Yesterday I got up, ate some of the dreaded porridge with some lingon berries to liven it up, and set to work on making bread.
First up was my favourite wheat bread recipe - dense, filled with delicious seeds and carrots. But before adding these, I split the dough in half, put the to-be-seeded bread part aside and added more flour to what was left, to make a smooth white bread dough. This, after rising, was turned into Panipopo - Samoan buns that I loved as a child (note that I followed the linked recipe only for the sauce, which is vegan). There were a few bakeries in Newtown where you could get aluminium trays of the things, delicious browned buns with a thick coconut sauce soaked into the bottom. Delicious. So dessert (morning tea? I don't know, what do you call the sweet things you eat after brunch?) was sorted. (I also sneakily saved some dough for frying and turning into toutons, delicious things that my mother keeps writing to me about from her RSL in Newfoundland. Not having molasses on hand, we ate them with fig jam.)
The seed bread we ate in thick slices with scrambled tofu - fried with garlic, onion, cumin, paprika, thyme, green olives, broccoli, and a small sprinkling of nutritional yeast. So, so good.
So that was a lot of links there, but here is my favourite bread recipe, which started the whole thing.
Wholemeal Bread
(you can use white flour too. If you want to omit the seeds and grains, as I did for the toutons and panipopo, then just add some more flour a little bit at a time till a smooth dough forms).
3 cups white flour
2 cups wholemeal flour
2 cups mixed seeds/grains (my favourite combo is rolled oats with linseeds and sunflower seeds)
1 1/2 Tbsp sugar
3 tsp salt
1/4 cup oil
1 grated carrot (optional)
Mix the above together in a large bowl.
The heat the following liquids to finger warmth:
1 1/4 cup water
1 1/4 cup plant-based milk (or more water)
Dissolve 50g fresh yeast in the liquid.
Add the liquid to the dry ingredients and knead on a clean, lightly floured surface for 5-10 minutes until smooth, adding flour as necessary. Place in a greased bowl, flip dough over once (so that it is greased all round), leave in a warm place until doubled in bulk.
Knead lightly and shape, and leave again until doubled (I don't always do this). Bake at 200 degrees Celsius for 30 mins until golden.
