Baking Bread Without Sourdough: Tips & Tricks

How to bake bread without sourdough

Classic rye bread needs sourdough to be light and easily digestible. Baking with sourdough, however, takes a lot of time. You also need a living sourdough culture, of course. If you don’t have either, you can still bake your own bread.

• If you use flour from wheat, spelled, emmer and Kamut, you can let the dough rise with yeast and get an attractive, delicious bread.
• A major advantage: the baking of the bread takes less time overall until it is ready. Because with sourdough, a long resting time of up to 24 hours is advisable, not to mention the time for preparing the sourdough over several days. Yeast dough will take about an hour to rise.
• One disadvantage: you may not tolerate yeast bread as well as sourdough bread. The small lactic acid bacteria, in combination with the long swelling time, ensure that the nutrients are optimally broken down.
• With yeast bread, your intestines have to do more digestion work.

Recipe for bread with yeast dough

A very simple basic yeast bread recipe, which you can enhance as you wish with additional seeds and grains, is the following:

• Ingredients: 500 grams of wholemeal flour (a mixture of wheat, spelled, emmer, einkorn, Kamut is also welcome), 400 milliliters of water, 1 cube of fresh yeast, or a bag of dry yeast, 1 tbsp. sugar, 1 tsp. salt, 2 tbsp. rapeseed oil
• Preparation: Mix yeast, sugar, salt, and oil with a little water in a cup.
• Add the mixture to the flour mixture along with the water. Knead everything together well.
• Then cover with a cloth and let it double in volume at room temperature for about 1 to 2 hours.
• Grease and flour a loaf tin or Roman pot. If you use a special bread baking pan, greasing is often not necessary, depending on the coating and material.
• Knead the dough briefly again, put it in the bread pan or put it freely shaped on the baking sheet.
• Let rise again at a comfortable room temperature for about 20 minutes. Then bake the bread at 180 degrees for about 40 minutes.
• You can refine this recipe even further by adding flaxseeds, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, chopped nuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds, chia seeds, or other goodies like bread spices to the batter. Let your imagination run wild. Your bread will gain in flavor and nutrients as a result.