Few weeks ago, I had a hankering to make an Olive loaf. I had a bunch of olives in my fridge and every other ingredient required to make the bread. All that I lacked was a dutch oven. The original recipe which I found in a book called “Crusts” used all purpose flour and a dutch oven and me being me, I had to make this whole grain and without a dutch oven. I replaced the duct oven with two cake pans and inverted one cake pan over the other held together with a binder clip – I know it sounds crazy but it kind of worked! I highly recommend watching this video to learn how to create a DIY dutch oven. The only disadvantage with this method was that the shape of my loaf got a bit distorted. I wanted a nice round loaf and ended up with a loaf in the shape of a cake, but I am also to blame cos I let the dough rise longer the second time for more time that it requires….yeah! not doing that again. Next time, I will just use normal loaf pans or two 6 inch cake pans and make sure I follow timings for the second rise….
Then I set about experimenting with the flour and came up with the following recipe which produced a pretty decent loaf which was soft and chewey. The entire loaf was consumed within a day and I was a happy camper. However I will definitely be playing around with this recipe to amp up the flavor and the salt quotient of the bread. I did feel that it lacked a bit of flavor but when toasted or slathered with a thin layer of butter or cheese it tastes great! I felt that it was best when toasted for a quick snack and would be wonderful with soup!
More updates / versions of this loaf shall follow 🙂
What you need:
- 1/4 tsp yeast
- 1/4 tsp sugar
- 1 and 1/2 cup of warm water
- 1 tsp salt
- 2.5 cups of whole wheat flour
- 0.5 cups of all purpose flour
- 1tbsp of Milk powder
- 1/2 cup chopped olives. I would prefer more olives as 1/2 cup of chopped olives seemed to be hardly visible on the loaf.
How I did it:
- Add the sugar to 1/2 cup of warm water and activate the yeast. The yeast should bloom in about 10-15 minutes
- Mix the flour, milk powder and salt and add the yeast mixture and the remaining water and mix into a dough. Half way through the kneading add the chopped olives and olive oil and knead until a smooth dough is formed. Avoid adding extra water.
- Oil a bowl and allow the dough to rise for about and hour or until the dough has doubled in size.
- Punch the dough down and knead some more and shape into a round boule.
- Line the bottom pan of the DIY dutch oven (I used an 8 inch cake pan) with a parchment paper and transfer the dough into the pan, cover and set aside for the second rise. Allow this to rise for 30 minutes
- When the dough is resting, pre-heat the oven at 450F
- After the 30 minutes, cover the pan of the DIY dutch oven with another pan of the same size (in my case it was another 8 inch cake pan) and hold them together using binder clips.
- Pop this into the oven and bake for about 15 minutes
- After 15 minutes remove of the cover of the DIY dutch oven and bake for another 15 minutes until the top is golden and the bread sounds hollow when tapped.
- Remove the pan from the oven and remove the bread out carefully. Allow it to cool completely before slicing.
The Kitchen Project 