco spelt wholemeal flour and 100 ml of water in a clean, dry glass jar. Stir with a spoon and let stand at room temperature. Cover it with gauze or similar so that the dough can breathe.
- Day 2. After 24 hours, stir again with a spoon.
- Day 3. Remove half and cool by adding 50 g of flour and 50 ml of water. Stir and let stand.
- Days 4-5. For two or three days repeat the previous step until you see that it has come to life: that it gives off a lactic smell with a certain acidity, forms bubbles or that in 2-4 hours it doubles or triples its volume. When this happens, it’s ready to use.
If you want more sourdough recipes, you can consult this article by Luciano Villar in which he tells you how to make sourdough with rye flour.
