After the last post on breakfast I thought I'll let you in on what we do for lunch. I couldn't skip lunch without fainting! Occasionally lunch conists of left-overs from dinner, but more often we take sandwiches to the land made with homemade bread and, well I quite like cheese or salami or ham etc. but these things increasingly become rare luxeries for us so we make our own sandwich fillings such as a bean and olive paté or hazelnut butter. I'll write a separate entry on how to do these, but I know of some people who find it difficult to make yeast doughs. I have never quite understood where the difficulty lies, but for those who do, here a step-by-step guide to our basic bread recipe:
For 1 loaf weigh 500g wholemeal wheat flour. We get ours directly from a mill. Mix in a teaspoon of salt. Form a crater in the centre of the flour, crumble in a 25g cube of fresh yeast and a teaspoon of sugar.
Measure about 350 ml warm water. Pour some of the water into the centre over the yeast and sugar and stir into a thinnish paste with the back of your wooden spoon.
Cover the centre paste with some of the flour from the outside of the crater, cover up with a clean tea towel and leave in a warm place for 1/2 an hour
This is what it should look like then:
Add the rest of the water
and mix with a wooden spoon
giving it a good beating, making sure it's all nice and evenly moist. If too dry add a wee bit more water. Cover again with the tea towel and leave for at least one hour.
It should have more or less doubled in size
Fill into a lightly greased tin flatten and squeeze into shape with the back of a wet wooden spoon
and place in a cold oven, putting the temperature to about 175C. Bake for about 50 minutes and...
Simple as that! There are of course variations to the theme, you can use different types of flour, you can add herbs, olives, dried tomatoes, olive oil before the second rising stage, but this is the basic recipe which we do every other day or so.In other news, these are the pretty flowers of the litchi tomato
and this is some spilanthe. Works wonders against toothaches. You chew one leaf and makes the whole side of your mouth go numb.
7 comments:
Now that looks like a very fine loaf of bread with or without the cheese and salami. Your other spread of bean and olive pate sounds good too. Sometimes we make a sandwich with lots of salad greens, onions, tomato, pickles, and pretend that there is meat and cheese in it...still pretty good.:)
If you ever get a chance to try Silke's "Perfect German Bread" I highly recommend it, it is the only bread we make anymore. - http://silkepowers.blogspot.com/2010/05/perfect-german-bread.html
So that is one heck of a thorny tomato you have there, when the fruit is ripe you will have to be very careful picking it.:) Your spilanthes looks to be growing well too.
I love your top photo, nice looking pumpkin...soup or pie?
Mr.H, I just love the simplicity of this bread. We usually make two loaves at a time, to save energy and time, but the current batch of flour has a problem of going off earlier.
I love the looks of the litchi tomato and it's not as densely bushy as I had feared. The taste of that spilanthes is just most surprising. and that pumpkin... I'm sure I could have got it 45 kg if I had pampered it. As it is it's quite heavy enough for me. No idea what I.m going to do with it. I already have one of those in my larder as well as a huge squash. Freezer is pretty full, so no room for gallons of soup.
That's a really simple bread. I like the sponge at the beginning.
Maybe I'll try it -- I have a recipe I turn to for everyday, but it's more complex.
Stefani, what sponge? You don't mean the sunflower head? The great thing about the bread is also that it always turns out fine, even if I use cold water or the temperatures in our kitchen are low or we forget about any of the timings. Yesterday for instance we accidentally baked for 20 minutes longer. The only time I've not known it to turn out was when we forgot to add yeast.
The bread looks lovely! I've never made a loaf, but I might just try this.
I love that sunflower face! And yes, home-baked bread SMELLS so good, doesn`t it? Shall I send you a salami to go with it? For all your work you must eat well! Essen und trinken hält Leib und Seele zusammen!
Jan, you should try it, it's so simple and unlike the bread I can buy here, it normally stays edible for a few days.
Angela, thanks for the offer of a salami. You could always bring one along if you come and visit. We do eat well, even though we sometimes struggle to get enough calories down.
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