Spelt found its way into my baking rotation ages ago and has since become a regular in many of my recipes. It has an unmistakable flavor that permeates and pervades a loaf of bread, much like warming butter on the stove seems to occupy a house all at once. And while I’ve been keen on the nutritious grain for years, I’ve never ventured down the path of a 100% whole grain spelt pan loaf. Let’s change that.
Keeping with my recent predisposition towards baking in pans — see my recent pain de mie and my barley pan loaf — I just knew spelt would lend itself nicely to the confines of a rectangular pan, especially since I like to push pan loaves to high hydration. So my first trials with this recipe were structured around increasing the water at each attempt, but after several iterations, I found myself preferring previous results with lower hydrations: more doesn’t always mean better.
