the Happy Vegetarian

There’s nothing like kneading bread to relieve stress… I find it very therapeutic. It’s not hard work.. but it does take time. Inbetween certain steps of making this bread, I have gone out grocery shopping and even went to a bar to have a drink with my boyfriend. So making bread is pretty relaxed — it just takes good planning… it’s all what you make of it.

This spelt bread is super simple and approachable — meaning that if you aren’t used to eating anything other than white bread — this is a great bread to experiment with. You can also play with the proportions of the spelt and white flour to get the taste that you like.

Ingredients:
350 gr. Spelt meel
350 gr. White flour
1 package dry yeast
1.5 tbs. Sea salt
425 ml luke warm water
olive oil

Directions:

Mix together in a bowl the dry ingredients. Add the water and mix with a spoon or your hands until you have a sort-of doughy mass. About 30 seconds.

Dump the contents of the bowl on a clean and floured counter-top. Now this is the fun part: knead the bread for about 20-30 minutes. This will stretch the gluten and make it nice and elasticy giving your bread a nice texture. How to knead bread.

Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rise for an hour.

Punch the dough a couple of times and then quickly form into either one big round bread or 2 smaller ones. Don’t worry to much about making a perfect circle.

Place the dough on a lightly greased cookie sheet or pizza pan. Cover with a damp clean cloth and let it rise for another 45 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 220 degrees celcius (or 200 if you only have a crappy hot-air oven the size of a small microwave like me…) and bake your bread for about 35 minutes. Check your bread to see if it is done by knocking on the bottom of it with your knuckes… If it sounds hollow, it is done. If not — bake another 5 minutes and try again.

Let the bread cool on a rack. Store in a paper bag or bread box. If you put it in plastic, it will go and stay soft.

Tip: I find that spelt bread tastes the best once toasted. Pop a few slices in your toaster before you make whatever delicious sandwhich you were thinking of… heAvEn!

Technorati Tags: bread, vegetarian recipes, baking, spelt

Filed under: Food on June 15th, 2007