Christmas has been and gone and it was inevitable that I’d get at least one recipe book. This year it was The Great British Bake Off; How to Bake written by Linda Collister. The book, like the TV competition that it is based on and named after, has a section on bread and there were several that caught my eye. The first one I’ve given a go is called “Monkey bread”, which I made with a little variation of my own (although I haven’t decided yet whether this variation was misguided or not).
Rant over, back to the bread. I made a well in the dry ingredients. I added the butter to the milk and stirred in, then added one beaten egg. This all got poured into the well in the dry ingredients and all of this was stirred together. It took a few extra blobs of milk to get it to form a soft dough and I kept some to hand for the next step. I turned the dough out onto a work surface. I didn’t bother flouring it; I don’t get that worried about the dough sticking to the table any more. I’ve found the last few times that I’ve baked at the dough coming clean away from the work surface is a good indication that it’s either too dry or has become elastic and smooth enough to stop kneading. Aaanyway, I kneaded until the dough was exactly that; elastic and smooth, which took 10-15 minutes. It then went in a bowl to prove for an hour while I got on with dinner.
The extra 5g of yeast meant that it proved a little faster than I was expecting. So much so that I had to dart between cooking dinner and getting the dough ready for the next step. Once the dough had doubled in size, I turned it onto a lightly-floured worktop and “knocked it back” by kneading gently for about 30 seconds. I cut the dough into 60 pieces, ready to be rolled into balls and placed in a loaf tin. And remembered that I’d forgotten to grease the loaf tin. This is where the flavour variations start. The original recipe suggests that you coat the balls of dough with muscavado sugar, cinnamon and pecans or walnuts, or with cheese, and that you grease the tin with butter. I went for olive oil be because, in my moment of “I think I’m clever”ness, I decided that it would taste nice with pesto. So, tin greased, I started arranging them in the tin and brushed the balls lightly with pesto before adding more. I used up all the dough and tried to get the top roughly even, then covered the loaf tin and left the dough to double in size again.
About ten minutes before the loaf was ready to bake, I put the oven on to preheat to 200°C (400°F or gas mark 6). Just before it went in, I drizzled it with a little more olive oil. It went in for 35 minutes... after about 10 it looked like it wanted to climb out of the tin, so I’d clearly got a good rise on it! The usual test was made when it came out; does it sound hollow? Yep, it sounded good and empty, so it went on a cooling wrack and cooled.
When I cut into it, I was kinda expecting to see vivid green stripes where the dough balls had met and sandwiched in the pesto. Turns out that I should have used more pesto to achieve this effect because the green was only very subtle. I’d also been wondering about the wisdom of these pairing; a dough enriched with butter, milk and egg then flavoured with basil, nuts, cheese and olive oil. It didn’t taste bad, per se; like the colour, the pesto flavour was very subtle. But the firm texture and mildly buttery flavour of the actual bread probably would have worked better with the flavours that it was originally suggested to go with. Probably a self-explanatory point, but I do get the urge to mess with recipes from time to time.
Next breads planned; wholemeal bread using the sponge method, and panetonne... I don’t care if it’s not Christmas any more; I still want to try making it.
References
The Great British Bake Off: How to Bake, Linda Collister, BBC Books, 2011
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