My favourite meal of the day is breakfast, I could never do without, sometimes I go to bed thinking of the next day’s breakfast, I always find the thought of breakfast very soothing and calming…no matter what happened that day, I’ll have a lovely meal in the morning!
The item that HAS to be on my breakfast table is bread, along with black tea (with sugar, no milk), sounds all rather boring, but if you make your own bread things get interesting.
The recipe is for a wholemeal bread with walnuts, so from a nutritional point of view this bread is really good for you!
Baking your bread is easy, it just take a bit of elbow grease (think of it as a de-stresser, visualize someone you’d like to punch while you knead the dough).
If you have a bread machine, it’s terribly easy, I use mine but I then bake the bread in the oven, because I find the machine dries the bread too much when baking it.
The photo is not good, I know…but this bread is eaten so quickly I never have the peace to take a decent picture!
WALNUT BREAD
400 gr of wholemeal flour (stoneground and organic if possible)
1 teaspoon of fine sea salt
3 tablespoons of tasteless oil (you can use walnut oil, or -more cheaply- rapeseed)
about half a cup of walnut pieces
1 sachet dried baker’s yeast
250 ml of warm water
1 teaspoon of sugar (or agave nectar)
Put the salt in the bread machine, then the flour and the oil.
Put the sugar in the water and stir to dissolve don’t use hot water, it will kill the yeast.
Put the yeast and half the water in, don’t put all the water because each loaf is different and you need to keep an eye on how much water you add, you don’t want a sticky mess!
When the machine starts give it some time to work the ingredients and add enough water to make a nice clean ball, soft but not sticky.
Add the walnuts about 20 minutes before it finishes kneading, if you add them too early the pieces will almost disappear!
Let the machine do the hard work and wait for it to finish.
If you are kneading by hand, put salt, flour and oil in a bowl, stir the sugar in the water and put the yeast (the water has to be barely warm, almost room temperature otherwise it will kill the yeast).
Make a well in the flour and start adding water, mixing with a spoon. Keep adding and mixing until it’s too coarse to mix with a spoon and transfer on a floured surface to knead with your hands.
Knead vigorously for at least 20 minutes pushing the dough away with the lower part of your palm, putting it back together and then repeating.
When you have a ball of soft and elastic dough, add the walnuts and incorporate them.
Put the dough in a bowl and cover with clingfilm or with a damp towel and leave to rise in a warm place until it’s doubled in size (this might take 1 to 2 hours, depending on the temperature of the room, but don’t be tempted to put it in the oven, it will ruin your bread).
Once the dough is doubled, take it out of the bowl, knead it for one minute to knock some air out, turn the oven on at 180 degrees.
Put the dough in the baking tin, make some slashes across, cover it with a towel and put it in the hot oven after 5-7 minutes.
Bake for about 30-35 minutes until it’s golden on top and when patted on the bottom sounds hollow.
Leave to cool on a rack.
