Spelt and Rye-Scald Sourdough Bread (2024)

Spelt and rye grains are each uniquely flavorful and they perform quite differently in bread baking compared with conventional (modern) wheat. Spelt makes a very extensible dough that stretches and doesn’t snap back, while rye makes a very sticky dough with little gluten strength. In addition to behaving differently, both spelt and rye are sometimes recommended for people trying to manage their blood sugar (see: research on rye and a study about spelt).

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When I first tested this flour combination, I was discouraged by the dense crumb I was getting, but then my daughter, whose favorite bread is airy sourdough ciabatta, said, “Oh, I really like this bread.” So I decided to focus on the flavor and not try for big holes. My family ate three test loaves with scrambled eggs, cream cheese and smoked salmon, and turkey and arugula. But most satisfying was spreading some runny natural peanut butter on it and noting that nothing leaked through the crumb.

Due to using the rye flour to build the sourdough levain and for the scald (flour + hot water mixture), this bread has an extra delicious flavor, aroma, and softness. For the scalding process, you can do a relatively complicated saccarification (conversion of starches to sugars to create sweet flavors) or a simple gelatinization scald (trapping water in the starch molecules so the bread is more moist and resists staling) or the hybrid process I ended up with (described below).

In saccarification, the temperature of the scald is carefully managed at two levels. An enzymatic flour is added in the second stage and the temperature is held constant for several hours. You can learn more about saccarification here: Grain Mash Sourdough Method and Anadama Bread. In a gelatinization scald, hot water is added to flour (or the flour and water are heated together) to reach a comparatively wide target temperature range of 149-176°F. Information about this temperature range varies, and that range is on the lower side. You can learn more about flour gelatinization here: Sourdough Pan de Mie with Scalded Flour and Scalding Experiment with Spelt Sourdough.

I chose a process somewhere between these two. I heated the rye flour with boiled water that had cooled to around 180°F so that the resulting mixture was just under 168°F. The enzymes in the rye flour should be functional between 145-168°F, so I skipped the step of adding more enzymatic flour or diastatic barley malt powder to the paste. I then transferred the scald to a Thermos™ and let it sit while the levain ripened overnight. In the morning, I combined the ripe levain and scald into a preferment. This slows the scald’s enzymatic activity, although during the fermentation of the final dough, enzymes in the flours will again break down the complex carbohydrates into sugars, and the sourdough microbes consume those sugars to make the dough rise.

The three stage process of this dough is more hands-on than many bread recipes, but the bulk fermentation is actually relatively quick because of the size of the preferment (about 300 grams). The fermentation can be extended by refrigerating the dough during the final proof. I had planned for an approx. 18 hour refrigeration, but I checked on the dough after about 5 hours in the refrigerator and decided it needed to be baked as soon as I could get the oven preheated. If you’d like a slower final proof, I would stop the bulk fermentation at less than the 75% expansion you see below. That should make an overnight refrigeration work for the final proof.

Flour Variations and Baking Style

Breadtopia carries four different rye whole grain flours and berries: sprouted, regular, serafino, and bono. You can use any of these in this recipe. The sprouted rye will be more enzymatically active and sweeter. The regular and serafino have the strongest traditional rye flavor, and the bono rye has more floral notes.

This recipe’s dough is relatively large with 620 grams of flour in total, but it will fit in Breadtopia’s standard (not small) oval, oblong, and round cloches. The bread also bakes up quite nicely in our small Pullman pan.