Wheat Ever Next?

Bread baking has become a bit of a routine here now, I’d say 75% of our bread is home-made, some achievement I think. It’s been a real cost cutter too, despite the initial outlay of buying the different flours and some dried yeast it works out so much less expensive than shop bought bread, for comparison at our local bakery it costs around £2.00 for a bloomer and I can make one at home (including a generous estimated electricity cost) for around £1.00 maximum. Out of interest for those of you in the UK I buy my flour from Shipton Mill, the quality of the goods and service is second to none.

We’ve been needing more bread recently too, my Dad has just started a new job and his office isn’t near any decent places for lunch, so he takes his own. Generally a sandwich but fresh ciabatta, a wedge of good cheese and some fruit doesn’t sound too bad either does it — the joys of home baked bread; so much fun for the baker and enjoyment for the eater too. 

I love the idea of completely controlling the ingredients in the dough too, nothing artificial, no preservatives, just pure, fresh ingredients and there are so many variations possible. Interestingly since we’ve eaten more home baked bread we’ve felt much healthier than when we were eating the store bought, we’ve suffered less abdominal bloating and had much more energy; BREAD MATTERS: The State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking Your Own (Andrew Whitley) discusses this idea at length.

When the new Bread Baking Day challenge appeared on Apple Pie, Patis & Pate I was really glad to find out what the topic of the month was. I’d seriously been considering giving this month a miss as time seems so short, but when I saw it was simply 100% wholegrains I reconsidered, after all the bread would still need baking and I’d still more than likely end up blogging it.

Then it dawned on me 100% whole grain may not be so easy, it meant no adding of refined white flour to lighten the bread, no introductions of anything that didn’t fit this bill:

Whole cereal grains and foods made from them consist of the entire grain seed usually referred to as the kernel. The kernel is made of three components — the bran, the germ and the endosperm. If the kernel has been cracked, crushed or flaked, then in order to be called whole grain, it must retain nearly the same relative proportions of bran, germ and endosperm as the original grain.

Whole grain ingredients may be used whole, cooked, milled into flour and used to make breads and other products, or extruded or flaked to make cereal products.

There’s so much more to whole grain than just wheat but that’s what I decided to stick to. Look here for more options.

Image courtesy of Google Images

This called for some serious consideration, I didn’t want to end up with a brick or make Irish wheaten bread, I wanted a yeasted sandwich bread. After reading through Dough: Simple Contemporary Bread: Simple Contemporary Bread (Richard Bertinet) which contains a recipe for 100% wholemeal bread but Richard confessed it was a dense and heavy bread more suited to eating with a chunk of cheese or seafood salad, not what I was looking for. So to the next stop on the cookbook shelf Exceptional Breads: Baker & Spice (Dan Lepard & Richard Whittington) but nothing inspired here either. Third time lucky I found the recipe, Ballymaloe brown yeast bread in The Ballymaloe Bread Book (Tim Allen).

The Ballymaloe brown yeast bread is one of the easiest yeasted breads I’ve ever made, if not the easiest. It requires no kneading and one rising. 

The recipe calls for the addition of treacle but molasses could be used for a higher nutritional value. 

My preference is for the use of fresh yeast but if you prefer or you can’t get hold of fresh yeast do feel free to substitute dried or fast acting yeast here. Although if using the fast acting sort there is no need to complete the ‘activation stage’ described in  the recipe below, just add the yeast to the flour and proceed from there, taking care not to allow the yeast and salt to touch as salt kills yeast.

Although recipes that call for a stirred not kneaded method generally lead to breads having a courser texture this was actually a benefit here as it helped keep the bread less dense. The resulting loaf is rather rustic but it has a light texture on eating, perfect for sandwiches or toasted and dripping with Irish salted butter, yum

Tim Allen suggests the bread is best paired with cheese and tomato chutney for sandwiches, I bucked the trend and decided to go with Wexford Cheddar and red onion chutney. Wexford Cheddar is quite a mature cheese and is one of my favourites, it pairs so well with the sharp almost spicy tang of the onion chutney and then is calmed by the comfortingly sweet, almost nutty soft bread, sandwich heaven.

If you’ve not experimented much with making your own bread please do not be worried about it, yeasted dough seems to cause so much worry and unease, you will overtime gain a feel for the dough and become more confident with the use of different flours, blending and interchanging as you go as well as developing flavoured breads. I’d be happy to help/offer advice too, so feel free to leave me a comment here or send me a quick email, the details can be found in the contact me page at the top of the screen.

Do give it a try (a few actually, as I said it takes a while to get into the swing of it) you will reap the benefit and so much so enjoy the process. Good Luck!!

The Recipe:

• 450g wholemeal/brown flour or 400g brown flour & 50g white flour
• 25g fresh yeast
• 425ml warm water
• 1 teaspoon black treacle
• 1 teaspoon salt

1. In a large bowl combine the flour and salt.
2. Sponge the yeast in 150ml of the water and the treacle, leave in a warm place for the yeast to become active, about five minutes. You will see when this has happened because the yeast will have become bubbly.
3. Add the remaining water to the yeast and stir gently together, pour this into the dry ingredients and mix with an open hand, drawing the flour from the sides of the bowl.
4. Pour into a lightly oiled loaf pan (2lb tin) and cover with a clean tea towel, leave to rise for around 40 minutes in a warm place, the dough should more than double its original size and just peep above the loaf tin rim. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 230C or the equivalent.
5. Bake for 45-50 minutes or until nicely browned and the bread sounds hollow when tapped. Remove from the tin onto a wire cooling rack and cover with a tea towel for a softer crust, allow to cool.