How is my spelt starter doing?

Thank you for the feedback!

I had no idea the ratio was relative to weight, which makes the recipe I used seem a bit strange, since it never mentions weight. A cup is a measurement og volume, not mass. I thought it was too hydrated, but followed the instructions, so I thought it was fine.

Anyways, I've fed the starter as follows the last two times: 60g starter, 60g water, 60g flour. This morning it had risen more than double in size before it fell and looks good.

I saw your blog entry on the loaf, drogon, and thinking about trying it out.

Going forward, my plan is to store the starter in the refrigerator and feed it once a week or more, depending on how much I use. It will mostly be two of us eating the loaves, so I won't need a huge starter. Do I seal the lid completely when storing the starter in the fridge, or just loosely as I did during the development of it?

Should I keep it at these ratios (1:1:1:, 60g of each) and keep it at 100%? That gives a total of 180g starter at all times. I read from drogon's blog entry that I can use some starter and add some flour/water for some hours when making a loaf. So if I were to make that loaf, I could take 120g starter and feed it back up to 180g with 60+60+60. Either reducing the entire recipe or add 30g water/flour and let it work for a while.

Thank you for the recipe, A BakEr. Very useful with the video since it shows the stretching and folding technique.

I do have one question regarding the amount of starter.

In that recipe and another I've found, both use 1/4 cup of starter to 530g flour, which amounts to 11% starter to flour weight. Drogon's recipe uses 150g, which is 30% starter to flour weight.

Do the loaves vary so much in the rest of the recipe and making that drogon's need 3 times the amount of starter or is it because the starters are different? I know each is different and I'll probably try different amounts when making my loaves, I just wondered if there was some importance to the difference I should know.

I'll prepare a dough this evening and try making it tomorrow morning.

I made the one in drogon's blog.

After feeding the starter with [1:1:1] 2-3 times, I took out 105 g starter and added 60g flour/water to the remaining 60g starter. I made a new time-lapse of the starter and put it side-by-side with the previous video. The second starter isn't quite 100% hydrated yet, but it's moving in the right direction. Here's the video, which I also put in the first post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4PJPqNwU7I

I started this a bit late, so instead of adding a bit flour/water to the starter to get 150 g, I just adjusted the entire recipe to the starter amount. Which meant reducing it to 70%:

70 g wholemeal spelt
280 g white spelt
106 g spelt starter
200 g water
6 g salt

I forgot to add honey (I would've used sugar or maple syrup since it's low on fodmap) since it wasn't in the blog recipe.

This is after mixing everything:

It was maybe a bit more wet than drogon's based on the pictures. Maybe because my starter is still a bit high on hydration. I had no trouble working with it though and it didn't stick enough to leave dough trails everywhere.

It's 0-6 ºC outside and 25 ºC inside, so covered it with plastic wrap and let the bowl sit on my girlfriends night table next to the open window. My thermometer said it was about 16-18 ºC in this area. Found my dough the next day like this:


After letting it warm up, stretching and folding a bit it was ready for the proofing:


One and a half hour later I dumped it upside down onto the teflon sheet, slashed it three times and used a peeler to put it into the preheated oven:

At this point I was a bit worried that it wouldn't rise much during baking. I've made some spelt breads before using yeast, and my experience is that the bread does not rise very much during baking. It will not differ much from the size and shape it was when I put it in.

But the worries were not needed. The bread quickly rose up and looked quite yummy. I stuck my thermometer in it and set it to alert me when it had reached 95 ºC. I removed the teflon after 12 minutes at 250 ºC and lowered til 210.

Quite pleased with the final result. Best bread I've ever made, that's for sure. My girlfriend loved it and ate it with nothing but butter on the slices. We let it sit and cool down a bit, but cut it open while it still had some heat in it, allowing the butter to melt.

As a first attempt, I'm very happy with this bread. I look forward to experimenting more with recipes and methods. My starter seems to be doing good.