Make yeast free bread with absolutely no commercial yeast with our recipe for sourdough with spelt and wheat flour. Bake up this easy sourdough sandwich bread to serve with dinner tonight! We used Melissa Richardson’s book, Beyond Basics with Natural Yeast to cut commercial yeast out of our diet and make sourdough an everyday event in the homestead kitchen. 
Today, we’re sharing our recipe for naturally leavened, sourdough with spelt yeast-free bread. This recipe was inspired by Melissa Richardson’s sourdough cookbook, Beyond Basics with Natural Yeast.
This article includes the recipe plus a thorough review of the book. We’ve also included our experience cutting out commercial yeast from our baking and our diet. With Melissa’s books, we’ve learned how to completely cut out commercial yeast from our kitchen.
We’re sharing the book with you because this was the number one tool we used in making sourdough a part of our everyday kitchen activity here on the homestead. We hope it will be of use to you, too.
If all you want is the sourdough with spelt recipe, just scroll down a bit.
A Few Other Leavened Recipes
Healthy Bread & Natural Leavening (Another super easy beginner bread recipe)
Sourdough Sugar Free Breakfast Cookies
Pumpkin Drop Biscuits – a Sourdough Discard Recipe
Bonus: Kefir Fermented Bread Dough – No Yeast!
To keep track of your sourdough recipes, as well as ferment times and baking details, please join our newsletter family and receive our super simple Sourdough Worksheets!
Yeast Free Bread is Unique
I think I’ve read every natural leavening book on the market and Beyond the Basics with Natural Yeast, by Melissa Richardson, is without peer. (Unless, of course, you’re talking about her first book The Art of Baking with Natural Yeast.)
The first thing I want to point out before I get into the details of Beyond the Basics with Natural Yeast is that this (and her other book) are so unique in the world of natural leavening cookbooks.
Here are a few reasons why:
- There are sourdough bread baking books that will tell you how to produce beautiful looking bread but they still call for isolated, commercial yeast in the recipe. My body does not like commercial yeast.
- You can find a few cookbooks that focus on natural yeast but they are, in my experience, often written for people who are at a much higher level of cooking/baking than I am. They call for proofing boxes (I had to look that up) and several steps and blah, blah, blah. It’s bread, not brain surgery – I only time for so many things in my day. Melissa’s books speak to us normal folks out there about how to get yeast free bread and other baked goods.
- Beyond Basics with Natural Yeast is easy to use, laying flat on your counter. It has thick pages that turn easily. There are great pictures and troubleshooting tips. The book is also priced very accessibly for those of us who love to cook wholesome foods for our families, but don’t have a lot of money to spend on every cookbook out there.
Cutting Out Commercial Yeast
If you need to learn how to bake with natural yeast and not simply add it to a commercial yeast recipe for sourdough bread, Melissa can truly help you learn how.
Our family cut out commercial yeast for awhile because we had such a hard time processing it without stomach upset. One of the first recipes we started with was our sourdough with spelt and wheat flour.
I love the silky, smooth texture of spelt flour in bread but it took awhile to get the recipe right.
Natural leaven is a way to ferment grains and flours and it takes some education and practice. We learned not to limit ourselves to naturally fermented bread dough, too. We now ferment all our grains in some kind of culture before we eat them to make them easier to digest.
Foods like:
- kefir
- whey
- buttermilk
- raw milk
- homemade sauerkraut juice
Learning to ferment and bake with natural yeast has been a Godsend for our family. Literally.
I was lead to this method of grain preparation and baking after months of prayer; prayers that usually went something like this, “Heeeeeeeeelp!”
Beyond Basics with Natural Yeast
Melissa will teach you in both her books how to bake with natural leaven, achieving beautiful and healthy yeast free bread. These books are wonderfully written for the total novice and the seasoned leavener.
Yeast free bread is totally doable for the novice baker – you just need to learn how!
I absolutely recommend you purchase Melissa’s first book, The Art of Baking with Natural Yeast, because it will cover all you need to know to start baking this way from scratch. I’m still exploring everything there and am just so grateful I have it to guide me.
When I first started trying to learn about baking with natural leaven it was just one sad experiment after another until I found these books.
Baking for the Every Day Person
One of the best parts about reading these books is her prose – she’s just fun to read. Some baking books leave me feeling like I’ll always be on the outside of the fancy ingredient, equipment, and style group – that’s just not how I bake.
