3 Seed and Chickpea Bread

I have copied this from my other blog in case you missed it over there.


This one goes nicely with soup or toasted. It doesn't rise as much as other breads, due to the weight of the chickpeas in the dough but the flavour is worth it. The recipe is from somewhere on the internet and has been slightly modified; if it was yours originally thanks.

Ingredients.

100g Sunflower seeds.
100g Pumpkin seeds.
100g Linseed
14g salt.
400g boiling water.
1x 400g can of chickpeas
20g olive oil.
12g instant yeast.
620g White bread flour.
80g lukewarm water.

12 hours before you’re going to bake, place all of your seeds in a medium sized container, cover with 400g of boiling water and the 14 g of salt.  

Then in a smaller bowl, place 120g of white bread flour, 80g of lukewarm water and 2g of yeast. Mix well and cover.

After 12 hours it's bubbling nicely.

12 Hours later drain your chickpeas and mash with a fork, roughly.

Place 500g of bread flour into the bowl of your mixer, or into a large mixing bowl if kneading by hand. Make a well, add 10g of yeast and the crushed chickpeas, seeds and dough mix, along with 20g of olive oil.

It should start to come together pretty quickly, but if you think it’s too dry, add 25g of water, mix again for a minute or two then reassess.

Knead for 10 minutes and cover in a lightly oiled bowl. 

Leave it to rest for 90 – 100 minutes until it doubles in size.

Knock back the dough then divide into two and shape into tins. Put the oven on to 250°C

Allow the dough to rise again, for about 45 – 60 mins,

 Bake for 20 mins then reduce the temperature to 200°c for 20 mins more. When you bake, pour a little boiling water into a tray in the bottom of the oven to create steam.

I cut it too quickly but the soup was hot and I was hungry.

White Sourdough and Onion Rings

Just a few action shots of this week's White Sourdough, the recipe is from an online course.

And the Onion Rings, well they were made to use up my sourdough starter excess. I soaked the onion rings in Balsamic Vinegar overnight and made the batter in the early morning. Then I fried them outside in the freezing cold to avoid odours inside. (Actually I did them in the conservatory on my portable induction hob but it was cold)

Freedom

While I am sad to have stopped baking bread commercially, I still think that it was the right thing to do. I am no longer tied to having to start at 5 every morning or be unable to go out for the day if I want. Not that I don't appreciate that for a lot of people that is the norm but after a 40-year career I feel that I should be able to take it easy if I so desire.
Not only that but I have been so wrapped up in producing a limited range of products that I've been unable to try any of the hundreds of recipes that I have for different breads.

So today (well I started yesterday but you know what I mean) I made a couple of breads that I haven't made for a long while.
First up was Marmite Bread, based on a recipe from James Morton, the bake-off bloke from a few years ago. This is a yeasted bread with added sourdough starter for flavour as well as the Marmite.
I mixed the dough last night and left it in the fridge,

and by this morning it had risen quite well.

I shaped it into a cold Casserole dish and let it rise while the oven warmed up to 240 degrees,

then it had 40 minutes with the lid on,

then 20 more with the lid off, until it was done.

after cooling it sliced as a dense, full flavoured loaf. Yvonne, who is not a Marmite fanatic enjoyed it.

The other loaf was a recipe from a website called Red Brolly, who do food and sewing blogposts. This one was called Summer loaf and has Cranberries, Walnuts and Pistachio nuts in it. Again its yeasted and has milk as well as water in it.

The dough rose well,

and I shaped it into two cast iron pots as it was a bit big for loaf tins. (3200 g of dough in a double mixture, it would have made 3 large tin loaves.) It has 100 g Pistachio nuts, 200 g Walnuts and 240 g Cranberries in it.

 As you can see it rose into a panettone sized loaf,

after 50 minutes baking at 230 degrees.

and I actually got a good distribution of fruit and nuts as well.

So that's two off the list; and bread for a week.

New Baking Day

Sunday is now my new baking day, replacing every other day of the week. This has the bonus of meaning that we actually have bread for ourselves, something that was very often missed when I was baking commercially.
Of course making sourdough means that I have to start preparing the starter on Saturday but that's only 5 minutes work.
Saturday morning I took 20g of spelt starter from the fridge and added 20g each of flour and water, making 60g. On Saturday evening I added 60g each of flour and water making 180g of starter for use on Sunday.
Sunday morning at 6am the dough was made with 670g water, 1030g flour, the starter, 20g salt and 90g Agave Syrup.

I folded it three times at 7,8 and 9 am and shaped at 11.

At 15.30 I put two 3 litre Dutch Ovens in my oven to warm to 240°C and at 16.45 I placed the now well risen dough in them.

I'm going  to amend this method next time as I always get a problem at this point. The dough never falls correctly into the D.O.

Anyway after 30 minutes lidded and then 15 more unlidded at 200°C the bread was cooked.

PIty about the shape but the taste more than made up for it.

As you can see it has a close crumb, maybe not a sourdough for the purists but at least there is something solid to put the butter on.