New year's loaves

Happy new year! This new year's day, I'm baking some bread. Not because it's the new year, mind you; it's because we've got some leftover salad that looks a little ropey, and I think it'd be a fine addition to some bread (and because I've got time today!). It's not going to be anything particularly adventurous (fundamentally it's just an ordinary sourdough loaf), but it's still nice to get baking!

Leftover Salad Bread
Ingredients

• A generous dollop of Aage
• 500g Strong wholemeal flour
• 250ml Warm water
• 10g Salt
• A slug (~10g) of olive oil
• ~55g Leftover salad (lambs lettuce, olives, spring onions, mustard, olive oil and salt)

Method

1. Mix Aage, the flour, water, salt and olive oil together and form a dough.
2. Knead until not sticky.
3. Put in bag to rise for ~1 hour until doubled in size.
4. Deflate and knead.
5. Divide into two portions and knead the leftover salad into one.
6. Shape into loaves, return to the bag and prove for ~2 hours until doubled in size.
7. Bake at 220C for 10 minutes, then turn down to 190C for a further 30 minutes.

The salad turned out to have quite a lot of olive oil and moisture in it, which made the half of the dough with the salad rather sticky. I opted to shape the plain ball of dough into something approximating a bâtard, but the salad-infused one ended up as a generic boule shape because it was too sticky to shape! Here they are before the prove.

Ready for the oven. As you can see, slashing the plain loaf didn't exactly go to plan. It turns out that the kitchen knife I tried to use was not nearly sharp enough. I reverted to a bread knife for the salady one, which worked better. They are clearly underproved (which I'm pretty sure is due to insufficient sourdough starter activity - I really need to plan my bread baking further ahead so that I can get Aage out of the fridge and woken up properly beforehand!)

As ever, they look gorgeous coming out of the oven.

The salady one is slightly underbaked. I did think that that might happen, given the extra moisture and oil in it, but it's not bad really - the dough is cooked all the way through, it's just a little cakey in the middle. Lovely flavour though - the spring onion gives a really nice fragrance, and the chopped up olives provide the usual lovely bursts of salty punch. The lettuce cooked away to nothing, but that's exactly as expected. I'm definitely going to add spring onion to bread again in the future!