An ancient loaf

I've been curious about using different types of flour for quite a while now. Recently, I finally went and got myself some spelt flour, so I thought I'd see what baking with spelt was like. Spelt is a particular sort of wheat that was around back in Roman times and still survives to this day. It's the same recipe as my usual sourdough (500g flour, 200ml water, 13g salt, half of Aage), but made with (white) spelt flour. I didn't use the sponge method, so it's all just thrown together in one go.

The spelt flour is really fine - about halfway between regular wheat flour and cornflour. It has a slight tendancy to clump, but it forms such a silky dough! It's been the most satisfying dough to knead that I've found so far (although that might partly be because I used warm water and it's a ridiculously cold day!), and the gluten seems to develop incredibly easily compared with normal bread flour. Here's the dough at the end of the knead, about to start the first rise. It's rather a wet, soft dough as you can see, but remarkably, it's not actually all that sticky either.