Baking whole spelt bread using poolish

I have recently started baking bread and have been experimenting with different types of flour like spelt and rye. They are healthier alternative to wheat flour. Being a beginner in bread making, I don't expect pretty loaves of bread coming out of my oven. As long as they are edible, I bring them to work to eat. :)

For bread baking, you need 3 basic ingredients. Flour, water, yeast. Most of the time, salt is added as well. For yeast, there is a choice of commercial yeast or "natural" yeast, aka sourdough.

My previous attempts with sourdough ended with edible bread (how can bread be inedible?) but they are not very well risen. Perhaps it is because my sourdough starter is not fully established or maybe usually I use the sourdough started on rye or spelt flour which do not have a lot of gluten to hold the bread well. Nevertheless, I will continue testing and improve on sourdough bread.

Anyway, I decided to bake a loaf of spelt bread using commercial yeast over the weekend. However, I do not like to use tons of yeast to make the bread rise and end up with a loaf of bread smelling very yeasty. So I went on the internet (like what most people do) to search for a solution. I ended up reading on pre-fermentation. A short description on pre-fermentation can be found here.

A very simple and appropriate quote I came across... "You can have it fast or you can have it good, but you can't have it fast and good."

I decided to use a poolish and below is a picture of the spelt flour I used and the poolish I made.

When you do a pre-ferment/starter using part of the ingredients from a bread recipe the day before baking, you need only a minute amount of yeast. You let the yeast work on the flour and water for a longer time. 

Having a slow rise and longer fermentation, I ended up with a more complex-tasting loaf of bread which definitely tasted better than commercial bread.

Making a pre-ferment overnight is like taking care of a sick baby. In this case, I keep wondering whether the pre-ferment is growing (I used only 0.2g of yeast!) or will it over-flow the container I left it in. In short, I had no proper sleep at all. Thank goodness it grew normally, to around 3 times its size after around 10 hours.

10-hour old poolish

At 14 hours, the poolish looked like what is shown below. If you look carefully, you will see a lot of bubbles on the surface and the centre of the poolish is slightly receding. That usually means the poolish is ready to use. Don't wait too long or it will collapse.

14-hour old ripe poolish

I added in the remaining flour and water (leaving a bit of water to mix with honey and salt). Then, I leave the dough to autolyse for 30 mins.

While waiting, I mixed the honey and salt with the remaining water. When 1/2 hour is up, I added the honey/salt mixture into the dough and mixed it well. I left it to proof to double its size which didn't take long, surprisingly (around 1/2 hour).

I did 3 rounds of stretch and fold with 40 mins rest in-between. I did not knead the dough like what is done traditionally nor did I use a machine to knead the dough. Spelt flour has weaker gluten and I do not want to over-knead it.

Before final proof, I left it in a greased new enamelled cast iron pot.

Dough is proofed and ready for baking. I might have over-proofed it.

I baked the bread at 230C and have the pot covered by the cast iron cover for 20 mins and then with the cover removed for another 20 mins to facilitate browning until the internal temperature is 97C. If you don't have a cooking thermometer, tap on the bottom of the loaf, if it sounds hollow, it is done.

I made wrong choice of using a new enamelled cast iron pot to bake this bread, and ended up having the bread stuck to the sides despite greasing the pot. Maybe I should flour it as well. 

Baking in a cast iron pot with a lid traps the moisture within the pot to allow a better rise and nicer/thicker brown crust. Can't really blame the pot for sticking as it is my fault.

Bread was stuck to the sides of the pot. :(

The crumb of the spelt bread looked like this.

Various sizes of holes, well distributed. Thick crust is seen.

Conclusion of this bread making method is that using a poolish is very fantastic way of reducing the amount of yeast you add. You do have to plan ahead to determine the amount of yeast needed because it is based on the amount of flour you are putting into the poolish and also the duration of the pre-fermentation. And with slow fermentation, you get a more complex flavour in the loaf of bread. You can use poolish for any type of flour for bread baking.

For the next loaf using the same method, I would lower the hydration of the loaf to 66% (currently at 70%), avoid over-proofing the dough during the final proof, use lesser salt, use 38% of flour in the poolish instead of 50%, bake at a lower temperature of 200C and maybe bake in a normal loaf tin.

The recipe I used is modified from Breadtopia
I used one of the comments in the post that substituted sourdough with yeast. I further modify that recipe to make use of poolish. You can learn to stretch and fold the dough from that post too.

Other references that you might be interested in:
Poolish and Biga



Ingredients
Poolish
250g whole spelt flour
250ml water
0.2g of yeast (0.08% by weight of flour used in the poolish, slow fermentation of 14 hours)

Main dough
250g whol spelt flour
100ml water
9g salt
3 tbsp honey

Baker's percentage
Flour 100%
Water 70% (ie 70% hydration)
Salt 1.8%