Spelt Flour + Rye Sourdough

The perfect sourdough recipe has been my goal for a few years. Between battling with varying ambient temperatures, trying to find a culture that ferments consistently and getting my schedule dialed in, there’s a lot to take into account. I’m getting pretty close with this spelt and rye flour recipe though!

Schedule: I based this loaf off of my sourdough schedule.

Since this is a 100% naturally leavened bread, I created a levain with my sourdough starter that was last fed 12 hours prior. This levain provides enough for 2 loaves of bread.

30 minutes before mixing the salt into the dough, I performed an autolyse by mixing the water, levain and flour together.

Ingredients:

Levain

Started at 8:30am with the following ingredients. Mix everything together and loosely cover and let it ferment for about 8 hours.

22g unfed sourdough starter (last feeding was 12 hours prior)
108g filtered water @ 85-90’F
86g Bob’s Red Mill bread flour
22g King Arthur whole wheat flour

Dough

800g Bob’s Red Mill bread flour
46g Bob’s Red Mill spelt flour
46g Bob’s Red Mill dark rye flour
572g filtered water @ 90-95’F
216g levain
22g sea salt

Levain is floating and ready to be mixed into the flour

Method:

After mixing the dough, I performed 4 stretch and folds within the first 4 hours. The dough fermented at room temperature (around 73’F) overnight. After the overnight fermentation I divided the dough and shaped them before proofing in bannetons for about 2 hours.

I baked the loaves in a preheated dutch oven at 450’F for 38 minutes covered, then removed the lid of the dutch oven and baked for an additional 17 minutes.

Result:

This was only the second time I’ve used this sourdough culture to ferment my dough and I think it’s working very well. It’s an extremely fast and efficient fermenter and I might have to cut back bulk fermentation time even more.

The flavor of this bread is very nice. The sourness isn’t overpowering and the spelt/rye flours give it a nice texture and complexity.

I should have scored the bread but instead let it naturally vent. One loaf (the one pictured in this post) formed a really nice natural ear. I feel like with some proper venting it would have risen even better though.