Peasant Bread Made with Kefir Whey

I posted this bread a couple of weeks ago. Wanted to send this blog as I tweaked the recipe a bit and was pleasantly surprised.

Ingredients:

512g Unbleached all-purpose or bread flour

10g Kosher salt

8g Sugar

8g SAF Instant Yeast

50g Melange Pour Le Pain (can be purchased on line at Red Stick Spice Company)

454g Kefir Whey @ 78 degrees (If you don’t have whey of any kind, just use distilled water)

Softened butter

2  1 and 1/2 Pint Pyrex 441 Baking Bowls (They can be found on Ebay) If you can’t find any, no worries. Just use one 9 1/2 x 4 1/2 bread pan.

Directions:

Whisk together the flour, salt, sugar, instant yeast and pour le pain.

Slowly add the whey (or water) and mix thoroughly until dry ingredients are absorbed.

Let rise in proofer or warm place (covered with a towel) until doubled in size. Usually about an hour or so.

Generously butter your baking bowls.

Once the dough has doubled in size, divide the dough in half and put in the baking bowls.

At this point, don’t forget to dust the top of the bread with rice flour. This keeps the dough from sticking to the towel.

Cover the bowls with towels and put back in the proofer or a warm place for another 30 minutes or so. The dough should be rising slightly above the edge of the bowl.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Once the dough has risen sufficiently, brush melted butter over the tops and bake for 15 minutes at 425 degrees.

Then turn oven down to 375 degrees, turn the bread if it’s browning more on one side than the other and bake for another 15 minutes or so until the tops are golden brown.

Remove from bowls and allow to cool on a wire rack. 

*I found this recipe in Bread Toast Crumbs by Alexandra Stafford.  This is a great and easy bread.  She has a wonderful site, alexandracooks.com