Back in early 2015, the second year of this blog, I wrote about ‘bread’ in literature, focusing on one of the earliest novels in English, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which was published in 1719.
Shipwrecked on a desert island Crusoe has to fend for himself – building a shelter, making his own clothes and, of course, feeding himself. Making bread is one of the activities he is most proud of, not least because of the amount of time involved: it takes four years for the barley and rye grains he finds to grow sufficiently to be harvested to make flour.
When I wrote about bread in this post I included a recipe for flatbreads, made with white flour, so nothing like the bread Crusoe would have made.
Revisiting this post recently I decided to try making some bread out of barley flour (which I discovered is available to buy online). As ever I found Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery (published 1977) a great source and inspiration. I used a combination of barley flour and white flour so the loaf wasn’t too dense: the final result had a pleasant nutty flavour and was particularly good toasted.
ROBINSON CRUSOE’S BARLEY LOAF
Ingredients (makes one small loaf):
225g strong white flour
120g barley flour
5g salt
7g fast quick active yeast
225ml water
2 tablespoons buttermilk (or make your own by adding 1 teaspoon lemon juice to 2 tablespoons milk and leaving to stand for 10 minutes)
Method:
Place both flours in a large bowl and stir with a metal spoon to combine.
Add the salt and mix thoroughly.
Then add the yeast and stir through (NB: it’s important not to add the yeast and salt together as if salt comes into direct contact with yeast it can inhibit the action of the yeast, meaning your bread won’t rise).
Add the water and buttermilk and mix thoroughly. Flour your hands and bring the mixture together into a ball. Then knead on a floured surface for approximately 10 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic, springing back when you poke your finger into it. (Alternatively you could do this stage in a food mixer with a dough hook – it will take approximately 5 minutes this way).
Place the dough back in the mixing bowl – if you’ve been kneading it by hand – cover, and leave in a warm place to rise for at least one hour; it should double in size.
Preheat the oven to 220C / 200C fan / Gas mark 7.
Empty the dough out of the bowl back onto the kitchen surface, and knock it back down again (in effect you are knocking the air out of it). Shape the dough and place into a small greased loaf tin.
Place the loaf into the preheated oven for 15 minutes. Then lower the oven temperature to 205C / 185C fan / Gas mark 6 for the next 15 minutes. And then shake the loaf out of the tin, lay it on its side on a baking tray and return to the oven, now reduced to 180C / 160C fan / Gas mark 4 for a final 15 minutes. When the loaf is ready it will sound hollow when you tap the bottom with your knuckles.
Place on a baking rack to cool before eating.
