The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [91]
2 teaspoons active dry yeast (¼ oz or 7 g)
½ cup warm water (120 ml)
6 cups stone-ground whole wheat flour (900 g)
2 ½ teaspoons salt (14 g)
2 tablespoons butter, cool (28 g)
additional water, if required
In this loaf, dates are the only sweetener, disappearing into a beautiful fawn-colored slice, soft and medium light, that keeps very well. The happy consumers can’t tell you what is in the bread, but “it’s really good!”
Simmer the dates in 1 cup water until they are soft. Use cold water to bring the total measure to 3 cups of warm datey goo, and let stand until cool enough not to harm the yeast.
Dissolve the yeast in warm water.
Mix the flour and salt, and add the liquids and yeast to make a soft dough, adjusting with more water as needed. Knead until the dates have nearly disappeared and the dough is soft, smooth, and elastic (about 20 minutes), adding the butter toward the end of the kneading period in cold bits, and working the dough until it is silky and lustrous.
Form the dough into a ball and place it smooth side up in the bowl. Cover and keep in a warm, draft-free place. After about an hour and a half, gently poke the center of the dough about ½ inch deep with your wet finger. If the hole doesn’t fill in at all or if the dough sighs, it is ready for the next step. Press flat, form into a smooth round, and let the dough rise once more as before. The second rising will take about half as much time as the first.
Press the dough flat and divide in two. Round it and let it rest until relaxed, then deflate and shape into loaves. Place in greased 8″ 4″ loaf pans and let rise in a warm, draft-free place until the dough slowly returns a gently made fingerprint. Bake in a preheated 325°F oven about an hour.
For a very good loaf that is less sweet, reduce the dates to ½ cup.
DATE-SESAME BREAD
Substitute ¼ cup sesame oil for all of the butter in this recipe, adding it with the liquids. Roll the dough on sesame seeds while shaping, incorporating the seeds into the loaf and onto the crust. Proof and bake as above. Dates are dynamite with sesame, naturally.
Spicy Currant Bread
For a pretty and impressive holiday loaf, bake this bread—the whole dough—in an angel food cake tin. Serve with soft cream cheese and ripe pears.
It is truly delicious bread, but notice that there is quite a lot of bran in it. It would make an especially good gift loaf for someone who uses bran, but not for someone accustomed to a low-fiber diet.
We like the allspice, but the bread is also good with cloves, which give it a very distinctive flavor, with a clean nip to it. Or use a blend of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, or simmer a big tablespoonful of minced fresh or crystallized ginger with the currants and apple juice: zippy and wonderful.
If you start the night before, the bran has a chance to soften and absorb water, which makes the bread soft and helps it keep very well. If you find yourself without the time to do it that way, soak the bran as long as is convenient for you. If there is not even time to let the apple juice mixture cool by itself, speed the cooling by putting the bottom of the saucepan in a tub of cold water until lukewarm. Unless you purposely speed it up, (this page), this is not a fast rising bread, but it rises high.
The night (or several hours) before: rinse the currants to remove any dirt, cover them with the apple juice in a saucepan and simmer together for five minutes. Drain the currants and measure the juice: add water to restore the measure to 2 cups. Stir in the bran and spice. Cover and set aside in a cool place. Note that if you soak the bran overnight, it takes up more liquid than if you soak it a shorter time. The dough will therefore require more added water because the bran won’t give that liquid back to the dough.
Dissolve the yeast in the warm water.
Stir the oil and molasses into the apple juice. Mix the flour and salt in a bowl; make a well and add the yeast and the apple juice mixture. Mix thoroughly and knead to make a supple dough, adjusting the liquid