My dough is not taking the rise.
I ground 1500g of spelt grains to flour. mixed the flour with 1200ml water, lyased mix for 16min. After lyase, added 1 tbs of sour dough, kneaded for 12m, split dough into 3 tins, proved for 90m at 35C in a prooving oven. The dough did not rise. Added 3tbs of further sour dough in the hope I would get an oven rise. Cooked for 50min in steam oven. No oven spring. No rise. Bread has not risen. Air holes are very small 1-2mm.
I usually use bakers yeast but was advised to use sour dough because I wish to bake fermented spelt. When I tried with baker's yeast it came out very sough (rancid) I took some advice that recommended that I keep the temperature low when building the starter ie before applying it to baking, to prevent over growth of undesirable microbes in the sourdough.
Any suggestions?
That is a very small amount of sourdough for that amount of flour. Ant that proofing temperature is very high for the yeast in sourdough.
Using sourdough requires different schedules than using baker's yeast. For one thing, even when you use enough sourdough it will take many hours to build up the amount of yeast to where it needs to be to raise the bread. Normally one will ferment the dough for all that time, and then divide and shape the loaves. The loaves will then be allowed to ferment (or "proof") and the schedule for that will be more like for the final stages for yeasted breads.
When you write about adding a tsp of "sourdough", please explain what you mean. For example, did you mean a sourdough starter, and if so what are its basic qualities and how did you know it was ready to use?
TomP
yes sourdough starter. I followed 1:1:1 and by the end of the week the starter was bubbling, then I tried to bake some bread. I have found that Spelt does not keep its proved rise when using baker's yeast, It rises well and then drops back. I therefore aim for a minor rise with the additiion of an oven rise.
I was referring to tablespoons.
When I added sourdough to the dough prior to the final proof i had added just 1 tbs. Before the bake I added 3 more.
Usually dough recipes call for using starter as 20 - 30% of the flour weight. A few tablespoons would be nowhere near that amount. Imagine if you were to mix a dough using dry instant yeast but you only use 1/4 tsp of yeast for 500g of flour instead of 2 tsp. It would work but you would have to let the dough ferment for probably 10 or 15 hours before it would have risen enough.
Using a tbs or so of starter would be something like that. It would take a very long time to build up enough yeast to leaven the dough. And at the temperature you mentioned, 35C, the yeast would probably barely grow. For example, from https://www.theperfectloaf.com/the-importance-of-dough-temperature-in-baking/:
That temperature would favor lactic acid bacteria over yeast by a lot, so if the bread came out with little rise and a strong sour taste it would not be a surprise to me.
As the dry weight of the flour is 1500g, it seems that I should aim for 300g Sour Dough. This would mean the total flour content would be 1650g including the flour in the starter. Have I understood correctly?
Yes, that is the idea. Please remember that this is a guideline and many other percentages of starter can produce fine loaves of bread. But 20% works well ... lately I have been using 30% more often.
I would also reduce the hydration compared with your last try. You can always work in more water depending on how the dough feels. And with "ancient grains" like spelt, I would include the salt in the initial mix. The reason is that postponing the salt until later promotes extensible dough, and these grains produce doughs that are very extensible compared with modern wheat doughs. Including the salt at the start will help a little when it comes time to shape the loaves.
Can you confirm that you are suggesting that the salt be added prior to the lyase?
Yes (and I think you mean "autolyse", the way I usually see it written). Adding salt early tends to produce a tight, elastic dough, while adding it later leads to a more extensible, less springy dough. You can choose when to add the salt depending on what characteristics you expect the dough to have.
Often, you will see sourdough breads where xx% of the flour is prefermented. In other words, some percentage of the overall flour amount is in the starter/levain and the remainder is in the final dough.
In your recipe, you could put 300g of flour (20%) in the levain, along with an appropriate quantity of water, and the remaining 1200g (80%) of flour and the remaining water in the final dough. This lets you maintain all the other recipe quantities (water, salt, etc.) without having to adjust them.
When the levain is active and expanded, mix the final dough. When the dough is expanded, shape the loaves. When the loaves have expanded, bake them. Don't go by the clock, since the yeasts can't see it or tell time. The dough will be ready when it is ready. How long it takes depends on how much levain was used and the temperature of the dough. If you are accustomed to bread made with commercial yeast where a typical rise might take an hour, you'll need to adjust your expectations for sourdough where a rise might take several, or multiple, hours.
Paul
One thought: take a look at this post: https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/64417/100-sourdough-spelt-bread
I baked this formula -- originally posted by George Q -- back in December of 2022 (you can see my effort in the comments) and it was stellar.
Spelt seems a sensitive grain -- its gluten is fragile to begin with -- and in my admittedly limited experience, using 100 percent spelt flour really worked in this slow, multi-stage fermentation process.
Rob
thank you for the flesh loaf link. It looks wonderful. Is the dark honey essential?
no, the honey is not essential. But the bread, as I remember, benefitted from a touch of the flavor & the boost in fermentation.
It's very rare that something is essential in making bread. The core fact is that, almost always, small changes make for small differences in outcomes. Keep that in mind and your stress level will go way down.
There seems to be an exception in that some people have found that changing their water source makes the difference between success and failure in building a new starter. That's an exception, not the rule.
Thank you all for your very helpful comments. i will try and apply them.
I hope eventually to also be able to bake bread made from fermented spelt germ. I tried with baker's yeast. The grains were guite sweet until I fermented them with baker's yeast. They very quickly turned ransid and although I still baked the dough it was not pleasant to eat.
I was advised to switch to fermented wheat germ because the yeast will have bacteria which will control the lactic bacteria producing microbes. As a first step I tried baking unfermented spelt grains ground to flour. I had been advised to use just a tablespoon of levant and the bread did not rise at all.
Has anyone successfully tried baking with fermented spelt and sough dough?
Here is one of the recipes I tried using baker's yeast. I would appreciate some comments on how to minimise the rancid taste that develops.
https://www.hummingbirdhealth.com/cancer_prevention_bread.htm