It started with our visitors …
When people come to our house and have our toast, they often ask which bread we use, so here is the answer. We make it ourselves using a variety of flours and replacing some of the conventional ingredients with things that are slightly less unhealthy. (But only slightly!)
What makes this bread different?
We wanted to make this bread an interesting blend of flours that give it a deeper flavour when it’s cooked. So instead of ordinary strong white flour we use a combination of white, stone ground and rye flours. When it comes to the fat we wanted to reduce the amount of saturated fat in our bread so we’ve replaced it with olive oil. It’s the same with the sugar. To reduce the amount of refined sugar we replaced it with black treacle which also gives the bread a deeper brown colour.
The rye flour makes the dough slightly stickier that usual and we tend to kneed it using EVO to work it, rather than sprinkling more flour on the bread and the work surface.
Enjoy.
Ingredients
Here’s what you need to make two medium loaves:
- 300g Strong white flour
- 250g Strong brown stone ground flour
- 200g Rye flour
- 9g dried yeast
- 37g EV Olive oil
- 25g black treacle
- 490 ml tepid water (24 C)
- 10g salt
How to make it
Mix the flours in a large bowl, make two dips in the flour on either side of the bowl. In one dip add the yeast (this is to stop it from coming into direct contact with the fat or sugar). In the other dip pour in the extra virgin olive oil and spoon in the black treacle.
Mount a dough hook on the mixer and begin mixing on its slowest setting. Gradually add the tepid water to combine it with the flour. Keep mixing until it’s a consistent (and slightly sticky) dough (about 3 minutes). Stop the mixer, cover the bowl and rest the dough for 15 minutes. It will swell a little during this time.
Return the bowl to the mixer and continue mixing, gradually adding the salt. You will need to keep kneeding for 8-10 minutes which you can either do by hand or in the mixer. Now cover the bowl with greased clingfilm and leave it until the dough has nearly doubled in size (usually about 45 minutes unless it’s a very cold day).
Knock back the dough and re-knead it for another 8-10 minutes, shape it and put it in the tin. At this point you can sprinkle it with poppy seeds, sunflower seeds or your own mixture. Make a 2mm deep incision across the top of the bread with a very sharp knife (I use a scalpul). This will allow it to open up as it rises. Cover the tin with greased clingfilm and allow the bread to rise in the tin until it’s slightly more than doubled in size (usually about 1 hour).
When you see it’s nearly ready, preheat the oven to gas mark 8 and put a pan of boiling water in the bottom so the bread cooks in a steamy atmosphere.
Put the bread in the hot oven but turn the temperature down to gas mark 7 after about 5 minutes. Cook in total for 35-40 minutes.
When you turn out the bread you can check it’s cooked by tapping the bottom. It should sound hollow (unless, like me, you’re a techie; shove a probe into the centre and make sure its 91C or above).
Allow it to cool and enjoy!
