August: Three Malts & White Bread Loaf

I find that this recipe for Three Malts and White Bread Loaf makes a consistently good loaf of bread. It takes about 2½ hours from beginning to end so not bad and you can be doing other stuff during the proving and cooking times. It’s important to have good quality bread flour (we buy ours from Shipton Mill) and good quality yeast. You will need to keep the kitchen reasonably warm or have a warm place to work with the dough once it’s gone through the first proving. Also, be very gentle with the dough after the 2^nd proving as you don’t want to knock the air out of it! It’s very fragile at this stage.

Timings

Prep time: 15 minutes
1st proving: 45 minutes
Knead: 5 minutes max.
2nd proving: 1 hour
Cooking time: 30 minutes

Ingredients

400g strong Canadian bread flour

100g 3 malts & sunflower organic flour

320ml lukewarm water

1 tsp salt

1 tbsp demerara sugar

1 tbsp oil (we use organic rapeseed oil)

1 sachet dried active yeast

Oiled 8-inch round loaf tin

Pre-heat the oven to 40^oC (for proving) and then to 200^oC (Fan) for baking.

Put the sugar and all dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl and mix together with a spatula. Add the water and oil and mix with a dough hook on a low setting (2 on a Kitchen Aid mixer) for 5-6 minutes. If the dough is too sticky, it’s difficult and messy to handle, so you can add a little more of the 3 malts & sunflower flour. Likewise, if it’s too dry you get a powdery dough which is also difficult to handle, so add a little more water. If you follow the quantities accurately though, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Leave the dough in the bowl and cover with a cloth. Place in the oven to prove at 40^oC until it doubles in size, or for 45 minutes.

Remove the bowl of dough from the oven, putting the oiled loaf tin in to warm up in its place.  Turn out the dough onto a floured wooden board – anything like marble or granite boards are too cold. Knead the dough, folding it repeatedly, being careful not to tear the dough, for about 3 minutes (watch the video). Place it into the now warmed tin, cover the top with flour (or other topping like seeds or malt flakes) and return to the oven for 1 hour for the second proving.  

Take the tin out of the oven, gently placing it back on the board and wrapping with clean towels to keep it warm whilst the oven heats up to 200^oC (Fan). Return to the oven (gently!) once the oven temperature is reached and cook for 30 minutes. Turn out onto wire rack to cool.

Step-by step

Once you’ve made this loaf several times and are confident about the consistency of the dough, you can experiment with substituing the 100g of the Three malts & sunflower flour with a different one. One family favourite is to use 100g of Shipton Mill’s Organic Fig, Spelt and Pumpkin Seed flour. This gives a slightly sweet flavour and crunchy texture and is great with cheese. You do have to adjust the amount of water with different flours though – with the fig flour I use just 300ml water to get the right dough consistency.

For bread rolls, divide the dough into 9-10 balls after the first proving. Knead, dust with flour and prove for an hour. Bake at 200^oC for 15 minutes.

Paul Kirk