Healthy bread
Description
Baking is simple and quick. This healthy bread takes quite a long time to make, but the result is worth it, because you won’t find bread like this in an ordinary bakery. It’s not hard to make at all if you follow the step-by-step recipe. Use the recipe as a base for your own loaf, swapping the types of flour for other wholesome ones while keeping the overall proportions the same. Serve warm or cooled. Perfect with tea.
Instructions
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Step 1
Prepare the ingredients. By the time you knead the dough, the sponge should be ready—it should be started 8–10 hours ahead.
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Step 2
8–10 hours before you begin mixing the dough, prepare the ingredients for the preferment: 60 ml room-temperature water, 30 g wheat sourdough starter, 30 g whole wheat flour, 30 g first-grade wheat flour.
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Step 3
Stir the starter into the water.
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Step 4
Pour in the flour and mix into a homogeneous mass. Cover the sponge with plastic wrap and place in a warm spot.
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Step 5
After 8–10 hours the starter is ready: it has many bubbles, a characteristic slightly sour smell, and has increased in volume.
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Step 6
Pour the mixture of seeds into a dry frying pan and toast them lightly.
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Step 7
Pour 20 ml of boiling water into rye fermented malt, then cool to room temperature.
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Step 8
Pour 230 ml of water into a dough-mixing bowl, add the preferment and mix; pour in the scalded rye malt and sprinkle in the flour. Mix all the ingredients together and leave for 30 minutes for autolyse. After 30 minutes, add salt. Knead the dough.
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Step 9
After kneading the dough, fold the seed mixture into the dough.
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Step 10
Cover the dough with plastic wrap and place it in a warm spot to rise for 3–4 hours. Every hour, fold the dough using the stretch-and-fold method.
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Step 11
Place the finished dough on a work surface lightly dusted with flour, shape it into a round, and leave for 30 minutes.
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Step 12
After 30 minutes, shape the bread however you like. For example, like this: stretch the dough into a sheet with your hands and fold the edges of the dough toward the center.
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Step 13
Make one more roll, as if rolling it into a roulade, and pinch the edges tightly to seal.
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Step 14
Place the shaped dough in a proofing basket; if you don’t have a special basket, you can put it in a bowl lined with cloth that has been well dusted with flour. Fold the cloth over the dough to cover it. Let it proof for 1–1.5 hours.
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Step 15
When proofing is finished, preheat the oven to 250 degrees. Put the loaf on the baking tray with the seam side down. Score the loaf with a sharp knife in any pattern you like.
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Step 16
Bake the bread for the first 10 minutes at 250 degrees, then reduce the temperature to 180 degrees and bake for another 40 minutes until done. Cool the baked bread to room temperature on a wire rack.
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Step 17
Delicious, fragrant, and very wholesome bread is ready — impossible to resist!