I need simple ingredients and even simpler techniques.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate fine baking, but I live in a real woman’s life with a real woman’s kitchen. I need to know what will work and how to make it happen.
Melissa writes in her book,
The purpose of this cookbook (and my calling in life) is to make it easy for people to make beautiful, delicious, naturally yeasted bread and baked goods. I want everyone and anyone to be able to pick up these recipes and feel excited, not intimidated.
Mission accomplished, Melissa – I do!
May I also just add that having a sourdough culture in your food storage program is a wonderful idea. A culture, once dried, can last pretty much indefinitely.
You do not need to store commercial yeast!
Yeast Free Bread: Sourdough with Spelt
To give you an example of a yeast free bread, here’s our version of sourdough spelt loaf. This recipe mixes whole wheat and spelt flour with rich molasses to produce a delicious loaf that pairs perfectly with hearty winter stews.
Melissa has a spelt rosemary flax loaf in Beyond Basics with Natural Yeast that is similar but baked in a slow cooker for a soft, pillowy loaf. Melissa says of her slow cooker loaf,
Usually I’m a big fan of crackly crusts, but sometimes I just want bread soft enough to snuggle with.
Sourdough Spelt Loaf - A Yeast Free Bread!
Ingredients
- 1/2 Cup Sourdough Starter
- 1 1/4 Cups Warm Water*
- 1 tsp. Sea Salt
- 1 Tbsp. Molasses
- 1 Cup Whole Wheat
- 2 Cups Spelt Flour more to get consistency correct
- 1 Tbsp. Avocado or Olive Oil
Instructions
- Combine the 1/2 cup of starter, 1 1/2 cups of warm water, 1 tsp. of sea salt, and 1 Tbsp. of molasses in a large bowl or the bowl of your high-powered mixer fixed with the dough hook.
- Add the flour a cup at a time until it incorporates with every addition. Be careful not to add too much extra flour. Spelt dough is always sticky and wet, so don't let it fool you. When the flour is done absorbing the liquid, it will clear the sides of the lower half of the bowl.
- Knead the dough for ten minutes by hand or eight minutes with your mixer. As you begin to knead, pour the 1 Tbsp. of oil onto your clean work surface and knead it into the dough. I sometimes add an extra tablespoon of oil, so feel free.
- After incorporating the oil, lightly wet your hands and work surface as you continue to knead to keep the dough from turning into a sticky mess. Don't add to much water, just enough to keep the dough from adhering to you, your work surface...your walls, your toddler, etc.
- After the elapsed time, give it a few more kneads just to be sure the dough it even and roll into a ball. Put into a clean, greased bowl big enough for the dough to double in size.
- Cover the bowl with a lid, beeswax wrap, or plastic wrap. Place it in a warmish place to rise six hours or even overnight (12 hours).
- After at least six hours, turn the dough out of the bowl and let it sit for a few minutes to relax before you shape it.
- Grease a loaf pan for a sandwich bread or a cupcake pan for easy dinner rolls. You could also use a deep sided baking dish for rolls - this creates a kind of pull-apart roll-loaf because the soft shape of the spelt dough will relax. It's quite delicious and soft!
- Roll the the dough into a smooth log to fit into your loaf pan. Or cut the dough into 12 equal portions, rolling them into small balls and putting them into the cupcake pan or dish. Allow them to rise about 2 hours, or until you can gently push a finger into the dough and have it slowly come back up.
- Preheat the oven to 350°F/177°C. Score the top of your loaf.
- Bake the loaf for 35-40 minutes or until an inserted thermometer reaches 180°F/82°C. Bake the rolls for about 20-25 minutes. Rolls are more susceptible to over-browning, so if you know your oven runs hot, keep an eye on them.**
- Remove the breads or rolls from the pans and allow them to cool completely. I'm supposed to tell you that part so that the bread and rolls keep their form. However, if I'm serving this bread for dinner, I plunk it down on the table hot and everyone tears into it to slather butter all over it without stopping to look at its form.
Notes
Sourdough with Spelt Starter
I don’t use a spelt sourdough starter. That is to say that the flour I use to feed my sourdough starter is whole wheat, not spelt. I add spelt flour to this sourdough recipe to make it soft and tender.
