I'm all about the dough

You'll be pleased to know that my adventures in bread making ares still going strong. I tend to stick to the favourites most of the time because it's easier, and a lot of the time recently I have been throwing bread together at night to try and have it ready for the next day. However, every so often I throw caution to the wind and try something totally new.

This week I tried something I have been wanting to attempt for a while; fig and orange bread. As I think I mentioned in a previous post Mildred's, my favourite veggie restaurant here in London, does fantastic bread, and every time we go I must order the bread side order, if only to get the fig and orange bread.

I wasn't quite sure how to go about it, so did my usual trick of guessing and hoping for the best. I'd bought some malthouse multigrain flour and decided to mix that with some plain white to form the base of the dough, then I added figs, orange zest and substituted orange juice for some of the orange juice. The result was absolutely delicious. A lovely moist bread, with a hint of sweetness that went really well with cheese. A total winner that I think will become a regular treat for us. We've got some Stilton coming this week so I think it may well get made even sooner than we anticipated.


This would make a great picnic bread, or one to share, if you can bring yourself to!

Recipe: Makes one large loaf

300g Malthouse multigrain flour
200g Strong white flour
10g yeast
10g salt
200g dried figs (as dark and soft as possible)
zest of one large orange
juice of aforementioned orange,
enough water added to the orange to make it up to 350ml

Put the yeast in a large mixing bowl, then add the flours and mix together well, then add the salt and orange zest, mix again and then add the water/juice mixture. begin to mix the dough together and whilst doing so add the figs. Mix it all together until a sticky dough is formed. Form it into a ball and leave to rest for 1 hr. After resting scoop out of the bowl again, and form into another tight ball, rest for five more minutes, then place on a flat baking tray, leave in a warm place to prove for an hour. Meanwhile pre-heat the oven to 220C. Once the dough has doubled in size place in the oven. Bake for 5 mins at 220C, then turn the over down to 200C and bake for a further 30 mins. Remove from the oven and cool on a wire rack.