Back To My Roots- Not That I Ever Left- Wheaten Bread

Hi!

Continuing on from my last post- this wheaten bread is for the dinner party too. This is Irish Wheaten Bread in all its delicious glory.

You can't beat that wheaten bread taste, especially with the unbeatable ingredients we get here in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I don't think I ever really appreciated how good the ingredients were until I started baking myself. This bread is beautiful in every way. The taste, the smell, the texture.

I'm not going to lie, the first time I made it, it was a disaster. I treated it like white bread, as I hadn't made it before, or for a very long time and added too much flour and kneaded it for too long. This made it stiff and completely unlike what it should have been.

This time, I made it the way it was meant to be made. I used the techniques and and processes and together we will make beautiful bread.

The first thing you want to do, and I didn't because I just decided to make it at the last minute- didn't really plan it. See you never know what you are going to do or where life will take you. Anyway, grease the bread tin. To do this butter the loaf tin, this is a small, rectangular tin and then flour it with the same flour you are using in the bread. Tap on the tin edges to get the flour to move from side to side to enable it to coat the entire tin.

Preheat the oven as well to 200C in fan oven, so that would be 220C convection and gas mark 7. This will make the kitchen all toasty and slightly humid, good for bread making.

There, that's the first thing done! :) Fun, huh?

Now you want to weigh out all the ingredients into one large bowl. The ingredients you'll need are (This is from 'About Food') ;

For the Wheaten Bread;

- 500g Wholegrain Wheat Flour- I used Strong Wholemeal

- 1 1/2 tsp of salt- I did a twist

- 1 1/2 tsp Bicarbonate Of Soda

- 500ml Buttermilk

- This isn't on the recipe, but I added a little maple syrup, just a drop

Now the interesting thing is, I didn't have any buttermilk, so I made some. Cool, huh? I googled this and did you know that if you don't have or can't find buttermilk, you can take normal milk and add Greek Yogurt? I didn't, I knew you could make it, but didn't know what with.

I didn't have this either. So I googled further and found a Nigella recipe. If you add Lemon juice to milk, it sours it. I did have lemons, from the zest I used in the last blog. So I did this, and it soured alright! It also smelled like buttermilk.

The grainy look on the rim is the milk souring

Now you know how to make buttermilk. Now for the wheaten bread. You want to put the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a large bowl and combine, use a large wooden spoon. Then slowly add the first half of the milk. Then mix until combined.

Then the other half and this will create a loose and sticky dough.

Now you want to put this into your greased loaf tin and score the top with a floured knife. This allows the heat and moisture to come out when baking.

Then pop this into the oven and bake for around 35 minutes or until cooked through. The trick to knowing this is taking the bread out of the oven, slipping it out of the tin and tapping on the base. If it sounds hollow then that means it is done.

Again to ensure it was cooked I wrapped it in tin foil for a wee while to ensure it cooked through as sometimes it can be hard to tell with bread.

This is the bread done! Yum yum in my tum tum! With some good Irish butter it'll go down a treat!

Thanks again and I hope you have enjoyed my dinner party dishes. Not so fancy, but i'm not fancy.