Wednesday 28 May 2014

Seeded Multigrain Bread

Lately, my ultimate favourite thing to make is bread. Cakes, scones, biscuits and muffins are all well and good, but nothing beats looking around the dinner table and watching everyone tuck into your homemade bread along with a meal. It's time consuming and a pain in the arse sometimes, yes, but if you have a mixer it's not even that much of a hassle and the results are well, well worth it. Having mastered the white loaf this week I got a bit cocky and decided to give the "Fabulous Baker Brothers"' Six-Seeded Malted Wheat a go. For this one, I really did have to stray from the recipe a fair bit but you'll soon see why.


As the name suggests, you will need malted wheat flour for this one, but it proved seriously elusive in all the shops around me and so instead I had to settle for Sainsbury's Taste The Difference Wholegrain Seeded Bread Flour. This does contain malt but also already has some seeds in which means later in the recipe you will need to tweak the amounts a little to get the right texture. The recipe itself isn't too bad, chuck 10g sea salt, 5g dried yeast, 20g Rapeseed oil and 385g 
tepid water but then it gets a little more complicated. The original recipe calls or 560g of malted wheat four and 85g mixed seeds, so if you're using standard malted wheat flour do it like that, but because my flour had seeds in it had less flour per 100g. Therefore, I added 50g of seeds, the original 560g of seeded flour, then around another 60g of the seeded flour and let the kneading hooks on my mixer do the hard work (this took about ten minutes, I would imagine maybe about fifteen by hand) until the dough was smooth and elastic like it would have been had I used the original amounts. The finished dough is smooth and it is elastic, but it's also fairly wet to the touch, which is worth bearing in mind.


Shape and put back in the bowl, cover with cling film and leave for about an hour (this is by far the fastest growing bread that I've ever made, which is good to know, too!) After the hour is up, shape and leave in a bread proving basket for a further hour. No bread proving basket? As you may be able to see, instead I used a really, really heavily floured tea towel (no, seriously, really use loads of flour, see the instructions on how to do this properly on James Morton's site) which I the left in a colander and covered for a further hour. After this, slash the top of the bread, cover in flour and pop onto a heavily floured baking tray. Pop into a really hot oven (gas mark 9) for about ten minutes, then switch down to about gas mark 6.5 for a further twenty, but do keep checking. When risen and golden brown, take out and cool on a cooling rack.


It's worth me mentioning at this point that the bread itself although soft is quite dense, but I'm pretty sure that would be the case even if you used the actual Malted Wheat Flour, it's just the kind of loaf that is it. It's not unpleasant to eat, and it toasts really well, it's just not quite as "light" as the traditional white loaves you might be used to. The rustic shape is a bit of a pain when making sandwiches, but the loaf is pretty delicious nonetheless.

Have you tried making similar loaves to this? What were your experiences?

S xo.

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