lidia bread

lidia was here in cork for a week with eva and paula. we had a great time, visiting the island, lovely places like cobh, kinsale, killarney, etc, but we had time to cook and bake and to create this blog. So our main aim was and is to share recipe in the distance as we three live in different cities and myself in a different country, so we can put here attempts and doubts and discoveries and questions mainly about bread but also you will find some baking. And while sharing between us we can share with everybody else and enrich this blog with people who want to participate too. so do not be shy.

we made my sourdough, starting with strong wholemeal flour, and after 2 days the sourdough was crazy: double every 12 hours, millions of bubbles and overflowing the glass jar. So we decided to made a white sourdough so we fed it with strong organic white flour. i think this change didn't like it, didn't die but its activity is very slow since then. i m going to feed it today with strong wholemeal flour and put it finally in the fridge. and let's pray it is ok.

so as we said before, while waiting for the sourdough we made a couple of breads, using fresh yeast. the first one, the one i called lidia bread, was a strong flavour wholemeal bread. here is the recipe:

500g organic spelt flour
150g organic wholemeal rye flour
150 strong wholemeal flour
30g fresh yeast
17g salt
400g water

the bread has two fermentation of around 3 hours and then oven for 50 min, first 15 min at maximum temperature (in my oven it's around 140 celsius degrees) and the at 190 degrees. we put some water in a tray underneath the bread, and we wasn't able to spray the bread with water basically because we forgot to buy the spray bottle :-) but it came finally crispy enough.



so the result was a lovely and rich brown bread, during the fermentation the dough grew quiet well but in the oven we didn't get many alveolus, maybe because of the yeast, maybe because it has a high proportion of wholemeal flour or even because of the oven, as it was too close to the top inside of it. Nevertheless the texture and the flavour was unique. lidia promised she is going to try to make it again using this time her sourdough so i am really looking forward for her to make it and share with us. i am sure she will improve it.



and as the bread has only one destiny to fulfill, we all had dinner with it that night, and our food was enhanced with this powerful homemade bread. here you can see a sample with tapenade, semi sun dry tomatoes and feta cheese. it s true as well as lidia said the this bread get even better if you toast it. i m getting hungry again ;-)