Sourdough Baking - A spelt-wheat bread from a firm dough

Some of you might have seen the wet bread post I had made, and to have something to compare, I made a spelt-wheat bread with firmer dough. This time I had 62,5% water instead of the 75%+.

And this doesn't mean that it would be 62,5% or 75% water. That's just the flour:water -ratio, and the total amount of flour is always 100%. So if I have 1000 grams of flour and 600 grams of water, it'd be 60%. With 500 grams of flour, 300 grams of water would be 60% water, because 300 grams is 60% of 500 grams.

Simple.

But the recipe for this bread:
400 grams of sourdough starter
400 grams of spelt
400 grams of wheat (so it's 800 grams of flour in total)
600 grams of water
20 grams of salt
A little bit of olive oil, once again.

See, this is my super strong and great sourdough starter. It's bubbly, it's smelling good and it's ready for action. _{Just like I am. Or I was, when I was a teenager. Now those days have gone and I no longer smell good.}

Water, sourdough starter and flours added to a single bowl.

I'm using my beautiful assistent to mix the dough, so I don't have to work at all. Too bad it's super noisy, so every time I bake, I need to wait for my family to leave.

20 minutes of kneading with the machine in total.
13 minutes of kneading, then I added the salt and oil, 7 minutes of more kneading.

The flours can be different, sometimes more or less water is needed for the right consistency. Dry flours need more water, so occasionally I'll need to add a little bit of water to the dough. This time it wasn't needed, but it's good to know.

I left the dough to rest for 4 hours.

And this is after the 4 hours. The dough has risen very well.

Some of you might have noticed, but I'm not using my DSLR for the photos this time. The camera was sadly unavailable, but I've used my super fancy phone to take the photos. 48 megapixels and all.

You can see that these look terrible compared to the photos from my real camera?

Well after the rest, I cut the dough in half and squished them into nice, round breads. This dough is far firmer than the previous one, so I had far too much flour on the board I was working on.

Firm and nice, not soft and running.

I managed to get two beautiful breads. The dough was slightly smaller than previous time, but still youc an see the difference in the form of the bread.

These stay true to their form. Warrior breads. Undefeatable!

So I let them rest for one hour in the room temperature and then put them to the fridge. +4 Celsius degrees and 16 hours this time, as I had to work and I baked the bread when I got back home.

The breads had a nice rise and still they kept their form. They had spread a bit more than I had assumed, but they still looked real nice.

A small cut, like with the previous soft squishy coastal monster swamp breads.

It's easier to cut the bread when you cut it directly after taking it out from the fridge. You should have the oven ready. I had used the oven for cooking just before baking the bread, so the oven was at 250 Celsius put I put it down to 200 Celsius.

When I put the bread in the oven, I sprayed a lot of water in the oven. This makes sure that the bread crust doesn't dry too fast and the bread can still expand a bit in the oven.

Boom!

The bread was beautiful. You can see the difference, as the dough wasn't as wet so the result was clearly firmer. Both of the breads taste nice, but this has both flavor and the looks.

Can you see this? It's beautiful.

If you want to taste it, lick your screen. I'm using the new FlavorMax™ technology to add bread flavor to the blockchain. If you're using an updated browser, like Chrome or Safari, you should be able to taste the bread through your PC, phone or other devices.

Now as this has been baked, I'll be putting baking posts back on hold. I'll get back when I have new ideas about baking and post them.