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Ideas on Bread making

Here are a few ideas on what to make next time you mix up a batch of dough.

I don’t know about you but I can’t seem to keep a starter or wild yeast alive so I have to use dried yeast. When I do, I want to make as much bread as possible from one sachet, without having loaves of bread hanging round going stale.

So last week a mixed up a batch of dough and made an pesto, fresh herb & olive bread, a sesame seed loaf and some 5 seed cheese biscuits.

First I made up 1.5kg of, mainly, strong white flour, water, salt, oil and yeast and left for 2 hours to rise. I then rolled out a thin pizza type base and lined the bottom of the biggest baking tray I could find. To this a added a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce, then sprinkled a thick layer of pumpkin, sunflower, sesame, and linseeds. These seeds were pushed in to the dough so that when cooked they are stuck to the bread. I used the bottom of the small loaf tin for the sesame bread to do this, then cut lines in the tin so that when baked I could separate out the biscuits.

This was then put to one side to allow to rise again. My pesto, herb and olive bread was also made by rolling out the dough but not as thin as a pizza dough. I spread the pesto, olives, herbs over the dough, rolled it up and placed in a baking tray to rise again.

The last chunk of dough I mixed a big hand full of sesame seeds and added a little truffle oil.

When the olive bread had doubled in size I baked it for half an hour with the sesame bread. The cheese biscuits however got a 15 minute bake 10 minutes to cool, then a 10 minute bake, as I wanted the bread base to be completely dry and crusty.

A great success, perhaps partly due to using really good flour from Stoates, available in the BigBarn MarketPlace. Comments welcome.