How bread gets made in this house

My bread recipe is an adaptation of Mollie Katzen's in The Enchanted Broccoli Forest (I know that is twee but her later books have more grown-up titles). I have been making it pretty much ever since we left Germany (12 years ago) because I couldn't find any nice English bread. Things look better these days but I still like my own.

This recipe produces bread that is half wholemeal and half white. It has a good texture, provided by the nuts and grains and most people love it. I do NOT use a breadmaker, I think they are silly. I have 6 loaf tins, each for a roughly 750g loaf, and that fills my oven. I freeze 5 and we start eating the other one. I make two amounts of her recipe. I must mention, it has one "bug", in that she asks for 2 cups of water. This will never work with such a lot of flour! use 3.

cup = 250ml
tablespoon = 5ml

Ingredients

• 3 cups warm water
• 1 tablespoon dried yeast
• pinch sugar or honey
• 4 ½ cups strong wholemeal flour
• 4 cups strong white flour
• 1 cup cooked grains (barley, quinoa or millet for example)
• ½ cup seeds (sunflower, linseed, pumpkin, sesame, poppy - poss. not all at once)
• 1 tablespoon salt
• ¼ cup oil
• 1 dessertspoon honey or molasses

Method

1. Cook ½ cup of grain (barley, millet or quinoa, for example) in 1 cups of water. You need to bring it to the boil and then cover up and simmer for 10 minutes. Then leave to cool until just hand-warm.
2. Get a large mixing bowl and add 3 cups hand-warm water.
3. Add the dried yeast and a pinch of sugar or honey.
4. After about 5 mins you will see the yeast start to move around. At this point add 1½ cups of wholemeal flour and whisk it in. Leave for ½ hour or so until it has a foamy top. This stage is called the sponge and is important, as the yeast gets a chance to grow without lifting a lot of heavy flour.
5. Now add a lot more stuff! Stick a dessertspoon in some honey or molasses and add to the mix.
6. Now add the salt and the oil
7. Stir in the cooked grains and the seeds
8. Beat in three more cups of wholemeal flour
9. Stir in two cups of white flour. this will be much harder
10. Mix in the last two cups of white flour with your hands. After a while, the dough starts to come together. Sometimes you have to add more flour, sometimes it is hard to incorporate it all. Tip it onto your work surface and knead it until you have a nice smooth ball of dough
11. Put it back into the bowl and leave to rise for at least two hours. More than four and it will reach its maximum size and collapse but this has never caused me any problem
12. Oil three loaf tins
13. Take out the dough and knead it again on a floured surface. Divide it up into three portions and press one down into each tin
14. Leave to prove for about an hour (it really depends on the weather, yeast likes it warm)
15. When the dough is starting to rise above the rim of the tin, turn the oven on to 190°c (fan oven)
16. Put the bread in only when the oven has reached temperature (this is baking, not stew!) and bake for 45 minutes
17. To test the bread, turn it out of the tin and tap the bottom. It should sound hollow
18. You might want to give it at least 5 minutes so you don't burn your mouth on the first gorgeous slice with butter!

Variations
I always make two batches, as I said. A common combination is barley for the grains plus pumpkin and sesame seeds. I use molasses in this one. In the other bowl I would have quinoa or millet for the grains plus poppy and sunflower seeds. I would use honey in this mix.

Mollie Katzen also suggests chopped dried fruit. As a family of marmite addicts, this is not all that appealing, since we use this as our everyday bread. I have alos at times replaced most of the wholmeal flour with rye, or the white flour with spelt. Both of these work fine. The grains and seeds are also optional, bear in mind that leaving them out means you have less mass, so perhaps marginally smaller loaves.

I find the American habit of using cups to be well suited to measuring flour. I have tried putting all 8½ cups of flour for one batch on my scales and it just runs over. Far easier just to keep a clean cup measure and dip it into the flour bag. You could use an ordinary cup (not mug!) and work out roughly where 250ml would reach to. For a ¼ cup you could try an egg cup. This is only used for measuring oil, so it need not be accurate. Our egg cups have holes in the bottom for water to drain away, so I don't measure liquids with them!

I think I'll take pictures of the sponge and dough stages next time I bake, so you can see them.