Todays adventure with bread flour!

Its a lovely sunny day in our corner of Suffolk, the girls are quietly working their way through their homeschool tasks, and there is movement elswhere in the house.

The bread from the weekend has almost gone so it is time to get some more on the go. We are trying some Wessex Mill stong white in todays baking. We have never used it before but it seems to be a nice light (soft) flour. We are coupling it with Marriage’s strong wholemeal which gives a more delicate wholewheat taste than some flours.

We have also added our usual oats and omega3 seed mix to the dough. In a departure from the norm we are using Extra Virgin Rapeseed oil instead of our usual Virgin Olive oil. We hope it will add a new note to the taste.

After adding the yeast starter and most of a mug of water, we kneed the resulting dough on a worktop floured with dark rye flour, again we think this adds a subtle nutty flavour but doesn’t affect how the bread rises.

Once kneeded until the dough is nice and stretchy, we flour it and leave it to prove (rise) on our Sunny kitchen windowsill. Flouring stops it sticking to the bowl making the next stage quicker.

When the dough has roughly doubled in size, tip out onto a flour dusted surface for the final kneeding and shaping.

Kneed the dough gently for a couple of minutes, and shape as required. We turn ours into a tin sized sausage, and flatten it towards the corners of the tin.

We line our tins with silicon sheet to prevent sticking. We have brushed the top with milk, to give it a better finish and to prevent the crust drying out while proving and put it somewhere warm to rise to its final size.

With the oven heated to 200 degrees Celsius, the loaf goes in and cooks in our oven for about 25 minutes until the top is brown, and the bottom sounds sort of hollow…