Chia Seed Bread
The tasty bits of this week’s bread were more or less left overs. With my parents gone after a two week stay, the house was virtually emptied of chia seeds and there was more keffir than you could shake a stick at. With the best will in the world I would need to buy more chia seeds and would never be able to drink all the keffir so I made curd cheese out of the keffir and mixed the scant 2 tablespoons full of chia seeds toether with 400 grams of keffir whey and let the mixture sit, covered, overnight on the counter.
Servings:0
Ingredients
- 400 g Whole wheat flour
- 200 g White bread flour
- 400 g Keffir whey Or just plain water
- A few tablespoons of Chia seeds
- 12 g fresh yeast 6 g dry Or 3 g instant
- 12 g Salt
Instructions
- The night before you want to bake, mix the chia seeds and the whey or water together and let them sit to allow the chia seeds to swell. This is important because you will only extract all the goodness from chia seeds if they are soaked or ground. Their little shells are too hard for our systems to crack on their own so if you don’t soak or grind them, they just go straight through you and this is an expensive waste of an otherwise highly nutritious seed. The same is true for flax seeds, by the way.
- When you want to bake, measure the flours into a bowl. If you are using dry yeast, make a well in the flour, measure in the yeast and pour over about 100 g of the liquid (including any chia seeds that sneak in). Wait for 15 minutes or so for the yeast to dissolve and then add all of the other ingredients. If you are using fresh or instant yeast, just measure them into the bowl along with everything else. Bring the ingredients together and then turn them out on the counter. Knead well for 10 minutes (even if you are using a mixer, knead for 10 minutes). Pop the dough back into the bowl, cover, and let sit for 1-2 hours (or all day in the fridge) until it has double in size.
- Once it has doubled in size, turn the dough out on the counter (gently) and shape it how you would like it. For ideas and videos on shaping click hereand if you would like to know more about proofing your bread in a special proofing basket like the loaf in the photography, please click here. Cover the dough and let it sit for 45 minutes to one hour and then turn the oven on to 200 degrees c. Pop the dough in and bake it for 45 minutes. When you tap the bottom of the dough it should sound hollow and feel “thin”. Let it cool completely before cutting into it. The bread is lovely and makes great, tasty toast.
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