In case you haven't read the Page about Bread, I’d better introduce you to the oddly-called Vital Wheat Gluten (vwg). This works as a bread improver, particularly with wholemeal flour. Apparently the insistence on kneading one’s bread for a long time is to ‛activate’ the gluten, which takes longer in whole flour than in white. If you add 1 tbsp vwg to 1 cup flour, it makes the dough more ‛stretchy’. I have vwg on board for making seitan, which we’ll explore a lot more thoroughly on another page, so have started adding it. It does make a difference, but it is far from necessary. Thus in the following recipes it will be shown as optional.
It’s worth noting, before going any further, that if the ambient temperature is over 25°C (about 80°F), you can use water straight from the tap – or the sea. This helps reduce one possible cause for your bread not rising properly.
Incidentally, flour varies in how much water it will absorb, so you can’t really make any hard and fast rules here. However, I’ve never found that the amount in this recipe is too much. It’s really quite messy and unpleasant to have to add more water to the dough once you’ve started mixing it by hand.
I find the best way of ensuring the water is the correct temperature, when the ambient temperature is below 20°C, is to boil ¾ cup water and mix it with ¾ from the pump
- Put half the flour (and the vwg) into a large bowl. Add the salt (sweetener) and dried yeast and mix. Add the water and mix everything together into a smooth batter.
Gradually add the rest of the flour, half a cup at a time. Before it’s all incorporated, you’ll have to abandon your mixing tool and get down to it with your hands. After a few minutes, you should have pleasantly yielding dough that isn’t particularly sticky. If it is, or you can’t roll it easily into a ball, add a little more flour.
Once it comes away cleanly from the side of the bowl, gather it all together in a ball, flatten it out and roll it into a sausage. Put this into a well-greased (or oiled) ‘2 lb’ loaf tin. Flatten it down and leave it to rise until it’s about 25 mm (1 inch) above the sides of the tin.
The dough is susceptible to cool draughts and I reckon that the best way to protect it’s to put your mixing bowl over the dough, if it’s large enough or put it in the oven. (I used to put it in a large, polythene bag: if you have one, it might be worth saving just for this purpose.) When your loaf has risen above the tin and is nicely domed, light the oven and cook it at a Moderate heat for about 40 minutes.
Shake the loaf out of the tin and rap the base with your knuckles. It should (as they say in all the best cookery books) sound hollow. Equally to the point, it should be an appetisingly brown colour and smell delicious.
Put it on a wire rack and try to leave it for at least 20 minutes before slicing it: warm bread doesn’t cut very easily. Usually, however, at least the crust gets cut off not long after it comes out of the oven!
Additional tips: if the bread doesn’t rise it’s usually for one of two reasons. Either the yeast has gone stale or the water was too hot. Made with cold water, bread will eventually rise, but if the water is too hot you will kill the yeast, so err on the side of coolth.
In cold places, put your loaf in a sunny spot or cuddle it up with a hot water bottle. Alternatively, put it in the oven and use a small oil lamp or pilot light to keep it warm.
Use 1½ cups seawater instead of fresh water and salt. This will not make the loaf too salty.
If you have plenty of time, you can get an even better-textured loaf by mixing in two-thirds of the flour and then leaving the batter to rise for about 20 minutes. This is also a good way of ensuring that your yeast is OK, if you have any doubts. (If the batter doesn’t start to rise, add new yeast.)
‛2 lb’ loaf tins vary in size. If your loaf seems a little undersized, use 4 cups flour (4 tbsp vwg) and 2 cups of water. The other ingredients can stay the same.
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