As you who have been following the last few posts would know, we stayed at The Lily Dutch windmill just north of the Stirling Ranges both on the way to Esperance and on the way back.

As I mentioned previously, the windmill is a five story 16th Century fully operational replica Dutch windmill. The proprietors produce wholemeal stone-ground spelt flour at the mill.  And of course, I had to buy some.  I had heard about the flour prior to my visit and I wanted to try it.  It is always good to try something new.

I have made spelt bread a few time before.  The spelt flour I use is Schapfen Feinstes Dinkelmehl Spelt wheat flour, type 630 from Germany.  I buy it from Kakulas Sister in Nollamara.   It certainly makes a lovely loaf of bread.  It is a very fine milled spelt flour which I like. I don’t like bread that tastes like its main purpose is to be good for you.

It was time to make bread and try out my new flour.  I had about 300g of my usual spelt flour on hand so I decided to combine it with my wholemeal stone-ground spelt flour and some ordinary bread flour to make my bread.

For all my other spelt bread recipes I have gone to Wild Sourdough by Yoke Mardewi so I decided to  go back there and pull out one of her recipes.  I noticed a recipe half ‘n’ have wheat and spelt sourdough.  I liked the idea but  it did not really fit with the flours I had so I decided to make my own combination of flours but use her overall quantities.  Her recipe was: 150g starter, 500g water, 400g white spelt flour and 400g whole meal wheat flour and 3 tsp salt.

I decided to go with a white bread flour starter as I didn’t want the bread to be too heavy.  But as Maus was feeding the starters, I heard a cry from the kitchen.  She had feed my white bread flour starter with rye flour.  Oh no!   Luckily she still had some of the old starter in a jar so she was able to restore the starter but I now had a  rye starter for my bread.

As I now didn’t have any white bread flour in the starter I decided to include 250g into the mix to lighten up the bread, remember I wanted to use 300g of white spelt flour, that only left 250g for the wholemeal stone-ground spelt flour – oh well que sera sera.  

Then, when I started making the bread I couldn’t bring myself to throw out the extra rye starter Maus had made up so I decided to throw the whole lot into the bread – overall I used 240g of rye starter.

My final recipe was not much like Yoke’s recipe at all.  I didn’t follow Yoke’s procedure either.  I made the bread the same way as I always do.  As you can see,  despite all of the above, the bread  turned out fabulously and it tastes great too.

So please remember, bread is merely flour, water, yeast and salt.  Any combination of those four ingredients will produce bread.  And fabulous bread to boot.  Bread making is a fabulous hobby which costs very little.  If you have the inclination, give it a bash.  You won’t look back.