In Full Flour - Sourdoughs, Spelt and Stone-ground wheat

If you have a good look at most supermarket "wholemeal" or similar flours, you can see they are actually white flour that has had a certain amount of bran put back. This happens because steel rollers used to mill flour not only separate bran, but produce enough heat to turn the oil in bran rancid quickly. It has to be removed altogether - along with a significant proportion of vitamins, and of course fibre.

Stone grinding, which is cooler, allows the production of a flour that is simply the entire wheat grain, ground. The resulting stone-ground wholemeal flour is visibly different from the reconstituted stuff labelled (implausibly) wholemeal/wholegrain.

So far, so good - with effort you can find a better if heavier alternative to regular bread flour, but of course still one that presents difficulties for people with allergies or intolerance to wheat, most of all sufferers from coeliac disease.

Older varieties of wheat offer answers to some people with milder forms of wheat intolerance, although not coeliacs. Spelt (triticum spelta), the old hulled wheat that many people seem to find more digestible than modern wheat, seems to be growing further in popularity. It has great flavour and although its different gluten doesn't produce the airy texture of artisan sourdoughs made with strong wheat flour, it can be substituted for modern wheat in most recipes with happy, if distinct, results. The coeliacs are still out in the cold here though.

For some months I used spelt to maintain a motherdough - a version of sourdough kept working slowly under refrigeration and used as-is to cook flatbreads and some other simple breads, or combined with other ingredients in a more conventional approach to sourdough baking. In his excellent book Bread Matters, Andrew Whitley observes that wholegrain spelt seems to be a particularly good way to start and maintain sourdoughs, with a high concentration of the natural yeasts that allow grains to generate spontaneous cultures.

I also learned from Whitley of research on the effects that sourdough cultures have on the impact of wheat for allergy sufferers. Researchers at the University of Bari discovered that when bread wheat was fermented in a sourdough culture for an extended period (as in a motherdough), even sufferers of coeliac disease might have the negative impact of wheat lessened or removed. The Bari experiment suggested bread with as much as 30% wheat that underwent a long fermentation could be eaten by coeliacs without harm (no I'm not recommending anything to coeliacs!)

Encouraged by this for my household where a milder allergy is at issue, I have gradually turned my motherdough from spelt into a whole wheat flour affair, but am still using spelt as before for breads involving quicker rises, or (along with rye etc), with the motherdough in other recipes. One will follow soon...