Nic Dempsey

Last year, I got into a ruinously expensive Gail’s bread habit, their seeded sourdough is lovely. I decided that I had to get back into the bread baking habit, I started with this recipe from BBC Good Food. It was good and made amazing toast. There has been a lot of noise about UPF recently, Ma read Ultra Processed People and gave up buying bread and mayonnaise. Mum can cook, but it’s not something she enjoys, I do enjoy it so I started baking an extra loaf for Mum..

The joy of cooking something often is that that you start to get a feel for it and for me, that’s when I start to change how I do it to better suit my cooking style and taste.

First, I put all three of the seeds into the dough, I added pumpkin seeds, I increased the seeds from one tablespoon of each to three. I’ve been reading about the health benefits of flaxseed and chia seeds (fibre, omega-3, helpfulness in reducing blood pressure and cholesterol) and I’ve been grinding them together and adding them to baked goods and on my yoghurt, so three tablespoons of that went into my dough, I replaced the water with the whey leftover from straining my yoghurt. I made it in a loaf tin because it’s an easier shape than a bloomer. One thing that I didn’t change was to swap from white to wholemeal flour. Since lockdown, I’ve been buying bread and plain flour in 16kg bags and I didn’t think that I would use the wholemeal before it went rancid.

Other things worth noting about my bread making style is that I’m really lazy, I don’t really knead my dough, I use the kitchen aid to bring it altogether and knock it about a bit and then transfer it to my instant pot on that yoghurt setting for the first rise. (This is a tip I got from Sarah’s blog Sustainable Cooks and it makes everything better. The dough rises faster and better, it just makes the bread nicer).

You can make bread, without the equipment, you’d need to give the bread some kneading and more time to rise. You don’t need all the seeds either, you could just use 9 tablespoons of mixed seeds and if you’re not someone with whey leftover from yoghurt making use water instead. Bread is pretty flexible. I do it this way and it makes a decent everyday loaf of bread and still makes great toast.

In a bowl, rub 46g butter into 500g white bread flour and 7g of instant yeast (I use the kitchen aid to do this).

Add the 3 tablespoons each of pumpkin, sunflower, sesame and, poppy seeds, 3 tablespoons ground linseed/chia seed mix, and 1 teaspoon of sea salt and stir through.

Using the dough hook gradually add 350 ml of whey (or water) until it comes together as a dough.

Transfer the dough to an instant pot on the yoghurt setting and leave until it’s doubled in size (usually a couple of hours).

Take the dough out and transfer to a 3 lb loaf tin (I use these ones), leave to rise until it the dough is above the top of the tin (about 45 minutes to an hour).

Bake on 200C for 35 minutes. The bread should sound hollow when you tap it. Leave to cool before you start slicing into it!