Here at England Acres Farm Market & Bakery, we made the switch to using Daisy Organic Flours three weeks ago. Many customers have asked “what is spelt” when they see the bags of spelt flour on the shelves or when we mention the brownies, Breakfast cookies, etc are made using spelt flour. The insert below should help to answer the question ‘What is Spelt’.
Spelt is an old genus of wheat. It used to be called the ‘breadmaker’s wheat’ and was prized, at one time, because it made the lightest loaves of bread available. Now, you have to understand that before the 1900’s, loaves of bread were like bricks! If you have ever tried an old-fashioned rye bread, you will know what used to be ‘standard’. Once wheat began to be hybrid, everything changed. Other wheat varieties besides spelt came into favor because they were now higher in gluten and higher in starch and they could made light, fluffy loaves.
Spelt also had another drawback. Wheat seeds grow with a simple hull and chaff surrounding them to protect them. The hull and chaff are easy to separate and remove from the seed itself. Spelt, on the other hand, has a husk around each seed. It is difficult to remove the seed without some damage and it is much more difficult to separate the whole seeds from the husk, stems and broken pieces this separating process can produce. This extra processing and cleaning made spelt more expensive and so also added to its decline as a ‘favorite’.
When people started changing the basic makeup of food, they usually had specific intentions in mind. With bread grains, these intentions were to make a light, white and fluffy product, to raise the gluten and starch levels. Lab anaylsis done on wheat in the 1900’s showed it be to about 50% starch molecules and 50% vegetable protein. By 2000, anaylsis’s showed average wheat to be 92% starch and only 8% protein! Unfortunately, these hybriding intentions didn’t include the maintaining of vitamin and mineral levels or take into consideration that changing the basic makeup of the food might interfere with a body’s ability to digest that food!
You may hear it said that ‘Spelt is easier to digest than wheat’. One of the reasons that this may be true (for certain people) is that spelt maintains the old levels of gluten, starch and protein. Our slowly evolving bodies deal much better with food when it reflects natural chemical structures that we have dealt with for eons. New chemical structures are much harder for bodies to deal with.