However, I don’t use spelt flour exclusively in this bread loaf recipe or as feed for my starter because it’s much more fragile than whole wheat flour. Spelt has less gliaden protein, which is a fancy way of saying that it’s gluten just isn’t as turgid as whole wheat’s when you mix it with water.
Spelt flour products typically rise a little less and are a bit more dense than other wheat flour products, certainly more so than white flour products. They are delicious but a bit fussy on their own.
However, for reasons of better digestion and health, some people really prefer to use a spelt sourdough starter. If that’s you, read this article from Grant Bakes to make a sourdough starter with spelt flour.
What’s Inside Beyond Basics with Natural Yeast?
First of all, the book is spiral bound with a hard cover – this is what every cookbook should be! It will lay flat while you read it and bake. Thank you, Melissa.
Yeast Free Bread from the Fridge
The first few sections cover some basic natural yeast principles:
- feeding your starter
- beginning with a new starter
- some information on natural yeasts
- five critical keys to success
One of those is to keep your starter in your refrigerator door and check on it every time you open the door – in fact that’s number one. This is a good place to mention something that’s very important, especially if you’ve worked with natural yeast before and have a method you like.
Melissa’s recipes and advice are for refrigerator starter. If you culture yours on your counter-top, you’ll be learning a new technique.
Melissa points out two things that are important:
- If you try to mix these two methods, you’ll get mediocre results so commit to one – either fridge or counter-top.
- If you have some experience under your belt and are ready to take your natural yeast baking to the next level, Melissa recommends Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bread which uses counter leavened starter.
When I’m more comfortable with what I’m doing, I’ll check that out but for right now, I’m going to do whatever Melissa tells me to do. I’m not an artisan baker.
I’m a mom who needs my hand held while I try to keep my family in happy gut health. I’ve tried every other method under the sun for healthy grain consumption and natural yeast is the one that feels the best and is the most manageable for my life.
Other Helpful Stuff
In the back of the book, there’s a troubleshooting guide, just in case.
Throughout the book, there are symbols next to some recipes indicating that they are suitable for vegans, friendly for diabetics and no-wait recipes.
There are also symbols for those who were the winners of the contest Melissa ran for new natural yeast recipes from her readers. Those winners (the people) are featured in the back of the book but their recipes are all over the place and they’re cool.
Only Yeast Free BREADS?
Nope, learning to use natural yeast isn’t just about learning to bake breads without commercial yeast. Though bread recipes are a large part of the book, of course.
However, simply put, you haven’t lived until you’ve eaten sourdough waffles for breakfast. Or how about sourdough…
I’m so excited to try every single one of these recipes!
I’ll report on my progress because I think this is an important topic for a lot of us seeking a healthier way to consume bread products. I’ve tried other methods and using natural yeast is the one that works the best for me.
(I’ll tell you about my soaking/sprouting/dehydrating/grinding nightmares another time.)
Maybe it will be the one that works well for you, too. The best way to find out, in my opinion, is to start with Melissa Richardson’s The Art of Baking with Natural Yeast and her newest title Beyond Basics with Natural Yeast.
Gift Suggestions for the Yeast Free Bread Baker
If you’re looking to gift these books to the bread geek in your life, you’ll want to include the following items:
- Purchase a few half gallon mason jars to go with the books. The leaven bubbles up and I have overflowed my quart jars too many times that I now use half gallons.
- A spurtle
is really the best thing I’ve used for mixing my leaven and would make another good addition to your gift.
- I love those plastic mason jar lids
, too, for covering the sourdough starter while it ferments/feeds. In half gallon jars you shouldn’t have to worry about your leaven coming in contact with the plastic unless you’re mixing a ton.
- They’ll also want some sort of basket or bowl (which would be nice to present all this in anyway) for proofing their dough.
- Toss in some beeswax wrap, too.
Don’t worry, Melissa will teach you or the recipient of your gift how to use all those tools to make yeast free bread. For now, just trust me that all this stuff will come in handy!
FAQs for Sourdough with Spelt
I had a lot of questions when I first started working with spelt flour because, although it is a kind of wheat flour, its behaves differently than hard or soft winter wheat flour. Here are a few common questions about using sourdough with spelt flour.
Is Spelt Good for Making Sourdough?
