Bread of Heaven

Home-made bread is always irresistible, but today’s was positively heavenly, even if I do say so myself. Smoky baguettines, fresh from the oven, to accompany the griddled chicken and salad for dinner.

During a quick foray to Waitrose a few days ago, my phone rang and as I stopped to answer it, I found myself looking at an interesting array of flours. In addition to an impressive variety of ordinary and organic, white and wholemeal wheat flours, there were also Buckwheat, Gram (chickpea), Barleycorn, Kamut (ancient Egyptian tpe of wheat) and Spelt (white and wholemeal ). The one that really caught my eye and which I absolutely couldn’t resist, was the Oak Smoked Stoneground Malted flour. Yup, the oak smoked flour would have to be sampled and after a few days of itching for the opportunity, today was the day.

I do like to cook, but have neither the time nor the inclination to spend the whole day at it or have to work too hard. Making bread manually falls into both the time-consuming  and hard work categories, so I’ve had a bread machine for some years now. It allows us to wake up to the smell of freshly baked bread every now and again (altogether too tasty to do too often though) with a fairly minimal amount of effort on my part.

So, back to dinner. The bread machine was fed early in the afternoon (recipe below) and did all the hard work of mixing and kneading with the dough kept warm while left to rise. Easy! Later, I cut the dough into four pieces and shaped the baguettines, leaving them to rise again for half an hour. 15 minutes in the oven (220C) and we were in business. Needless to say, the results were wolfed down enthusiastically by all, still warm and liberally buttered. The subtly smoky, malty flavour can only be described as yumptious and you can bet I’ll be making these again very soon.

My basic light wholemeal recipe:

11 fl.oz water
1.5 tbsp olive oil
10oz oak smoked malted flour (or other strong wholemeal flour)
6oz strong white flour
1tbsp soft brown sugar
1.5tbsp skimmed milk powder
1tsp salt
1pk (or 1tbsp) bread yeast

Enjoy!