Today it was time for more bread baking practice. Actually a not too difficult thing to make when you don’t have much equipment. #pleasehurryupcontainershipandstopwithyourscenictourofeurope

All you really need is a bowl and a baking tray, and something to knead on, ideally with a dough scraper too. Speaking of bowls:

Check out my shiny new bowls! Woooo. I know. I’m spoiling myself. Truly. They are pretty much the exact same as the orange ones I used to have in the UK, except these ones I haven’t used in the microwave (against instructions) and caused them to explode chips of melamine…….. I have some pyrex bowls, and a big Mason Cash one, but sometimes a nice plastic bowl with a pouring spout is what you want, especially with these nice deep sides. Yep, I have thought about this a lot over the past few weeks!

Anyhow, back to the bread.

When we moved I had limited space/baggage allowance for bringing things with me, so I brought only the bare minimum (book-wise), my current cookbook availability is limited to Prashad, Leiths Baking Bible, and Rose Elliot’s New Complete Vegetarian. Yep. Pretty limited. But of course it means that I can work my way through recipes I wouldn’t necessarily, and modify them to fit whatever I have in the cupboards, rather than walk the 40 minutes to the nearest store! I was in a bread baking mood.

Spicy Carrot Bread Recipe – modified from Leiths Baking Bible

Ingredients

225g/ 8oz strong white flour

225g/ 8oz wholemeal flour

1 tsp salt

8g fast action yeast

1 tsp sugar

1 tbsp hot chilli powder

115g/ 4 oz carrot, grated (approx. 1 carrot)

225ml/ 8 floz lukewarm water

1 tbsp olive oil

1 egg, beaten

Method

Sift the flours and salt together into a large bowl, adding in any bran left in the sieve. Add the carrot, yeast, sugar, chilli powder, water, egg, and oil, and combine to form a rough dough.

Knead for 10 minutes, or 6 minutes by machine, until smooth and elastic. Place in an oiled bowl, and turn to coat in oil. Leave to prove until doubled in size.

Knock back the dough, and form into an oval loaf. Place on a greased or lined baking sheet and slash 2 or 3 times, then leave to prove again until 1 1/2 times the original size. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F

Dust with flour and bake for approximately 35 minutes, or until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the base. Cool on a wire rack.

Done!

It’s got wholemeal flour and vegetables in it, you can taste the health! I had a slice just with some butter, but I can see it going down just nicely with some soup for lunch tomorrow. If I had had some seeds, maybe some oats, then I might have piled some of those in there too, but alas…. the shop is a little bit far away! And I used chilli powder, but the original uses freshly chopped Thyme, Chives, and Dill and fresh yeast too. I can see me revisiting this bad boy in the future, especially once the spice rack improves.