Yes! Spelt flour makes a wonderful addition to any sourdough loaf because of its silky texture and rich flavor. It will make the crumb, or the soft inside of your loaf, “pillowy” (as Melissa Richardson says in her book).
Because of its more delicate composition, spelt flour does require a little more work to get the crunchy crust of an artisan sourdough. The easiest way to get that delectable crunch is to use a cast iron Dutch oven. Baking 4 Happiness can teach you how to use a Dutch oven for baking a simple sourdough spelt loaf with a crunchy crust.
I most often use my sourdough with spelt recipe for sandwich bread or dinner rolls because of its heavenly texture.
- I bake my loaf in a stoneware loaf pan or cast iron loaf pan.
- I bake my dinner rolls either in a cupcake pan or lumped together in a round baking dish where they slump together to form a kind of pull apart loaf. When they come out of the oven, the kids swoop in to pull out their favorite rolls – some like the crustier outside rolls, some like the smooshy soft inside rolls.
We always seem to run out of butter when I make these rolls. Hmm.
What Are the Disadvantages of Spelt Flour?
As we’ve mentioned, because of its more delicate composition, it absorbs and holds water more readily, so you usually end up with a sticky dough which can be tricky to work with. Adding the oil in while you need and keeping your surface and hands wet after that can help mitigate that stickiness.
Since spelt is a form of wheat, people with wheat allergies, gluten intolerance, or other gut issues may have a problem comfortably digesting spelt as they would with any wheat product. Sometimes, this sensitivity is caused by the phytic acid that is present in any seed or grain.
Fortunately, the fermentation process with naturally leavened bread products breaks down that phytic acid making this sourdough with spelt bread recipe a healthier version of regular wheat bread.
Does Spelt Flour Spike Insulin?
This is an important question for those who suffer from diabetes or diabetic symptoms; also for those with ICBS or other bowel syndromes. Compared to other grains, spelt has a relatively moderate effect on blood sugar and can actually help you with regular bowel movements on a lower carb diet because of its fantastic fiber and mineral content.
Cotswold Flour has a nice summary of what spelt flour is and how it can be used.
It should be noted that any refined flour will cause a spike in blood sugar. Refined flours have had their extra fiber removed, leaving only the soft, starchy (sugary) endosperm of the wheat kernel behind.
Because of blood sugar concerns in my own body, I have started using only whole grain flour for everyday baking. These fiber-rich, naturally fermented, no yeast baked goods are easy to digest and provide a quality whole food.
We only use refined, organic flour for special holiday baking, as with our sourdough version of the classic Slavic Easter bread, kulich.
Why is My Spelt Bread So Dense?
Aha, yes! This can be a common problem when working with spelt flour. Remember how loosey goosey spelt flour gets when you mix it with water?
Any whole grain bread will be more dense than its refined flour counterparts, however there are some things you can do to keep your sourdough with spelt from turning into a brick.
First of all, combine it with whole wheat flour (or white flour if you don’t mind using refined flour). The super strong gluten of regular wheat will help give your loaf structure and lift.
You can absolutely learn to make 100% spelt flour sourdough loaves but if you’re new to sourdough baking, I would start by combining the spelt with regular wheat flour.
Also, be sure to watch how much water you add. I typically add a little less water in my initial mix because I know I’ll be wetting my hands and work surface while I need to prevent the stickier spelt flour dough from gluing itself to me and my counter.
Too much water will make your sourdough starter and your sourdough loaves heavy and dense. On the other hand, too little water will result in a dry, brittle loaf.
Water content is one of the things we observe and practice while we’re learning sourdough baking! It’s ok if you don’t get it perfect every time you try it, especially as you’re starting out.
Allow yourself a learning curve and just keep practicing. Any loaves too dense for sandwiches can be used for bread pudding, croutons, and bread crumbs. To learn how to make those, visit our 5 Ways to Avoid Food Waste article and scroll down a bit.
A Book Review
The publisher sent me a copy of this book for review after I signed up for the release tour saying something very undignified like, “I’ll be your best friend if I can review this book!” I’m not sure but what I might have squealed in delight, too.
The opinions in the review are my own. I love this book fur reelz.
We loved this book so much that we quoted it and listed it the must-have resources of our own book, The Do It Yourself Homestead. That’s love. 
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