More information about spelt?

We started using spelt two years ago when we went wheat free. Ours has been a strange oddessy. I was getting treatment from a physical therapist who is also a naturopath who also did nutrirional counseling. She followed the Eat Right 4 Your Type diet and recommended that I eliminate wheat from my diet. I did and four weeks later felt like a new woman.

I started seeing another doctor that the PT recommended, a homeopath/naturopath who did food intolerance tests for my daughter and later for me. DD is intolerant to potato, I am intolerant to the combination of potato and grain. In our modern food supply, potato is in nearly everything. The vitamins that they fortify everything with are usually potato derived. They use potato flour to keep shredded cheese in the bags in the store from sticking. It's salt, of all things. It's everywhere. And potato is in almost every kind of flour and baked good there is. There is ONE brand of bread that we buy, Nature Bake's sprouted wheat, that does not have potato in it.

So we use spelt flour for baking and cooking because it doesn't have potato or potato derivatives in it.

We use the white spelt flour and it bakes up almost like regular flour. You don't use as much liquid and you mix/knead it less. We haven't used whole grain spelt flour in a long time, but when we did it made great bread in the bread machine. I have a good spelt bread machine recipe. But it's very heavy and I would usually try to soak the grain before cooking, which didn't always work.

Because it has gluten in it, it's not for gluten-free diets. I don't know if the white spelt is available elsewhere, Portland, Oregon is kind of the capital of alternative flours/grains in the region, if not in the U.S., so I don't know if this is helpful for you.

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