Fermented Oat Sourdough with Spelt and Einkorn

The inspiration for this sourdough came from Chad Robertson’s Tartine #3 book, which I admire. I simplified the process and changed it because I prefer using exclusively ancient grains, while almost all Tartine recipes call for at least some high-gluten modern wheat flours. Also, based on the baking experience with ancient grains, which I’m glad to say is starting to add up, I notice that straying from the master’s recipe, and doing things my way is more often than not a good thing. The Tartine method might seem complicated at first, until you figure that you just need to follow some basic steps and modify them according to your personal observations:

• Make leaven, which is just combining a spoonful of active starter with equal parts of flour and water, and waiting for that mixture to become bubbly. The word ‘leaven’ used to scare me! Now, I just do it automatically after breakfast.
• Combine flours with leaven and water, and allow flours to get hydrated for an hour or so. This hydration process is called ‘autolyse’, another used-to-be-scary word for me.
• Then add salt and a touch more water, and proceed with a bulk rise – meaning all your ingredients are fermenting happily together. During the bulk rise, the dough benefits from getting developed through stretching and folding, very simple process, with the only trick – repeat it every 30 minutes for 3 hours. The alternative to this process is cellar temperature overnight fermentation (55ºF). Or what I like to do is 3 hours of stretch and fold, normally in the evening, then overnight fridge.
• After bulk ferment, transfer the dough to towel lined and floured banneton baskets, and ferment at warm temperature for a few more hours (or overnight in the fridge).
• Bake!!!

I wrote this recipe for one loaf, to make it convenient for those who are just starting to experiment with sourdough ancient grains baking. I normally make dough for two loaves, and either bake them consecutively, or keep the second loaf in a basket in the fridge until the next day or so, to get fresh bread.

HOW TO MAKE FERMENTED OAT SOURDOUGH WITH SPELT AND EINKORN

Ingredients
75 g leaven (see how to make below)
350 g all-purpose spelt flour
50 g oat flour
100 g all-purpose einkorn flour
375 g filtered water, divided
15 g fine sea salt
250 g fermented oats (see below)
Rolled oat flakes for coating (optional)

Instructions
Ferment oats:
Mix 1 cup of raw rolled oats and 1 cup of raw oat groats in 4 cups of filtered water and 1/2 cup of kefir in a mason jar. Cover with a lid loosely (doesn’t have to be air tight, I use white mason jar lid). Leave at room temperature for two days. You will see some layers form, and maybe (not necessarily) some light bubbling.
At the end of two days, strain the liquid through fine sieve, squeezing the excess with a spoon. This is your fermented oats. They would keep in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks. I just eat the left overs with some honey.

Make leaven:
50 g all-purpose spelt flour
50 g filtered water
1-2 tablespoons recently fed active sourdough starter
Mix the ingredients together, cover with an air tight lid or plastic, and keep at room temperature for 8-12 hours, or until leaven becomes very bubbly.

Make dough:
Sift the flours (350 g spelt, 50 g oat, 100 g einkorn) into a medium bowl.
In a large bowl, combine leaven (75 g) with 350 g of water. Whisk to combine. You’ll get white milk-like liquid.
Place the flour mixture into the leaven/water, and mix gently with a spoon to just combine, so no dry bits remain. Don’t over mix.
Cover, and leave at warm room temperature for 1-2 hours. (this is autolyse stage, to hydrate the dough).
Add 15 g of salt, and 25 g of water. Fold the dough on top of itself to incorporate.
Next step is bulk rise. During this stage the dough should be developed by folding and turning.
30 minutes after salt/water addition, dip one hand in water, grab the underside of the dough, stretch it out and fold over itself. Rotate the container one-quarter turn and repeat three or four times. You should do folding and turning every 30 minutes for the first 2.5 hours of the bulk rise.
During the third turn/fold, add fermented oats. Continue every 30 minutes.
After 3 hours and 6 foldings you should see 20-30% increase in volume. If not, continue bulk rising for 30 minutes to one hour.

At this point, depending where you are with time, you can move on to basket (banneton) fermentation. Or, if you are running into night time, put the dough into the refrigerator until morning. In the morning, bring the dough to room temperature (about an hour), and proceed with basket.

Here is where I don’t follow the Tartine instructions. Tartine recommends shaping and bench rest, which are difficult to handle with the grains that I use in this recipe. All Tartine recipes use modern wheat flours in some form. That makes it fairly easy to develop surface tension in dough. Since I only use ancient grains, and like to keep hydration high (I think it produces much better crumb) – the dough gets too sloppy during the bench rest because there is not enough gluten to keep things together. I just dump the dough into a basket lined with a flour sack towel and sprinkled with flour and rolled oats.
Let the dough rise in the basket for 3-5 hours at warm room temperature, or overnight in the refrigerator. Whatever your time allows for.

Bake:
Place a Dutch oven with a lid in the oven, turn oven on 475ºF and preheat for 20 minutes. I use the middle rack.
Carefully remove Dutch oven from your oven, and transfer the dough into it. It’s okay if it’s sloppy, or comes out in pieces. The sloppy doughs make for prettier loaves, like the one I have on the photo here. I don’t score them.
Close the lid, and bake for 15 minutes.
After 15 minutes, remove the lid, and bake 20 minutes. Or a bit longer if you prefer darker crust. I like mine like you see on the picture here, so I stop at 20 minutes.
Cool on a wire rack before slicing. Waiting for it to cool is the hardest part of bread baking!

FERMENTED OAT SOURDOUGH WITH SPELT AND EINKORN

Here is a slight variation of the ingredients for two loaves using whole ground einkorn berries:

150 g leaven
400g all-purpose spelt flour
300g all-purpose einkorn flour
200g ground einkorn berries
100g oat flour
850g water
25 g salt
500g fermented oats