Olivia Potts
How to bake perfect spelt bread
Sometimes I worry that I’m flighty. And not in a charming, no one can tie me down, I’m-a-free-spirit sort of way. But rather skittish, unreliable, inconstant. When I feel that way, I come home and bake spelt bread.
Spelt bread is grounding. It is quick, physical work that you have to do with your hands. It doesn’t require skill, implements or fancy ingredients. I don’t need to set a timer or panic about precision. It transforms me into someone pragmatic, capable and resilient. Spelt bread turns me into the baker I wanted to be when I first started cooking.
I love sourdough. I think it’s magical, in the most literal sense of the word. It makes me feel like an alchemist or a witch standing over a cauldron, day by day watching the mixture slowly change from flour and water to something capable of making a loaf of bread and, finally, an actual loaf. But it is seriously slow-food. And it is serious. It requires care and tending. It is a literal flour baby, which sits in my fridge, and needs feeding every single day. The recipe I use for sourdough takes a week from start(er) to finish, and even when the starter is fully-fledged, there is a three day wait for the bread.
Spelt isn’t like that. If sourdough makes me feel like a (slightly nervous) magician, spelt bread makes me feel strong, powerful and deeply practical.
Spelt bread proves very quickly compared to normal strong white, wholemeal, or rye bread flour. With a fair wind, you can start this bread when you get home from work and have it ready for supper. How’s that for practical and capable?
It’s a sturdy bread, that will support the heartiest of sandwiches, without being dense and claggy like pure rye bread. The crust is crisp, chewy and yielding all at the same time, and it slices like a dream. I don’t always add seeds to this loaf, but sometimes I do, and then I feel even more accomplished, nonchalantly chucking them in and kneading them through like an earth mother.
I bake this in a big casserole dish with a lid. When professional bakeries bake bread, they have high pressure steam sprays inside the oven to inject steam at appropriate points during the baking process. You can’t really replicate this in domestic ovens. You can bung ice in a tray at the base of the oven just before baking, which will create a blast of steam, but will also lower the temperature of your oven. But for rustic, rough and ready loaves like this, I use a casserole dish to prove or bake in: the lid traps the steam that evaporates from the dough and will give the thick, chewy crust that you’re looking for. You only need the lid on for about twenty minutes to achieve this.
It goes like this:
Super Speedy Spelt Bread
500g spelt flour
Method
1. Mix the dry ingredients together by hand.
Icing on the Cake
This bread disappears somewhere between minutes to hours after it’s taken out of the dish, even in a household of two. I eat it with soup, or toasted with too much butter and too little marmite, eaten still standing over the toaster; I dunk it into soft boiled eggs, or pile it with teetering piles of salami and cornichons. It was made to be spread with thick honey or grilled with strong cheddar.