Tuesday 30 September 2008

Hairy Bakers Bread



This bread was made following the recipe here. Except I did not have any rye flour so I used wholemeal flour instead. Also I did not glaze the top with an egg and then cover with oatmeal (obviously).

It came out delicious but did have a unique flavour. It was perfect with cheese and made great sandwiches (both those with lunch meat and those with peanut butter). It did not make good bread and butter though.

I cooked these loaves in silicone bread pans on the middle shelf of my oven. Whilst the oven was preheating I placed a shallow cake tin full of water on the bottom shelf to steam up my oven. I probably could (should?) have removed this tin 5 or 10 minutes after putting the bread in but I didn't because I thought I might spill it. So I left it in until the water had all evaporated and I don't think the bread suffered much for it.

Overall, I highly recommend this recipe. It is a nice sourdoughish bread that eliminates the need to spend a week making a sourdough starter. The flavour is quite strong, so be prepared for that, but you might happen to really enjoy it. I got two good size loaves from the recipe but it cost me nearly a whole bag of flour (1kg to be exact). They were eaten before they were anywhere near close to going to stale though but the recipe could be easily halved if your family consumes less bread than mine.

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