How do you make sourdough bread with spelt flour?
Spelt is worth doing, and a 50/50 wholegrain and white spelt mix is a nice balance. Spelt has plenty of gluten but it is weaker and more extensible than wheat, so treat it gently: use a bit less water, keep the fermentation on the shorter side, and judge by size rather than the clock since it breaks down faster. A stiff starter helps here too by favoring the yeast and protecting the gluten.
Answered by Hendrik, The Bread Code
From the book
Depending on the flour you have at hand, the type of starter changes. With more bacterial activity you have more gluten consumption of your microbes. So if you want to bake a free standing loaf, you need a flour with more gluten. The more gluten you have, the more of it can be broken down whilst still maintaining dough integrity. If you live in a country where the climate to grow wheat isn’t ideal and you only have weaker flours, then a stiff sourdough starter could be advised. The stiff sourdough starter will improve yeast activity and reduce bacterial activity. If you are a chaser of a very sour bread and have a very strong wheat flour then you can try to play with a liquid sourdough starter. The key difference between all of the starters is how much water is used in the starter. The regular starter has a 1:1 relationship of flour to water. The liquid starter has a 5:1 water-to-flour ratio, and the stiff starter has half as much water as flour, as summarized in Table 4.1 .
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