03 Feb Spelt and rye onion bread

Posted at 12:05h in Blog by

My mum has three brothers and they all love to cook. Last week I was in Poland working on an important project. To celebrate my sending everything off on time, my godfather Wojtek (my mum’s youngest brother) came round and taught me this way of making proper bread. We made one spelt and one rye one then, whereas this time I combined the two flours and left out the plain flour. This has made it even healthier and taste-wise, it worked beautifully, not too heavy at all.

Wojtek gave me some fermented dough, which I managed to smuggle through security in my hand luggage on the way back to London. In order to make “proper” bread, you see, we need to use this rather than yeast. The only way you can get it is if you know someone that already has some spare and they give you a bit to use in your dough. Then every time you make bread (it needs to contain a lot of rye flour to make good leaven), you take 2 tablespoons of dough, put it in a jar and allow it to ferment for a week in the fridge, you then need to make bread again the following week. It’s quite a process even though the actual bread making is incredibly simple: Combine all the dry ingredients down there. Fry the onions in some oil, until they’re golden like this:

Add the warm water to the fermented dough jar, shake it as vigorously as you can (my weak wrist action appeared to be a source of great amusement to my mentor) and pour that into the dry ingredients. Mix it in, then keep adding more water and stirring until you get the consistency of thick batter… Something like peanut butter maybe… Transfer that into the baking tray, which has been buttered and floured. Now allow to rest for 10 hours in a warm place. On a radiator perhaps? After exactly 10 hours, bake at about 150 degrees C, for 1 hour.

If you live in the UK (I’m sorry I realise that most of my readers are actually in the US), then do let me know if you fancy making some, because I’d be more than happy to send you some of my fermented dough and pass on the bread love.

Ingredients:

200g rye flour
200g spelt flour
2 tablespoons fermented dough
1 mug of warm water (aprox)
1 onion, chopped
1 tablespoon sunflower oil
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon linseeds
1 tablespoon oats
3 tablespoons wheatgerm
Butter for greasing tray


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