Saturday, July 31, 2010









Favorite Fruit and Nut Bread

For the past few weeks, I have been making my favorite fruit and nut bread based on a Middle-Eastern stone ground Atta. After trying out a kilo of the flour, I was so impressed by its quality and freshness that I went back to the store and got myself 3 more kilos of it. Somehow, it seem better than the Indian Atta that I had been using.

I made up a formula using the entire kilo of flour. The rest of the flour used for the bread was German type 550 flour to make up a total flour weight of 60 Oz. The water absorbing qualities couldn't have been more different that the Type 550 flour. I ended up using a 85% hydration. For the past few bakes, the nuts that I used were Walnuts and Almonds. For the fruit, I used Golden raisins.

For this bake, I had to resort to Cashews, Almonds and Cranberries as I did not realize that the Raisins and Walnuts were already used up. The resultant crumb was not too dense as the Atta was only 58%. This made the bread very pleasant to eat. The bread was made over 6 hours with only a couple of hours fermentation. Despite the short time, the bread was very flavorful.

 Staple Walnut Bread 1kg All purpose flour 800g Water 3 tsp salt 3 tsp yeast Bowl of walnuts Makes two large loaves Mix dry ingredients and ...