Easy Spelt Bread for Dummies

Today I take you through ALL the steps for making a beautiful, spicy japaleno and herb spelt bread like this one:

Never made bread before?  No worries, I take you step-by-step through the routine, and I offer plenty of photographs to help you duplicate the experience exactly.

Ingredients:

Step 1:  Starting the yeast

In each step, I'll first show a photograph accumulating the ingredients.  For this step, you need a tablespoon (or two, more of this never hurt) of yeast, a couple tablespoons of sugar or honey, and several (maybe 6) tablespoons of warm water.  To tell if your water is the right temperature, use the "baby bottle" trick: touch a drop to the inside of your wrist.  If it feels slightly warm but not hot, it's the right temperature.

Mix these together in a bowl, trying to dissolve all the yeast and sugar:

When it's mostly clump-free, it's time to place the mixture in a warm spot, like a sunny windowsill, and find your other ingredients.  I ran off to my patio-garden, and look at the cute little guy I found nestled in among the peppers!

You can just barely see him on that leaf, the cute little Praying Mantis baby.  I am so happy he's here in my kneck of the woods to keep pest insects and spiders at bay.  Go little baby, go!  Eat all those other bugs!  (He's smaller than two of my fingernails, little guy.  So cute!!)  Anyway, I gathered in the following ingredients:

Clockwise: multicolored sage, half a jalapeno left over from breakfast, three tomatoes discovered in the garden (watch these, their number declines and then disappears with time), and haha, thyme.  To prep these, I sliced the jalapeno then then diced that, pulled the thyme off its stalks, and first made a chiffonade of the sage and then cut it into small squares.  The tomatoes?  A nice snack for the gardener-cook.

The result of prepping these ingredients.  Based on the amount of jalapeno, I probably should go harvest more herbs.  But not only am I a tad lazy, but just look at how far the yeast mixture has gotten in this abount of time!

Well, with that said, I set aside the stems / cores of the incredients for a future recipe:

Well, now I have to find an oil to add the mix.  I looked through all my cabinets, and these were all the oils I found:

I seriously contemplated using some of the scheswan oil, just for novelties sake, but then I remembered I was giving half of this to a person who dislikes scheswan peppercorns.  So I used plain olive oil instead:

Now we're down to 2 tomatoes.  I was hungry.  Also, you can see we have 1.33 cups of water, 1.5 tsp of salt, and 2 Tbsp of olive oil.  These we mix with the herbs and spice:

Next we assemble the dry ingredients: 2.5 c spellt flour, 1 Tbsp spellt bran, and 1 c all-purpose flour:

First I mix the started yeast with the wet ingredients:

Then I add my secret ingredient:  Paula Deen garlic peices.

Anything with Paula Deen's name on it will turn out good.  Also notice there is now only one tomato in the background.  Watch for that tomato.

Added 2.5 c spellt flour at this point.  I can still mix it with a spoon.

Added 2 c all-purpose wheat flour.  It's starting to look more like bread dough!

One half-cup flour later, it looks ready to turn out onto a floured table-top:



How to knead dough:  first push it with the heel of your hand away from you:

Then pull the far edge back towards you to double the dough:

Then rotate the dough 90 degrees (1/4 turn):

Then push it again with the heel of your hand:

If you do this for 10 minutes or so, you'll notice a couple things: (a) the dough is REALLY STICKY at the start.  I mean the kind of sticky where you can't hardly pull your hand free.  The temptation is to keep adding flour.  Don't add flour unless you have to.  Better to wash your hands free of all the sticky dough and oil them slightly than keep adding flour. (b) The dough becomes less sticky as you work it.  Eventually, with patience and care, you will wind up with a nice ball of dough:

Because I have only one large bowl at this time, I'll have to wash and reuse my bowl.  My other set of large bowls is up North, with my husband, at the Wall.  (For non-geeks who don't get this, disregard.)  Anyway, after washing and drying my bowl, I pour a tad of olive oil in it and tilt it around to coat it.  Then I put the ball of dough in, and rotate it to make sure it is fully coated.  Coating the dough with oil decreases moisture loss and is vital in the dry So Cal climate.

Now it's time to cover this with the cloth damp from multiple hand dries and walk away for an hour:

It's helpful if the bread has a nice view.  But now we have about an hour to kill.  I recommend first cleaning up the mess:

Then doing dishes is a good plan:

Then maybe a load of laundry:

Ahh, finally it's risen.  It should double in size:

This is the fun part: punching down the dough.  I'm serious, we get to make a fist now and punch at the dough:

Once it's punched down to its original size, we divide it in two and think about how we want to bake it.  I am thinking a regular loaf and a round-ish boule.  Sound good to you?  Sounds good to me, too.  So first, I break off half of the fully-submissive punched-down dough.  I pull the edges and pinch the bottom so it looks like this:

Then I roll this on the table and between my hands until the ball of dough looks nearly seamless.  I prepped a sheet pan by covering it with aluminum foil and spraying it with non-stick spray, and I plopped the ball on this:

Because we chose to do one bouille and one loaf, I have to show you how to do a loaf correctly, right?  First, we stretch the dough carefully into a rectangle:

Then we roll this up into a cylinder:

That nasty seam must be pinched out:

Whoops! I made the rectangle of dough longer than my pan...

No worries, I'll fix it! First I'll fold over the dough:

Then I'll pinch and rub and pinch and rub all the seams until they nearly go away:

The loaf goes seam-side down in the loaf pan to rise.

Both loaves go back in the window covered with a damp cloth:

It has to sit there for another hour to rise.  I look at it for five minutes.  Okay, I'm bored.  I do another load of laundry:





Then I make a snack:

Mmmm....  Finally it is time to actually bake the bread.  I preheat the oven to as hot as it will go (500 F), and cut some marks in the bread:

Sweating, I put the loaves in the oven:

Then I set the timer for 20 minutes:

And walk away for a bit to come back to bread almost burning.  I turn it out to a cooling rack, and use the ghetto lazy method of both cooling bread while softening the crust and stopping carryover-cooking of rubbing the loaves with a chilled stick of butter:

It works.  All that is left is to let the loaves cool in a pretty place for a little while:

Mmm, a tad salty, but yummy.  I couldn't pick a better place to make bread than in my kitchen window.  Bread, wine, chicken, and slaw.  A wonderful evening.

Stay hungry,

Amanda