Bread Matters (25 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT BREAD – A MEAL IN ITSELF

‘“And they were filled”, the Bible says.

No simpler words can be written to describe

happiness, satisfaction, gratitude.’

H. E. JACOB
,

Six Thousand Years of Bread
(Lyons Press, 1944)

Once you have mastered a basic loaf, it won’t be long before you feel like branching out. How about a light savoury bread, flavoured with olives, tomatoes, cheese or nuts? Suddenly, bread is liberated from the servile role of carrier to take its time-honoured place as the heart of a meal.

When you make flavoured breads you can be creative, you can indulge your favourite tastes, you can adapt breads to fit with specific dishes and you can take care of your nutritional concerns while making breads that are guaranteed to win over the most sceptical of families or friends.

How things have changed. Until the early 1990s, a flavoured bread usually meant, in the UK at least, a dough with added sugar, egg, fruit or spice. We liked teacakes, spicy buns and fruity malt loaf, but we preferred our savoury flavours
with
bread, not
in
it.

Then came the Mediterranean diet. We knew about pizza, of course, but travellers and food writers told of flat slabs of porous bread with an oily topping of herbs or local summer vegetables. Focaccia and
schiacciata
tied our tongues and tickled our taste buds.

Some bakers saw ‘speciality bread’ as a licence to put ever weirder combinations of bits into some pretty indifferent doughs. But the flavoured breads that have stood the test of time have been those in which the savoury element complements the texture and taste of the dough.

In this chapter I describe a basic dough that works well with a wide variety of savoury additions and I suggest ways of incorporating vegetable mixtures into the dough. This may seem obvious, but simply chucking in a load of Med Veg can produce a loaf with a strong resemblance to roadkill. However, with a sound basic dough and some idea about textures and flavours, there is no limit to the tasty and nutritious combinations that are possible in savoury breads. Perhaps they will inspire your creativity, or at least prove a most satisfactory way of using up vegetable leftovers. And to conclude, the Altamura recipe shows how to use the overnight sponge method to make a semolina bread, with a variation for a simple fruited bannock.

Basic Savoury Bread Dough

This recipe is similar to Scottish Morning Rolls (page 149), but whereas the sponge comprised about a quarter of the dough for the rolls, in this bread it is nearer half. The effect is to make this savoury bread dough slightly more acidic and therefore a better foil to the various ingredients that will be used to flavour and texture the bread.

The sponge

3g Fresh yeast

150g Water (at 20°C)

75g Strong white flour or Italian Type 0 flour

75g Stoneground wholemeal flour

303g Total

Dissolve the yeast in the water. Add the flours and mix to a soft sponge. There is no need to mix this vigorously: gluten development by physical means is irrelevant in a dough that is allowed such a long time to ferment because naturally occurring enzymes and acids transform it anyway.

Put the sponge in a bowl with plenty of room for expansion (up to 3 times its volume) and cover with a lid or plastic bag to conserve moisture. Leave it at room temperature to ferment for 16-48 hours. During this time, the sponge will rise up and collapse. The yeast cells will multiply and lactic and acetic acids will begin to develop.

The final dough

225g
^*
Sponge (from above)

150g Strong white flour

75g Stoneground wholemeal flour

4g Sea salt

15g Olive oil

105g Water

574g Total

If the sponge has been in a cool place, you will need to use fairly warm water to bring the final dough to a reasonable temperature of around 27°C. To work out how hot the water should be, follow the formula on page 68. For the purposes of this calculation, treat the sponge as part of the flour. Since they are equal weights, you can add their temperatures together and divide by 2 to arrive at an average.

Mix all the ingredients together and knead until the dough is stretchy and ‘silky’ (not so easy to detect if you are using a high proportion of wholemeal flour). Cover and allow to rise for an hour or so.

This dough may be moulded into loaves or rolls and baked as it is or used as a base for flavoured breads.

