WHAT YOU WILL NEED
Equipment: One huge mixing bowl about a foot in diameter
Three bread tins
A damp tea towel
Ingredients:
1lb of Stoneground Flour
2lb Granary Flour
1 Tablespoon of salt
1 oz of yeast and a teaspoon of sugar.
1 and a half pints of lukewarm/tepid water
1 tablespoon of black treacle
3 tablespoon of olive oil - don't use virgin, extra virgin or immaculate conception unless you're making olive bread.
Optional extras: Walnuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds.
Tracking it all down:
Yeast - You can get fresh yeast on order from any baker/cake shop for anything from 8 to 50 pence an ounce. I splashed out and went for two ounces for 16p.
Granary flour - I normally use Allinsons when I can get hold of it but Hovis and somebody called Dove House Farm do a reasonably decent one. Any supermarket should have some... or Daily Bread, if you happen to live in Cambridge or Northampton.
Black Treacle - not as obscure as you might think as anyone who makes flap jack will know. I got mine from Waitrose.
Huge Mixing bowl - I got mine from a "collectables" fair - you know the kind of thing where they set up stalls to sell the kind of kitchen stuff your mother and grandmother are still using every day. I bought one for five quid only to see an exactly similar example, but new, for £2.99 in our local hardware store the next week. Well then. That'll teach me to be pretentious won't it?
WHAT TO DO
1. Get the flour and the salt, tip them into the huge mixing bowl and stir together.
2. Get the yeast, stick it in a cup and add a teaspoon of sugar. It'll start as brown chunks. Put it somewhere warm until it goes all runny and foamy (phnark). You know when you're on the beach and you get that creamy brown foam on the surface... it'll look something like that, anyway, when it looks a bit like that only with smaller bubbles... a heck, you know just wait till it goes a bit runny and has bubbles in. When you see it, you'll understand.
3. When the yeast has gone all runny and foamy you can start.
4. Tip the yeast into the big bowl, rinse out the cup it's been in with some of the tepid water and stick that in, too, now put everything else in and mix it all up.
The mixture will be seriously sticky do not wear false nails, nail polish, plastic beads if they're coated as the coatings, nails and nail varnish will all come off into the dough. Don't wear rings either (disgusting doughy winnets under your favourite rock - or in my case, a clagged up puzzle ring - are a no-no). If you have false nails or nail polish applied then I'm sorry but unless you want them to be an integral part of your toast, later, you will have to don the Marigolds for this bit.
5. Bung a load of flour onto a sturdy work surface and tip the contents of the bowl onto the counter. Scrape out the rest of the stuff sticking to the sides if you can, although your hands will be covered in claggy dough making them more remeniscent of the hands of undead than you so it is now that the telephone will ring.
6. Right once you've finished your call and washed the phone you now need to knead. Not as tricky as it sounds. Clench your fists and press your knuckles down into the middle of the dough so there's a dent. Fold the dough in half - this traps air in your knuckle-shaped indentations. The dough will now look like a Cornish pasty. For ease and manoeuvrebility turn it sideways so the pointy ends are facing you and repeat the process. Carry on for about 5 minutes or until the bread is a bit less sticky. You will have to keep chucking flour onto the work surface to stop it sticking and you should also keep turning it over regularly so both sides get an equal coating of flour. Eventually it will stop sticking to your hands. You'll need to keep cleaning the bits that stick to your hands off and sticking them back into the dough in order to be able to conduct the stick test, otherwise it's rather hard to tell.
7. Pop the kneaded dough back in the bowl, cover it with a damp tea towel and leave it somewhere warm to "prove". This can take anything from about 40 minutes to about 5 hours. It depends on how fresh your yeast is. I freeze mine, which is fine for the first two batches but once you've unfrozen the third ounce it takes far longer to work.
8. Grease three bread tins EXTREMELY thoroughly with olive oil, some people swear by dusting with flour, instead, I tend to use greased grease proof paper so I can lift the cooked loaves out easily. Alternatively, if you want to try something else; rolls, cottage loaves, plaits, whatever, grease a baking tray equally thoroughly.
9. When the dough has grown enough to make a bulge in the tea towel take it back to the sturdy counter top and decant it onto the work surface. Once again, you'll need to use lots of flour and work hard to get a good third of it off the sides of the bowl. Flour and water paste has got nothing on this stuff, you could glue a Sherman tank to the ceiling with about three grammes of it.
10. Divide the dough into three equal pieces. Now you will need to knead each one, one at a time. Pretty much the same protocol applies with this second kneading as with the first except that now, if you want to add anything interesting to the bread this is the time to chuck it in.
You can put in as many seeds as you like. I tend to stick to one type in each loaf what with all the crunchy bits in the granary flower. Normally I make one loaf with sunflower seeds, one with Walnut pieces and one with pumpkin seeds. How much to use is a matter of personal preference. I cup my hands and my long suffering husband fills them about three quarters full of each ingredient in turn. Then I add them to the dough by gradually kneading them in. Try to make sure they are worked thoroughly through the dough or one end will be walnut bread and the other won't. It also is important to ensure that you knead the bread quite thoroughly to get all the air worked equally through it, or you'll get a big empty hole in the middle. This hasn't happened to me yet but my Mum assures me she encountered this problem as a bread making rookie. I suspect the only reason I haven't is because I've watched her making bread for years and have unconsciously absorbed some of her know how.
11. Put your three tins back into the warm place to prove a second time. When they start to appear over the side of the tin, or if they're rolls, when they are about a third as big, again, as they were when you put them in. Turn the oven on. Mum is a bit sketchy on this, when I asked her what temperature she told me she didn't know because her oven isn't very accurate. As far as I can tell it has to be hot enough to kill the yeast but not so hot it burns. The nearest I got to a temperature was "upper middle" so I'd guess about 400 to 450 farenheit, about 180 - 230 c in a fan oven or gas mark 5 to 7. 180 in a fan oven seems to work ok for me.
12. When the bread is about a third again as big as it was when you put it into the tins, you are ready to put it into the oven. Make sure it's up to temparature before you do otherwise your bread will grow massively in the first couple of minutes in the oven.
13. After 10 minutes or so, take the bread out of the oven, remove it from it's tins with as little attrition as you can and put it back in on its side for another 10 minutes or so. Bashing the tin hard on the counter top or oven helps loosen the dough so I don't recommend a ceramic bread dish.
14. After another 10 minutes get the bread out, if it's cooked then when you knock on the bottom it will sound woody and hollow, if it isn't the sound is more like something hitting earth hard. That said even the woody hollow sound has an earthy tone to it so if you can't tell the difference just give it another 5 minutes for luck and then take it out.
Place the loaves on a cooling rack to cool... unless you have any pets who are as fond of bread and marauding as my cat, in which case you'll have to hide it somewhere.
Once it's cooled you can freeze two of the loaves for another day, the third should be troughed immediately, preferably by ripping it apart in a feeding frenzy while it is still a little warm.
