Bread from scratch

Intro

Bread needs flour, water, and some form of “gas source” to make it fluffy. You could use chemicals that generate gas when heated (baking powder) or yeast. But the first and in many cases still the best solution is sourdough, a combination of different yeasts and bacteria.

Why is it the pinnacle of break baking?

  • You can bootstrap it yourself from scratch by cultivating the microorganisms already on your grains
  • It gives a much more complex and delicious taste, even to simple breads
  • Due to the created milk acid sourdough bread has a longer shelf life
  • It is healthier, the lactic acid bacteria create acids that help your body to extract more nutrients
  • You can use flour types and ingredients that are otherwise not usable, like rye.

Sourdough

Sourdough is a mix yeast and lactobacillus bacteria you can either buy it in the supermarket or make it from scratch by mixing whole grain flour and water and then simply waiting for the microorganisms to grow. If you newer made it from scratch and have around a week of headroom, I can highly recommend it, there are a lot of tutorials online.

I did it multiple times over the years but this time I just wanted to start baking, so I bought a starter locally (two for less than 2 EUR from Seitenbacher). Unfortunately my local supermarket only had this on type and its made from and for rye, so it had to adapt to the spelt flour I used.

Recipe

I got a little carried away what to bake but then finally settled on a recipe that came with written instructions and a YouTube tutorial.

I did two little alterations.

  1. Instead of 400 g spelt flour type 630 + 200 g hole grain spelt flour, I just used 600g (100%) spelt flour type 630
  2. Instead of 1 g active baking malt, I used 2 g malt I had lying around from brewing (Münchner Malz Typ 1) and ground it in a mortar

Result

Here are some visuals from the process.

Mixing

I mixed, knead and folded the ingredients by hand.

Mixing the igredience

This is the ground malt.

Malt

Proofing Basked

The dough rested in a proofing basked for 60 minutes at ~25 °C room temperature and one night in the fridge at 3 °C.

Dough in the Proofing Basked

This is how it looked before baking. I used a silicone piece to transfer it in and out of the backing pod.

Dough before baking

Baking

The dough was baked in an cast-iron pot pre-heated at 250 °C.

  • 20 minutes at 250 °C with closed lid
  • 30 minutes at 220 °C with open lid

After 20 minutes with closed lid.

After baking in the closed cast-iron pot

Finished bread after 30 minuted without a lid.

Finished baking

Serving

It smelled and tasted delicious, even when eaten plain.

Krume

But even better with some jamón serrano...

Serano

... or in butter caramelized onions.

Caramalized Onions

What could I improve?

I'm quite impressed how it turned out!

But because I replaced the whole grain flour the dough was slight to wet, so I could potentially reduce the amount of water. I'm not sure if I really tasted the malt, so next time I would go from 2 g to 5 g, just to see the difference.