Sesame’s Secret

“After enjoying a breakfast diet consisting of tea, fruit and hard boiled egg (weekdays) for 3 weeks now I did start feeling certain cravings. The funny thing is, I don’t know if I missed eating bread or if I just missed making bread! I suppose it’s a bit of both, although maybe it’s really more the making… Considering that I had waffles that weekend in Cornwall and Ana and I did Kaiserschmarrn yesterday, I would say that our breakfast doesn’t leave much to desire. It’s okay to have a little bit less of those nasty carbohydrates from Monday to Friday, no?”

Using the excuse that we actually bought more buttermilk than necessary for the Kaiserschmarrn, here are the ingredients for this week’s bread:

350 gram of flour (white flour with barley and rye mixed in…)
pinch of salt
3 spoons of sugar
150 ml of buttermilk
saffron
sesame seeds
olive oil
water
2 spoons of (fast action) yeast

As usual we start with starting the yeast: 100ml of buttermilk mixed with 50ml of boiling water and the sugar. When it’s all stirred well, add the yeast and put aside. It’s funny, we still think it’s quite a satisfying feeling to see the yeast bubbling up and ready for action!

In the meantime we mix the flour with the salt, a good shot of olive oil and a spoon full of sesame seeds. The saffron could go in, too, but we get more of its flavour by gently roasting it a bit before we do so. After that, we add the yeast mix and work everything into a homogeneous dough.

After about 2 hours of resting covered in a warm place we properly knead the dough for about 5 to 10 minutes (this is good for the dough, your muscles and your general well-being) and flatten it out on the work top, so it roughly resembles a pizza-base. We then baste it with olive oil and sprinkle another spoon full of sesame seeds over it. As we don’t want to make pizza we need to fold it 4 times, now it should look more like a bread!

Placed already on a non-stick tray the dough needs to rest another 2 hours before it gets basted with the remaining buttermilk and sprinkled with yet more sesame seeds. It then goes into the oven (preheated at about 180 degrees) for more or less 20 to 25 minutes.

“The bad thing about making bread is obviously, that once you’ve done it, you need to eat it. The good news is, however, it turned out quite yummy!”