Sharing bread with my father.

As part of the creative writing course I’m currently doing we were asked yesterday to come up with two lists relating to the current situation. One showing the positives we think are coming out of it and the other listing the negatives. After much thought and head scratching I was half way down the page with negatives, while struggling to get beyond the third line with the positives. 

There was one which came instantly to mind though and that was the benefits it’s having on some long distance relationships. I’m thinking primarily of my father who lives about sixty miles away from where I am. I don’t think there has ever been a period where we’ve gone so long without seeing each other, but at the same time I don’t think there has been a period where we have talked so much. Of course we’ve always spoken and called each other, particularly in the years since my mother died, but somehow now there feels to be a more serious interest in each others lives. A desire to exchange news, anecdotes and sometimes gossip that wasn’t there beforehand. It’s even reached the point where we’ve started to discuss cooking and what he’s planning to do with all of the produce he currently has growing on his allotment.

My father is the age band who’ve have been told to self isolate but luckily he’s surrounded by supportive younger neighbours who regularly check up on him and have been getting supplies for him on their supermarket trips. If I tell you that top of his list the last time the couple next door asked if he needed anything was three bottles of red wine and some madjewel dates, it’s clear he’s not doing too bad.

The last time we spoke he was planning to make some bread. Like most of us he’d run out of flour for a while but then within a couple of days two of his support network left a bag of it on his doorstep. This led us on to another food discussion which ended with us swapping recipes. A first that definitely wouldn’t have happened but for coronavirus isolation.

The recipe I gave my dad is my bread ‘go to’, the one I’ve been baking at least twice a week for the last couple of months. When I first started to use this I was very precise about the fact that the flour had to be a mixture of spelt and rye, now it doesn’t matter though. I’ve made it with whatever flour is available and it works. A quick, easy to make home made bread.

Ingredients

• 10g Dried yeast
• 350g warm water
• 3tbsp runny honey
• 250g dark rye flour
• 250g white spelt flour
• 1tsp sea salt
• 50g mixed seeds -these are a nice to have but the bread works fine if you don’t have any or just want to leave them out.

Method

• Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and add the honey
• Combine the flours, salt and seeds in a bowl. Mix together.
• Pour the wet yeast mixture into the flour mix. Combine with a fork and your hands until you have a sticky dough. 
• Tip the dough onto a floured surface and kneed for 5 minutes. If you have a mixer with a dough hook you can use that.
• Return the dough to the bowl, cover it with a tea towel and leave in a warm place to prove for an hour.
• After an hour briefly kneed the dough again then form it into a flat oval, place it on a floured baking tray, cover with a tea towel and leave to prove for another 30 minutes. 
• Pre heat the oven to gas mark 8 and place an empty baking tray in the bottom of the oven
• After the second prove is complete half fill the baking tray with cold water. This will create steam in the oven and help to form a good crust on the bread.
• Bake the bread 30 minutes. When the bread is ready it will sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.

To get the rings on the bread as I  have in the picture you will need a proving basket If you prove your dough in one of these it expands into the rattan the basket is made of and creates the circles that you can see on the crust after baking.