Why My Sourdough Didn't Rise

For the first time in a long while, I produced a sourdough loaf that barely rose at all. I had a faint sense while making it that something was off — but not that it would come out this flat.

Ingredients:

• Starter60g
• Bread flour (Kitanokaori)190g
• Rye flour (Japanese)30g
• Wholemeal spelt flour30g
• Water (around 20°C)170cc
• Salt4g

Two things were different this time. I had found a Japanese-grown rye flour and wanted to try it, and I also used spelt. I had known for a while that rye is grown in Hokkaido, but this was my first time baking with it. The spelt was new too.

What is spelt?

Spelt is an ancient grain, the ancestor of the common bread wheat in wide use today. Recent research has shown it was cultivated in Europe more than 9,000 years ago. Because it has undergone almost no deliberate breeding, there are hopes for it on the health side as well — it is less likely to trigger wheat allergies. http://www.spelt-recipe.jp/

Even at the stage of mixing flour and water it felt very wet, and the dough stuck to my hands. I hoped the stickiness would settle as fermentation progressed through the stretch and folds, but it stayed wet to the end. I finished with a cold proof in the fridge, but when I turned the dough out of the basket it simply spread out flat.

One of my books says that spelt has softer gluten than ordinary bread flour. And with Japanese rye flour it may be that you need less water than with the imported kind. Something to test next time.

Beyond that, the weather has warmed up considerably, and while I was making this the room was around 28–30°C. That high temperature almost certainly pushed fermentation along faster than usual. Over-fermented, and the gluten weakened as a result.

What to change next time

· Less water in the starter.

· Less starter overall.

· Less water in the dough.

· Shorter fermentation, or all of it in the fridge.

Something along those lines. I will try again. For what it is worth, the taste was as good as ever — a perfectly nice sourdough loaf. If I had to name a difference, the acidity was more pronounced than usual.

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The first attempt at fixing it did not go especially well...

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