Free Form Bread with Seeded White Organic Flour
A guest blog by Monica Shaw of Smarter Fitter (©Monica Shaw)
I’ve written about this recipe before (see Malted Grain Loaf: best loaf ever?) but thought it was worth another moment in the spotlight after a recent success adapting it to use Shipton Mill’s new Seeded White Organic Flour.
I made this bread for my Airbnb guests last weekend, who arrived just as the bread was coming out of the oven (my most recent prototypical Country Living moment). I served this bread as part of my Airbnb “complimentary help-yourself breakfast”, along with butter, jam, muesli, milk, fresh fruit, coffee and tea.
I am always fascinated by what my guests choose to eat for breakfast, and for these folks, breakfast seemed to consist of nearly an entire loaf of bread, Keens cheddar and marrow chutney. And they had the same breakfast for the remainder of their three-night stay. I needed to make more bread!
What I love about this recipe is that it works really well for free-form loaves (vs tin loaves). It is also a yeasted bread so I can make a loaf within a few hours, making it a good contender for morning baking and lunchtime eating.
This particular recipe seems well suited for heartier flours (the original uses malted grain flour, and the Shipton Mill’s Seeded White Organic Flour is full of, well, seeds – sunflower, linseed, millet, poppy and pumpkin seeds). The dough is denser than the no knead bread I’m used to, but I suppose that’s why it works for free form baking.
I’d like to try this recipe with pure white or pure wholemeal flour and see if I have the same success. This will no doubt require adjusting the recipe somewhat to adapt to the different hydration levels that such flours require – such are the lessons in baking. And speaking of bread baking lessons, I think the basic one is this: most bread recipes are basically the same, it’s just a matter of adjusting the flour and water ratio to get a dough that “feels right”. And the only way to learn that is through practice. Time to make more bread…
Recipe for Free Form Multigrain Bread
