bread loaves

No more sliced white bread! Kim’s been baking bread twice a week. She found a good recipe from Delia Online that she tweaked and perfected. I’m not much of a baker but I thought I’d give it a try today. It worked out!

The nice thing about a good white loaf recipe is that you can use it as a base to make different kinds of bread. Kim worked out that you can add a cup of granary or wheat flour and it gives the bread a great flavour. She also threw in some seeds and rolled oats. Ummmm.

Kim increased the size of the recipe to better fill out our loaf tins. The altered Delia recipe is as follows:

  • 5 cups strong white bread flour
  • 1 cup wheat or granary flour
  • 1 level tablespoon salt
  • 1 1/4 teaspoon of dry yeast
  • 1 1/4 teaspoon sugar
  • 510 ml hand-hot water
  • 3-4 tablespoon mixed seeds and 3-4 tablespoon rolled oats

Follow Delia’s by-hand recipe except for the following changes:

  • Combine the yeast with some of the warm water in a small bowl and leave it to sit while the flour warms in the oven.
  • Use a ceramic serving bowl so that the dough doesn’t take on a metallic taste. But make sure you cover the dough loosely with the plastic wrap so that it can rise above the rim of the bowl.
  • Rise the dough in a warm place.
  • Don’t bother with the polythene bags once the dough is in the tins, just use the oiled plastic wrap from the first rising time
  • Start the oven heating about 1/2 hour before you need to put the bread in the oven.
  • Check the bread after 30 minutes of baking. Ours was done by then, but oven temperatures vary.
  • We found that the bottom and sides of the bread are browned and crusty enough without turning the bread upside down and baking for an additional 5 minutes.

We haven’t tried it yet but I bet you could use all white flour and add in all kinds of stuff like herbs or sliced olives instead of the seeds and oats.