Refreshing the sponge

While a sponge is usually created from scratch and then used up, it is perfectly possible to refresh what you don’t use with flour and water (and no more baker’s yeast). In this case, after 2 refreshments, most of the original baker’s yeast will have disappeared (due to its dislike of acid conditions) and been replaced by ‘wild’ yeasts from the flour. Gradually, the sponge becomes a leaven – more acid, slower acting, with a fuller flavour.

From sponge to leaven

75g Leftover sponge (from Final Dough above)

75g Strong white flour

50g Stoneground wholemeal flour

100g Water

300g Total

Treat this from now on as if it were a wheat leaven starter (see pages 179-181). If you use it to make the Basic Savoury Bread Dough, you can expect it to rise more slowly than if you were using a fresh sponge. But the flavour and keeping quality will be superior.

Sun-dried Tomato and Red Onion Bread with Tamari-roasted Sunflower Seeds

This bread is a feast for the eyes and the taste buds. With a hint of sweetness from the onions and the tomato purée and a savoury crunch from the sunflower seeds, it really needs no accompaniment – except, perhaps, for a drizzle of olive oil. You can tear off hunks to mop up sauces or salad dressings, or cut slices to make the kind of sandwich in which the bread has as much flavour as the filling. Or you can toast a thick slab and top it with roasted vegetables for a brilliant bruschetta.

Tomato bread needs a bit of care. To get any tomato flavour into a bread, you need to use a purée or concentrate, but this can colour the dough a shocking and rather surgical pink. Sun-dried tomatoes have bags of flavour (and salt, by the way) but the flavour is almost too concentrated and they are very expensive. So if you simply add an affordable quantity of bits of sun-dried tomato to the dough, the flavour may not permeate the whole loaf.

My solution is to make a paste using a mixture of sun-dried tomato and tomato purée. This is swirled through the loaf so that every bite should find some. But there is another trick. A small amount of tomato purée tints the dough attractively and the spices augment its flavour in a way that deceives the palate into thinking that the tomato flavour is stronger than it really is.

Assembling the various elements of this dough is a bit of a fiddle, but the end product is worth it.

Makes 2 small loaves

Sun-dried tomato mixture

30g Sun-dried tomatoes

50g Boiling water

50g Tomato purée

130g Total

Prepare this in advance if possible. Chop the sun-dried tomatoes roughly and pour the boiling water over them. When the water has cooled, add the tomato purée and then whiz it all up in a blender, leaving a few small bits of sun-dried tomato evident in the mix. Set aside for use later. (This can be made in larger quantities and stored in the refrigerator.)

Red onions

50g Red onions

15g Olive oil

65g Total

Finely slice rings off a peeled onion until you have 50g. Heat the olive oil in a small frying-pan or saucepan and drop the onion rings in without breaking them up at all. Sweat them on a low heat, stirring occasionally. When they are slightly softened but not mushy, turn off the heat and allow to cool.

Roasted sunflower seeds

30g Sunflower seeds

5g Tamari (or soy sauce)

35g Total

Put the sunflower seeds in a dry baking tray and into a fairly hot oven (200°C). Roast them, stirring every few minutes, until the seeds have begun to take a little colour but are not burned. Remove the tray from the oven and immediately throw the tamari on to the seeds and stir them around to distribute the liquid evenly. The heat should cause the seeds to soak up and become coated in the tamari. Allow the seeds to cool before adding them to the dough.

Tomato bread dough

1g Chilli powder

1g Turmeric

20g Tomato purée

65g Red Onions (from above)

35g Roasted Sunflower Seeds (from above)

570g Basic Savoury Bread Dough (page 212)

692g Total

130g Sun-dried Tomato Mixture (from above)

Stir the spices into the tomato purée and add the sweated onions with all the oil around them and the roasted sunflower seeds. Spread the prepared Basic Savoury Bread Dough (which should be nicely relaxed after an hour or so fermenting in bulk) out on the worktop, stretching it gently until it is about 1-1.5cm thick. Scrape the tomato, onion and seed mixture out on top of it. Fold the dough over the wet mixture, press it out and fold again, continuing until the mix is fairly evenly distributed through the dough. Do this gently, trying to avoid tearing the dough and mashing it up into a dog’s dinner. A certain streakiness in the end result is fine.

