Recipes for Bread

I am one of those pathetic people who is allergic to lots of things... not really allergic enough to get up tight about but allergic nonetheless. High on the list of loved but banned foods is bread, or at least until recently. For year's I've been able to go home to the Sweary nest and eat truckloads of Mrs Sweary senior's home made bread but the minute I buy any round here Captain Acid comes to call and I end up chugging Rennies like there's no ...
...it was the chemicals they put in modern bread. I mean, what's in bread? Well I'd guess wheat, water, yeast salt and maybe vegatable oil right?

Nope. A reasonably decent brand of white bread also contains:

Soya Flour
Preservative
Calcium Propionate (added to inhibit mould growth)
Emulsifiers, E481, E471, E472e or Sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate, Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids
and Mono- ... more

I am one of those pathetic people who is allergic to lots of things... not really allergic enough to get up tight about but allergic nonetheless. High on the list of loved but banned foods is bread, or at least until recently. For year's I've been able to go home to the Sweary nest and eat truckloads of Mrs Sweary senior's home made bread but the minute I buy any round here Captain Acid comes to call and I end up chugging Rennies like there's no tomorrow.

Well, first of all I'd assumed it was the chemicals they put in modern bread. I mean, what's in bread? Well I'd guess wheat, water, yeast salt and maybe vegatable oil right?

Nope. A reasonably decent brand of white bread also contains:

Soya Flour
Preservative
Calcium Propionate (added to inhibit mould growth)
Emulsifiers, E481, E471, E472e or Sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate, Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids
and Mono- and diacetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (blimey! Sounds like they start the digestion process for you) respectively, or to put it another way, an emulsifier, which, I think, is something that helps keep things mixed together that don't naturally want to be blended ... so presumably those are in lieu of kneading or stirring it with a spoon....
Flour treatment agents they're in the flour you buy, too otherwise you'd get ergot and your fingers and toes would fall off (I kid you not, I learned all about it in medieval history, eating bread was pretty dangerous in those days)
Ascorbic Acid (oh, it's fortified with Vitamin C then)
and E920 a non essential amino acid. An antitoxidant which also makes your hair grow and boosts your immune system.

So ok, they're probably less scary than their names but I'm a bit leery about eathing this kind of thing.

So a few months ago, while discussing my predicament with a man who is such an obsessive, and chemically well informed chef that, get this, he bought some dextrose tablets from a garage and boiled them dry to because he couldn't find anywhere to buy the right type of glucose for a dish he was making (yikes). ... Where was I? Ah... yes, well talking to him about how I could eat bread at Mother and Father Sweary's and not anywhere else we worked out that it was probably down to whether or not they used fresh yeast.

Sure enough, since then I've started making my own bread, with fresh yeast and I've had no further problems. It also tastes nicer, so because I love this bread and have now become addicted, I thought I'd share the recipe.

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, usually for about 8 pence an ounce. The idea of buying anything for ludicrously small amounts of money like 8 pence is delightfully old fashioned to me. 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.

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 or, 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.

I put a different crunchy thing in each of the three loaves; one with sunflower seeds, one with Walnut pieces and one with pumpkin seeds. How much to use is anybody's guess I cup my hands and Mr Sweary 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 Mother Sweary 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 - as a small child I used to "help" mainly by eating the raw dough until she started handing me a small piece so I could make my own mini roll to cook and eat later. Right where was I? Oh yes.

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. Mother Sweary 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 in um... well a special pod in the airing cupboard in my case... 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 don't buy one of those farty pottery ones... I've got one and I end up with three quarters of the loaf stuck in the bleedin' thing every time!

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 the Sweary household 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, if only to fortify your husband with the strength to see the kitchen in the state it's in and you to undertake the three hours it will take to swab down the entire place and clear up.

There you go. If anyone gives it a try, do pop into my guest book and let me know how you get on!

Thank you for reading.

Sweary 

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