Tag Archives: Dan Lepard

Dan Lepard’s Wholemeal Bread

This week is the wholemeal bread challenge from Short & Sweet. You can find Felicity Cloake’s version of this recipe here on the Guardian website in which she explored different ways of approaching the wholemeal loaf and ended up liking Dan’s the best.

I made two different loaves this time; Dan helpfully writes up the recipe saying it is a starting point to finding the loaf you are happy with.

Once you have had a go at the basic one, you can move on to exciting variations like ale and spelt and unleash the creativity of your inner bread baker! I know you have one in you or you wouldn’t be reading this!

I can eat 100% rye with great delight but something about too much wheat bran gives me indigestion. English stoneground wheat is always full of huge flakes of bran and I would rather have a finer milled German style whole wheat, though it seems almost impossible to buy here in the UK. Presumably any whole grain flour will give you dietary fibre, so you could use spelt, kamut, einkorn or emmer all possibilities for getting that fibre content into your daily bread.

I went for a 50/50 blend of wholemeal and white in one of these loaves and of 50/50 kamut and white in the other. These breads don’t use milk, but they do use butter which improves the keeping qualities of the bread and is very traditional in English loaves.

I used regular sugar in both as per the recipe and for my money that was a mistake as I have got used to using spraymalt to sweeten Brian’s white breads and I should have used that in these. The taste of regular sugar is too much for me in bread like this, though I imagine it is there to mask the slight bitterness of the wholemeal. I wonder if apple concentrate would be nice? It’s all about personal taste, so do vary recipes to suit your palate and experiment with sweeteners if you use them. Spraymalt is particularly nice, comes in lots of varieties, fascinating to read about it on the Muntons site. It is fairly easy to get hold of if you have a local brewing shop or from online beer making sites and I think Bakery Bits sells it too.

The contrast in the doughs was quite marked. Dough 1 was sedate and quiet, whereas Dough 2 with the kamut was soft and bouncy and increased quickly in volume. Despite being a high protein flour, its gluten is very different from that of regular wheat and the surface of the dough pocketed and opened up quite a lot, giving a rugged rustic quality to the finished loaf. I couldn’t get it to form a smooth sheath at all on shaping. It also sprang dramatically in the oven unlike the wheat one which rose a bit but didn’t do anything very exciting.

Both loaves make light sweet bread, easy for toast, very English in style. Not quite my thing but I am sure the sort of bread that pleases many people. it’s a very easy recipe for beginners to follow too, watch the timings, handle the dough gently, if you are not sure about shaping it use a tin which you butter and dust with flour and you’ll be fine.

For a forthright discussion about the role of fibre in our diets and the ramifications for children’s health in particular read Lou’s post on Please Do Not Feed the Animals.

For the round up post for last week’s sweetie extravaganza and some fascinating links click here and have a peek at the other round ups for the Shortandtweet group. Join in any time you feel like it, all welcome!

Edit:

Just thought I’d add a few links to other bread posts which incorporate wholemeal flour but are very different from this one….

For a sourdough bread using mainly wholemeal have a look at this old post of mine from the Mellow Bakers project with the grand name of Miche Pointe-a-Calliere. Another very good bread is this Rustic Bread which uses a mix of flours, including wholemeal to produce a very pleasing loaf and in which I incorporated some left yoghurt whey.

Another very popular bread that uses wholemeal flour is Dan Lepard’s Golspie Loaf, one of the star breads in the Hand Made Loaf. This is one I make regularly for my neighbour who is a big wholemeal fan. There is a picture of it in this little slideshow post.

Cardamom Peanut Brittle and Sesame Ginger Halva – Dan Lepard

I sidled up to this week’s short and tweet choices uncertain as to whether I was really going to do them. I haven’t made many sweets. I had a go at making marshmallows last year, but they weren’t that good. I have quite strong memories of disastrous fudge adventures when I was a child, the sort where you end up drinking the fudge, but basically all that boiling sugar gives me the heebie jeebies. I asked people what pans they used, lurked a bit on Twitter, hoping to see someone else do it and glean the secrets that way. But it was today or not at all this week. So here they are!

The great thing about making both these recipes is that they were really quick to do: a pleasant change from bread baking!

I showed the recipes to Brian and he offered to put all the stuff out if I walked the dogs and he offered to help. When I got back there was this very neat mise en place waiting for me. I also really wouldn’t do this sort of stuff without someone there next to me to hold my burnt hand under the cold water tap. I am a coward I admit it.

But now, I’m smirking and have had a bit too much sugar to eat, as we made both of these and they not only worked but they taste fabulous!

The cardamom peanut brittle was the most exciting to make, anxiously watching the sugar thermometer climb up to the right temperatures and then the whoosh of the foaming toffee which we managed to catch just as a few peanuts began to burn. Evidence Matters tweeted encouraging notes all the way through, I felt like she was really in the kitchen with me, and helpfully suggested cutting it with a pizza wheel just at the right moment.

Brian beamed with happiness and said that he hadn’t had home made peanut brittle since his Gran (remember her?) made it for his Dad. The salt and the cardamom stop it from being sickly sweet and a small piece definitely makes you want more. I might make it again with almonds or pistachios and smash it up for praline, but not today. I”m sugared out.

Having made the peanut brittle we moved on to the sesame ginger halva. Now I’m never too sure about halva, it has that strange crystalline texture, almost sharp and it can be very oily. But I figured that if I didn’t try it this time, I probably never would. It was simpler than the brittle, not so dramatic, and you don’t have to heat the sugar syrup so high.

I found that it is much, much nicer than the stuff you buy, more fudgey and less sharp and scratchy to eat. Though I did read something on the net that said the crystalline texture develops after a couple of days….

If you decide to have a go at this, I would say you definitely need a sugar thermometer. I think they are a good investment if you ever want to make jams or marmalade or any of these things. The quantities in both recipes are not huge, so don’t use too big a pan. I could have done with a smaller pan as I ended up tipping my pan up on edge slightly in order to get the thermometer bulb in the syrup.

For the halva we used a fresh jar of Cypressa tahini. We didn’t stir the oil that sits on the top back in, but took the more solid stuff out and used that. We added it to the sugar syrup just before it got to temperature and then beat it like mad for a short time and it changed state quite quickly becoming sort of creamy and grainy, before putting it into the foil. We cut it when it had cooled down.It has a fudgey texture today, I don’t know if it will change over time. It will be interesting to see if it does. In terms of the colour of the final product, it might look a bit darker than the one in the book but mine lightened up as it cooled and firmed up.

That was such fun, if a bit excessive on the sugar side. And it’s so interesting to have a go at doing something that you would never think of trying usually. If you want to join in and have a little tweety support while you do, sign up to Twitter and tweet to @Evidencematters using the hashtag #shortandsweet in your tweet and we can all support each other over there. Or if you just want to join in without tweeting, leave a comment on Evidence Matters tumblr blog with a link to a photo or whatever you want to share and you can be included that way too.

The recipes are in Dan Lepard’s new book Short and Sweet, one for your Christmas list if you haven’t already got your copy. It’s a friendly, intelligently written baking book and I thoroughly recommend it and the price has gone down today too!

Fenland Celery and Onion Bread

At the moment we are lucky to be able to get my favourite sort of celery, the old fashioned varieties which are mainly grown in East Anglia with its deep fertile peat soil.

It is a labour intensive business to grow as it has to be earthed up in order to blanch the stems and to develop the distinctive flavour that makes it special. It has a sweet nutty, almost almondy taste and it is very good. It’s around now, so keep an eye out for it if you are in the UK. This is my attempt to use seasonal food in my bread for this month anyway! Continue reading →