If you have been following some of my recent posts and indeed if you are interested in this sort of thing, you will have seen that I have been experimenting with alternatives to wheat flour. Our favourite so far has been spelt flour.

The bread maker has been in constant use since I bought it; in fact I can hardly keep up with the demand for the spelt loaves. Earlier this week I made a gluten free loaf, using Doves Organic gluten free brown bread flour. The result was good and a pleasant surprise, although the loaf was slightly anaemic looking and obviously didn’t rise all that well. My son, the chief taste tester, gave it the thumbs up, although he prefers the spelt bread, which I think will be difficult to beat from now on, if I’m honest.

For a change, I tried a spelt and rye blend, this week. The result was a lovely, tasty loaf, much denser and spongier in texture than the spelt loaf and with a harder crust. As you can see from the picture below, the bread doesn’t rise as well as a plain spelt loaf, hence the denser texture. But what is good about this bread, is that it makes a more robust sandwich than the spelt. I am able to cut reasonably thin slices to make sandwiches, as oppose to the wedges that often get cut from the larger spelt loaves, as it crumbles if you cut it too thin.

The ingredients of this loaf are:

1 1/4 tsp yeast
350g spelt flour
150g rye flour
2 tsp sugar
10g butter
150g plain yoghurt (I used soya yoghurt)
230ml water

I will definitely be making more of this one!