Rustic loaves

I’m continuing to work my way through my newest baking book, The Great British Bake Off: How to Bake. Today... and sort of yesterday, I’m making “rustic” brown bread.

This had to be started yesterday because this bread uses what I think is called the “sponge” method. This is where a dough is made using yeast and allowed to develop over the period of a few hours (somewhere between around 6 and 12 hours). This method bears some similarities to using a sourdough starter because this extended period of fermentation allows flavours to develop. But it’s obviously not quite the same because fresh yeast is used rather than bacteria generated naturally.

So, last night I weighed out 250g of strong wholemeal bread flour (the recipe actually specified “strong wholegrain seeded bread flour, or spelt flour”, but I didn’t have either of these and reasoned that the wholemeal I had would do fine). I measured out 200ml of water, at room temperature, and combined this with 5g fresh yeast. The water/yeast mix went into the flour and the whole lot was combined and worked roughly for about 3 minutes into a thick, sticky but slightly elastic dough. I covered it with a tea towel and left it to “do its thing” overnight.

When I came back to the dough in the morning, it was bubbly, had risen and had spread around the bowl so that it did actually look a little like a sourdough starter. I left this while I got on with the other bit of the dough. Another 250g of strong wholemeal bread flour went into another mixing bowl and was combined with 300ml lukewarm water which had 15g fresh yeast stirred into it. You can probably guess from that sort of ratio of flour to water that the mix was pretty sloppy but it still needed working for about 5 minutes until elastic. It then got covered and rested until doubled in size.

This is another occasion when I’m going to start coming across as a bit of a bumbling idiot who can’t read instructions properly, because I’d missed the little section in the recipe that told you to add the overnight batter to this fresh one. I was actually meant to do it before the resting period. I didn’t and had to add it afterwards. Luckily enough, this didn’t seem to adversely affect the texture of the finished loaves...

This was however the right point at which to add 2 tablespoons olive oil and 2 teaspoons salt. I then got another 250g strong wholemeal flour to hand and gradually started to work this in until a “soft but not sticky dough” formed. Out this got turned onto the table for 5 minutes of kneading by hand. Towards the end of said kneading, I worked 65g poppy seeds, 65g sesame seeds and 65g sunflower seeds into the dough. Once if was firm but pliable it got returned to the bowl and covered for another doubling in size.

Despite the fact that I personally felt rather cold, the dough clearly didn’t think the house was that cold because it didn’t take any encouragement to get it to double in size. Once it had got to that point, I scraped it out of the bowl onto a lightly floured work top, cut it in half and shaped it into 2 batons. Contrary to the book instructions, I used the method that we’d been taught at college. I gently flattened the dough into a rectangle, folded one third into the middle, folded the opposite third into the middle, lightly flattened again and did one more fold. This is all in the cause of generating a “spine” in the bread so that it holds its shape and doesn’t split open where you don’t want it to. These batons then got placed onto pieces of baking parchment and rested for another 30 minutes.

10 minutes before baking time, the oven got preheated at 230°C (450°F or gas mark 8) with 3 baking trays in; 2 to take the bread and one on the bottom of the oven to take some water. The loaves went into the oven, on their pieces of baking parchment and along with a cup of water in the bottom baking tray. The idea of preheating the trays is to generate immediate heat and therefore rise as the loaves go in the oven, and the water is there to create steam, which forms a damp layer on the outside of the bread, slowing the development of a crust and therefore giving it more time to rise. Or that’s the theory. The loaves got slashed and then baked for 30 minutes until golden and they gave off a hollow sound when tapped on the bottom. They went on to a cooling wrack and I vacated the house while they cooled to stop me cutting in straight away.

A little while later, I was back home and hungry. After a bit of loaf fondling to check if they were cool, I hacked into one and had a gander at the interior. I was a it worried when I started because the last few loaves I’ve done just using wholemeal flour have turned out like rocks. Clearly my technique and understanding has improved since then because this bread, while with a fairly fine texture of air bubbles, was still soft and fairly fluffy. I couldn’t taste any noticeable flavour from the overnight dough, but that might have been because the nutty flavours from the sesame, poppy and sunflower seeds was quite intense. Overall, a flavoursome and pleasingly textured loaf... and it was nice to be making a healthy one filled with fibre too.

Next? Sit and tap my foot while I wait for the tin for my panetonne to turn up.

References

The Great British Bake Off: How to Bake, Linda Collister, BBC Books, 2011