We’ve been baking with some ancient grains lately. And while grains are grains and the berries all look similar to me, there are some advantages to diversifying the grain bill for baked goods. We’re trying Spelt for the first time. It’s an ancient grain (Triticum spelta), and has a similar nutritional profile to modern wheat. You can make bread, cookies, cakes, and pastas with Spelt, just like modern wheat. The difference is, it has retained its pure form and has never been crossbred with other species.
What piqued our interest in Spelt is the significant increase in protein it has over common wheat. We don’t have any problems with gluten and at our advanced age we’re always looking for ways to bump up our protein intake. Spelt has about 15% more protein than whole wheat and nearly 50% more than white, wheat flour; a big win, especially if it tastes better.
Spelt Crusted Pizza
So, we decided to have a go at an unleavened, tavern cut pizza crust, using Spelt. Since we acquired our KoMo grain mill, we’ve been collecting a variety of grain berries. We mill, mix and match them into custom flour blends for baking, (mostly Sourdough Bread). Spelt is supposed to have a nutty flavor profile, similar to hard red winter wheat. The only other thing we’ve used it for so far was a blended flour recipe for chocolate chip cookies. We couldn’t discern any nuttiness over the sweetnes, so we’re trying a Spelt only pizza crust, to see what we can learn.
Most of the time when we process grains into food, we use a medium to long sourdough fermentation cycle. This goes a long way towards neutralizing phytic acid and other anti-nutrients. We are looking forward to making a loaf of Spelt Sourdough. Every once in a while we’re a bit more spontaeous and just mix some dough, sans fermentation. We eat a diverse diet of whole foods and don’t get too caught up in oxalates, phytic acid and anti-nutrients. Okay that’s not exactly true. We’re nutrition junkies and analyze everything, looking for the optimum mix of macro and micro nutrients. But in our defense we have a lot of fun doing it, and we still go hog-wild once a week on feast day.
Less is More
In the heart of the summer season we like to make fresh basil pesto from our garden plants but it’s not garden season, so we used some “Mezzetta” pesto from the local market for this pizza. We’ve learned over the years that less is more with pizza, especially the thin crusted variety. So we lightly coated the Spelt pizza crust with the “Mezzetta” pesto sauce and scattered onions, sliced mushrooms and chicken around the dough circles.
The chicken was pre-cooked in the new microwave/convection/air-fryer oven that we just installed in the 3MPH kitchen. We used the Air-Fryer mode to beautifully carmelize the chicken thighs and then fork pulled them into succulent, stringy, bite-sized bits, before scattering them across the top of the pies. Then we added some sliced mozzerella and a final coating of grated Parmigiano Reggiano.
“There’s no such thing as bad pizza.” ~ Jennifer E. Smith
We bake pizza as hot as possible, and we learned that Spelt cooks a little faster than regular wheat. It cooks up a lot darker too – a beautiful brown, amber color. It takes about 15% less time to get to a nice solid crunchy crust than regular wheat, and it does have a nice nuttiness. We will probably blend it with a bit of soft white spring wheat next time to balance the flavor and texture.