Dinkelbröcthen

A spelt kernel leaves the field still wrapped in its husk, and that husk is the reason the Dinkelbrötchen sits where it does. Wheat threshes free; spelt (Dinkel) is a hulled grain, so it has to pass through a dehulling step at the mill before any flour is ground, and a mill that wants to sell spelt flour has to keep that extra machine running. The bakery at the end of that chain shapes it like any Brötchen, a fist-sized roll scored or rounded and baked in a steam-injected oven, but the dough in the bowl is different: pale gold, a little sticky, and quicker to take up water than wheat dough, with a gluten network that stretches less and gives up sooner.

That fragility sets the baker's schedule. Spelt dough gets a short, gentle knead, because a long machine mix pulls the gluten past the point of recovery and the roll bakes up crumbly, with a crumb that sheds onto the plate. Proofing is watched by eye rather than by the clock, since an over-proofed spelt roll collapses in the oven and leaves a flat top and dense base. Done right, the crust crackles lightly when a thumb presses it and the crumb inside is close, creamy and slightly sweet, with a nutty note that arrives late and lingers after the bite. Warm from the oven it smells of toasted hazelnut and fresh hay, and the steam that escapes at the first tear is gentler than from a wheat roll.

Split and buttered, it takes toppings that suit its flavour. Cold butter and a slice of mild Emmentaler is the quiet classic, and a smear of Quark with chives gives the nuttiness something fresh to lean on. In Swabian and Bavarian bakeries the same roll is also sliced for hot Leberkäse with sweet mustard, the dense crumb taking the fat without going to paste. Honey and a fruit jam work on it too, which is why the roll also appears at the sweet end of a German breakfast table. Because spelt crumb dries faster than wheat, the roll is a same-morning purchase; by afternoon its shell turns tough and the crumb stiffens toward a rusk, and bakers who sell it often toast the leftovers into breadcrumbs.

The sifted-flour roll is one end of a range. A Dinkelvollkornbrötchen uses the whole grain, darker and denser with a pronounced bran flavour; a Dinkelkörnerbrötchen carries sunflower, linseed or pumpkin seeds on the crust and through the crumb; and some bakers blend spelt with wheat to get a softer, taller roll that still shows the colour of the grain. The spelt version also appears in a Laugen form, dipped in lye before baking, which gives it the mahogany skin of a pretzel over that sweet interior. Customers who buy these rolls by name tend to be asking for flavour, and bakers who stock them usually chalk the grain on the tray label so nobody has to guess.

Spelt carries a heritage that few other grains in Germany can claim, and bakeries lean on it. The twelfth-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen wrote about Dinkel with great praise, and her writings, reissued in the twentieth century, were a main driver in its return to health-food shelves. A different spelt product, Grünkern, comes from the same plant cut unripe and kiln-dried over beech fire in the Bauland of north-eastern Baden-Württemberg; its smoky flavour belongs to soups and patties, while the ripe grain goes to the mill and then to the roll. A Dinkelbrötchen ordered at a Swabian counter therefore sits at the end of a regional grain chain, with the grain growing a short drive from the oven.

Origin and history

The best-documented date for spelt in Germany is a statistic. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Württemberg grew spelt on roughly 200,000 hectares, against only about 12,000 for wheat. Spelt was the bread grain of the south-west, and the area it covered ran from Württemberg east to the Lech and north into parts of the Eifel and Hunsrück.

After 1900 the numbers slid. Wheat breeders kept improving yields, a combine harvester could thresh wheat directly, and spelt's husk meant the dehulling stage that mills had to add. By the middle of the twentieth century spelt had nearly dropped out of agricultural statistics in some regions, kept alive by a few farms, by millers in Baden-Württemberg, and by the health-food trade that took up Hildegard's writings.

Spelt acreage in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria has more than doubled since 2013, with Bavaria now leading and Baden-Württemberg second. Each of those hectares grows a grain that a Swabian baker of 1850 would have milled for most of the bread on the shelf, so the modern Dinkelbrötchen returns to a counter where spelt was once the ordinary flour, and where the 1850 ratio of roughly sixteen hectares of spelt to every one of wheat is the number the revival is measured against.