The first bread I attempted with my natural yeast starter using the Tartine method was such a failure it almost made me give up and decide to stick to my forte of glorified pencil pushing. Maybe good bread is just beyond my reach. It may still be, but after the first disastrous failure and one brick later, I managed to create an edible loaf of bread.

Brick bread (see right):

Spelt Bread 

After playing around with sprouting spelt berries, I started to develop an affinity for its off-beat wheatiness, which is often described as nutty (although I am not convinced that is the best description) with a moderately sweet flavor. My selection of spelt was store bought bulk Vita-spelt berries, which I stone ground with my Sunshine Nugget. I set the mill to a slightly courser grind than I have in previous batches. I sifted off about 15% bran by weight. The bran was heavy and noticeably larger than bran sifted off in my batches of fresh milled emmer and hard red wheat

Side note on bran.

Bran is tasty stuff, but true whole grain bread is just too heavy for my taste. I tried to use the bran to mixed results (e.g. a bran cracker that will never be spoken of again).

Recipe: 170g spelt flour, 40g leaven (50/50 all-purpose/rye flour mix), and 110g water. Autolyse for 1:30 (longer than normal because I had errands to run), then mixed in a tps. salt with a little extra water and gently folded for a couple minutes and left to rise for 3 1/2 hours. After a decent rise, I cut off one-third the dough to use for flat bread with dinner and folded the remaining dough into loaf shape and refrigerated overnight. The next morning I brought the dough back out onto the counter and let it sit for hours (basically all day). After almost forgetting about the bread (according to my Tartine Book No. 3 spelt has a very long rising time, which I did not know at the time), I folded the dough once again into better mini-loaf shape and pre-heated the over to 400 for baking. Lacking a steam injection oven or a proper cast iron covered pot, my work-around is just a pan of water plus water on the bottom of the oven to create a nice spa like atmosphere.

The end result: Nothing special, but not bad. A nice sourdough tang and not too wheaty. Still too dense with too tight a crumb though.