If the wetness of the tomato, onion and seed mix has made the dough impossibly sticky, scrape the mess off your hands and dust with a little flour. Scrape the worktop free of any stickiness and flick a little flour over it. Then divide the dough into 2 pieces. Leave them for a couple of minutes to allow the gluten to relax.

Using either a rolling pin or your hands, stretch each piece into a rectangle about 20 x 15cm. Divide the sun-dried tomato mixture between them and spread it evenly over the surface, leaving a narrow line along one side without any mixture on. Fold this top edge over and then roll the whole thing up like a Swiss roll. Do this as tightly as you can. You will notice that, as you roll, the dough piece stretches out widthways until, when you have it all rolled up, it will be about twice as wide as it was at the beginning. Curl it into an ‘S’ shape so that it will fit into a greased small loaf tin. Don’t worry if some tomato mix has oozed out and is smeared randomly on the surface of the dough. This adds to the generally uneven and multicoloured top crust that is a feature of this bread.

Cover the loaves loosely and prove until gentle pressure with your finger meets only feeble resistance from the dough, suggesting that the yeast is no longer gassing very vigorously. Proof may be slow but the loaves should increase to about twice their original size.

Bake in a moderate oven (190°C). The tomato in the dough will cause this bread to colour quite quickly. Care should be taken not to scorch it. The loaves are quite light and will bake in 20-25 minutes.

Olive and Pumpkin Seed Bread

There are many ways of combining olives and bread. This recipe uses a similar make-up method to that used in the tomato bread above: a swirl of black olive paste spreads flavour throughout the dough. The pumpkin seeds create a bit of crunch to contrast with the olives’ soft oiliness and add significantly to the nutritional value. If you do not have any olive paste, it can easily be made by mashing a few pitted olives in a blender. If the olives have been stored in brine, drain that off and add a little olive oil to help form a succulent paste.

In the unlikely event of this bread not being wolfed down within hours of being baked, like the tomato bread, it makes a wonderful base for bruschetta.

Makes 2 small loaves

30g Pumpkin seeds

20g Olive oil

570g Basic Savoury Bread Dough (page 212)

620g Total

100g Black olive paste

12 Black or green olives (pitted)

Olive oil for brushing

Work the pumpkin seeds and olive oil into the prepared Basic Savoury Bread Dough. Divide the dough into 2 equal pieces. Scrape the worktop clean and dust with a little flour. Roll or stretch each piece of dough into a rectangle about 20 x 15cm.

Spread the black olive paste over almost all the surface of each dough piece. Roll up quite tightly like a Swiss roll. The dough piece will end up longer than it started, so tuck both ends under the middle of the loaf so that they meet underneath. This should reduce the length of the loaf by half and create a roughly rectan-gular shape. Now push six olives firmly into each loaf. Even spacing does not matter, but the olives should be pushed in hard enough to break the surface and disappear into the dough.

Place the loaves on a baking tray and brush them with olive oil. Cover and leave to prove. Bake in a moderate oven (about 190°C) for 20-25 minutes. Any olive paste that has been accidentally smeared on the exposed surface of the loaf will tend to burn more quickly than the plain crust, so be prepared to take action (for example by covering the loaves with a sheet or two of baking parchment) if your oven is a bit flashy.

Mushroom and Garlic Bread

A small quantity of dried porcini mushrooms can add great flavour to bread. In this recipe, fresh mushrooms are also used to give moisture to the crumb. Garlic, of course, goes with mushrooms like nothing else. The trick with this bread is to brush the loaf with garlic purée while it is hot, so that the crust soaks up and holds the flavour.

For the fresh mushrooms, use whatever you fancy, but note that the meatier varieties survive baking better; frilly, watery ones, like oyster mushrooms, tend to disintegrate and the extra expense will be wasted.

Makes 2 small loaves

Mushroom mix

100g Boiling water

10g Dried porcini mushrooms

50g Brown-cap mushrooms or your favourites