 Scispirit Wholemeal Bread |
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Wholemeal BreadThe main point of making bread is the delight of getting your hands into the lump of dough to knead it rhythmically into the light texture that is the essence of bread. Few activities are so satisfying! In addition, you can create varieties of bread that are unobtainable in any other way. The recipe below gives a strong-flavoured, substantial bread.We can no longer get fresh yeast in small quantities where we live, so we use quick-acting dried yeast. It gives a good loaf though the flavour is not the same. I use butter for greasing the bread tins, because the grease always burns slightly, and burned butter tastes nice, whereas burnt oil doesn’t. The linseed (flax seeds) are soaked in cold water, when their outer coating softens and they stick well to the top of the loaf before baking. This way they taste good and crunchy, while if you bake them inside the bread they’re like chips of wood. You don’t get their essential oils this way – but you get far more of that by eating oily fish anyway. Ingredients
MethodPre-heat the oven to 230C. Mix the flour, salt, oil and yeast together in a large bowl. Roast the sunflower seeds and sesame seeds together in a heavy dry iron pan until golden brown and add to the flour mixture. Put the linseeds into a cup or bowl and cover well with water to soak them.The quantity of water for mixing the bread will depend on the make of flour (add more flour or water as needed). It needs to be comfortably warm-to-hot to the hand because it will get cooled down a lot by the flour. Add this water to the mixture, mix roughly with a wooden spoon, turn it out onto a clean surface and get it together with your hands. It should feel a bit sticky, but not so sticky that it adheres to the surface or adheres a lot to your hands. Kneading consists of stretching the dough, pressing your knuckles into it to make deep indentations, and then folding it in half so that the air is trapped inside – repeated 30 times or so, turning the dough through 90 degrees each time so that it is stretched in different directions. Grease 3 loaf tins, divide the dough into 3 lumps and press them into the tins. Leave until risen to a bit more than twice its volume (rising the dough twice is unnecessary with wholemeal flour). Then drain the linseed and spread it evenly over the top of the loaves (I use a fork for spreading and separating the seeds). Bake 25-30 mins, turn out of the tins (the bread should be brown and crusty all round), and leave on a rack to cool.
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