Using your loaf

Baking is a skill which I have been honing for some time now.  I really have no interest in creating anything sweet (you might have noticed a complete absence of anything sugary in my blog?).  Making bread is something I like to try my hand at with limited and sporadic success, but there is something compelling and rewarding to create a tasty loaf from a few, key ingredients.  Flatbreads are, in my opinion easy to master, indeed, any bread that doesn't require leavening or cooking in an oven (as opposed, to a hot, flat pan) seems to be rather manageable.

Today I had an urge to make a loaf, and after some probing through a couple of cookbooks I settled on a Moroccan rustic bread from my Moro cookbook.  I followed the recipe, but found that it required some tweaking - with the ingredients and methodology.  Baking, although a fine art, seems to hit the middle ground between alchemy and science - not really proliferating enough into either craft to firmly establish its cooking roots.  

Here's what I did:

Rustic Moroccan Bread

•    Add 3/4 of a teaspoon of yeast to 20ml of tepid water.  Allow to mix together for 2 minutes.
•  Add a good few squeezes of honey to the warm water.  Stir.
•  Warm 100ml of milk in a pan.
•  Mix 200ml of wholemeal flour with 100ml of plain, strong bread flour.
•  Make a well in the middle of flour, add the water/honey/yeast.  Add 1 teaspoon of fine sea salt.
•  Using your index finger like a dough hook start to mix the liquids in.
•  Slowly add the warm milk until you have a tacky, but not wet dough.
•  Flour a surface.  Kneed the dough for 5 minutes until it becomes soft and elastic.
•  Split the dough into 2 balls.  Roll each ball into a disc, 1cm thick and 15cm wide.
•  Oil 2 baking trays.  Place each disc onto a baking tray.
•  Cover the trays with a tea-towel each.  Leave in a warm place for 4 hours until they have roughly swelled to double size.
•  Preheat the a fan assisted oven to 200C.
•  Put the two trays in.  Bake for roughly 10 to maximum 15 minutes.  The bread should resemble the photo above.