I could live by eating only one bread..but it has to be this one!
One of the most traditional products of Crete is Carob (χαρούπι). It’s derived from the homonymous tree that grows in the Mediterranean. The tree produces a legume-like fruit that can be ripened and eaten or ground to a flour and used in recipes, similar to cacao powder.
I love carob and I wrote in the past a post dedicated to it.
I use carob flour usually in cakes, but here I thought to transform my typical carob cake recipe to a bread one. Carob flour has a very strong character and taste and thus is not needed to add too much of it in the flour mix. I used as a base a blend of wheat (bread) flour and a good amount of stone-milled, whole grain dinkel (spelt). Since carob is naturally sweet, I enhanced this character with a bit of honey and some sultana raisins. Finally, I included in the recipe toasted hazelnuts.
Carob bread
350g strong, wheat bread flour
200g whole grain spelt flour
50g carob flour
100g active spelt sourdough *
400g water
50g sultana raisins (soaked for a couple of hours in water)
50g hazelnuts (toasted)
a couple of tablespoons honey
7g salt
* To prepare a spelt sourdough, just feed your sourdough starter (no matter in which flour is kept) with whole spelt flour. Let it grow at room temperature for 8-12 hours or until doubled in size and frothy. Then, use it directly in the final dough
- Mix the flours with the water in a bowl until flours fully hydrated, cover the bowl and let it rest (autolyse) for 1-2 hours.
- Add the salt, the honey and the active sourdough, mix and shortly knead the dough. Cover and let to rest for 30 min.
- Add and incorporate the hazelnuts/raisins by stretching and folding the dough. Do this a couple of times, letting the dough to rest for 10 min in between each addition. Let the dough to rest and perform 1 or 2 more stretch-and-folds every 30 min.
- Cover the dough and let it in piece to ferment for another couple of hours, until it rises a bit. Then, transfer it into the fridge for the night.
- Next day start by preheating the oven at 230 °C. When ready, take the dough out from the fridge, transfer it onto a well-floured surface. Shape it, score it if you wish, and bake it for 30 min, then bring down the oven temperature to 200 °C and finish baking for another 30 min.