Sprouted Spelt Flour Bread with Montrachet Wine Yeast (and a terrific BreadStorm update)

As you may recall, a few months ago I switched all my formulas to BreadStorm format. BreadStorm is a bread formulation software that takes all the boring (to me) work out of baking bread (well, short of washing bowls and pans, for which I wish there were a program too).
It is the brainchild of two passionate home bakers and software programmers, Dado and Jacqueline Colussi, who like nothing better than making bakers' lives a bit easier. No more calculations, no more head-scratching over Excel formulas, and now, thanks to a stunning new update, a much more convenient way to bake from the web. If you go back to one of my recent posts, for instance The Prairie Loaf, and scroll down, you'll see that I posted the formula in the usual static form and made it available in BreadStorm proprietary format for BreadStorm users, including users of the free version. Those of you who didn't use a Mac or weren't interested in downloading BreadStorm were out of luck: they still had to do all the calculations themselves in case they wanted to scale the formula up or down. Not so anymore! From now on you will be able to toggle a formula between percentages and weights AND to scale it directly without any further calculation or downloading on your part. If you are a BreadStorm user,  of course you can still import it. Please note that this update is still in beta, which means that at the moment, only beta testers can create interactive formulas and only on Mac.
The picture above shows a 50% sprouted spelt flour bread I have been working on, using a Montrachet wine yeast instead of a bread yeast. I was curious to see if it would rise properly because from what I had read on the web, wine yeast can behave very differently from bread yeast. That wasn't my experience.

In the first iteration of the formula I only used .1% yeast and put it all in the poolish. The bread raised well but the taste was curiously bland.

In the second version, I used a total of 1.17 % yeast, split between the poolish and the final dough, and the taste was surprisingly complex. I only had a little bit of yeast and have now run out, and since wine yeast is quite expensive compared to regular yeast, there is a good chance I won't be making this bread again but if you do have access to wine yeast and want to give it a shot, I would encourage you to try using sprouted spelt or another wholegrain flour depending on what you have on hand. You may be pleasantly surprised. The sprouted spelt flour I used was a lovely present from my friend breadsong who brought it to me from British Columbia. Thanks, breadsong!

Here is the formula in the new interactive BreadStorm format:
Please let me know how you like this new feature. Dado and Jacqueline will be following the comments and they are keenly interested in your feedback as I am.

Baking notes

• The poolish fermented for 12 hours at 74°F/23°C
• The dough was autolysed for 30 minutes and hand-mixed
• Dough temperature: 75°F/24°C
• Bulk fermentation: 3 hours at room temperature (74°F/23°C) then 12 hours in refrigerator
• Shaped cold
• Proofed for 2:30 hours
• Baked for 40 minutes with steam the first five minutes
• Total time: 15 minutes at 450°F/232°C, 25 minutes at 400°F/204°C (tented with foil to prevent burning since sprouted grain flour breads tend to burn easily)
• If I made the bread again, I would try using more yeast to open up the crumb some.