Happy Sunday Bread Heads!
This week I thought we’d make bread with oats. I love oats; they are so hardy and nutritious! You can’t really make risen bread with oat flour; there is almost no gluten in oats so you have to have other flours in order to get the lift and texture I look for in bread.
This recipe is for what is called a Tea Bread (not to be confused with the Tea Party). It is two small loaves. The original recipe asks for two 7"x 3" loaf pans. I don’t have that size loaf pans and this is the only recipe I have that asks for that size so I refuse to buy them. Instead I just bake them in my regular 9"x 5" pans. I have tried making all the dough into one loaf, but it was so dense it never cooked properly.
This bread is great for eating with just butter or toasted. I find the small loaves annoying to try to make sandwiches out of, but your mileage may vary.
English Oatmeal Bread
Ingredients:
2 cups rolled oats (do not use instant oatmeal!!)
2 cups milk
1 package (2 ¼ teaspoons dry yeast)
2 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup whole-wheat flour
2 cups bread or all purpose flour
1 egg beaten with 1 tablespoon of water
Baking pans – two bread pans greased or non-stick
Method:
In a large mixing bowl, or the mixing bowl of your stand mixer, combine the oats and the milk. Let sit for two hours.
Stir in the yeast; then add the butter salt and whole-wheat flour. Beat with the paddle attachment of your mixer for 1 minute or 100 strong strokes by hand (this is another of those recipes that is going to build up your forearms if you do it by hand) . Add ½ cup of flour and beat for two more minutes.
Stir in the rest of the flour ½ cup at a time. You might not need all the flour. When I made this recipe I only added 1 ½ cups until the dough was dry enough. What we are looking for is a rough and shaggy mass that cleans the sides of the bowl. Since I can’t give you an exact amount of flour (this recipe seems to vary every time I make it) I took a picture of what the dough should look like when you stop adding flour.
Kneading:
If you are using a stand mixer, attach the dough hook and knead for 8 minutes. You will want to hang around while this dough is kneading as it tends to try to climb up and get in the gears of the mixer. If you have never had this happen to you, you are lucky! It is a total mess and not something you can fix on your own. So, watch that dough! If it climbs, stop the mixer, pull the dough in half and put both halves in the bottom of the bowl.
If you are doing this by hand, turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead for 8 minutes with a push-turn-fold method. Every couple of minutes lift the dough up and slam it down on the work surface. This will help the glutens develop in the dough. If your dough is sticky (assuming you have added all the flour already) you can add sprinkles of flour to it.
Place the dough back in the mixing bowl. Butter your fingers and then cover the dough with a light layer of butter. This will prevent it from forming a crust. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and let stand for 1 ½ hours, or until it is twice its original size.
Forming:
Punch down the dough, and turn it out onto a floured work surface. Knead for a couple of minutes to get any gas bubbles out of the dough. Cut the dough into 2 roughly even pieces (you can weigh them if you are really uptight about same size loaves). Shape the pieces into balls and let rest under a tea towel for 4 minutes.
Press on of the balls under your palms to form an oval. If you have the small pans, make it the length of the pans, if not, then about 7" will do. Fold the oval over and pinch the seam tightly together. Tuck the ends under a little bit and place in the loaf pan. Repeat with the second ball of dough.
Cover the pans, loosely with wax paper and allow to rise for 45 minutes.
Baking:
Pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees 20 minutes before baking. Uncover the loaves and brush with the egg wash. If you like you can dust the tops of the loaves with a little bit of oatmeal (since the oats disappear inside the loaves it is a way to tell that it is oatmeal bread, but I never do this step).
Slip the loaves into the hot oven and bake for 30 minutes. At 30 minutes open the oven and shift the position of the loaves. Since they take a long time to bake, you don’t want variations in the heat in your oven to hamper the quality. Turn the oven down to 350 and continue to bake for 25 more minutes. I find that I need to put some aluminum foil over them at 15 minutes in to this time, to keep them from getting too brown. It is also a good time to move them around in the oven again.
Check the doneness of the loaves by tapping on the bottom. If they are hard and give a hollow sound, they are done. If not they can go back in the oven for another 5 minutes or so.
Turn the loaves out of the baking pans onto a wire rack to cool.
This bread has a great flavor but Liz loves it for the nice thick crust. I tend to think of Tea Breads as sweet, but a couple of slices of this bread, toasted and buttered couples with a mug of tea quite well.
The flour is yours.