I'm still a novice with bread. In full confession, I've used the same really easy recipe in a bread maker for almost 20 years, because it's reliable and my experience of kneading dough by hand has been far from consistent. Still, I'm determined to beat this phobia and so I've made five batches of this bread in the last 48 hours, experimenting to see what works and what doesn't. The following are some of my findings.
Machine kneading or hand-kneading?
I watched Bread Week in Season 14 of 2023's The Great British Baking Show. I know, for a fact, that Matty (eventual winner) and Dana both chose to use the KitchenAid and its dough hook to eliminate most of the hard work. I watched, like a hawk, the judging of their bread and Paul Hollywood, King of Bread, didn't comment on the bread being any worse (or any better) for the use of the machine. Still, during my experimentation these last few days, at one point I left the KitchenAid doing its dough thing for 30 minutes and the dough still hadn't developed the gluten properly. In the end, my successful route is to use the KitchenAid for 15 minutes, and then follow up with about 5 minutes kneading by hand and it seems to work well.
Roast Garlic?
At first, I was roasting garlic and rosemary a la Tasha, and maybe the problem was the oil, or the warmth of the ingredients, but my dough failed to rise during the proving stage. In the end, I omitted the garlic completely and found success. One day, I'll circle around and crack the roast garlic thing.
How many seeds?
At first I think I was trying to pack too many seeds into my dough. It tasted delicious, but I couldn't get it to rise much. In the recipe below you'll see where I ended up to balance the rise and the taste. Incidentally, I experimented with pumpkin seeds, pine nuts, sunflower seeds, poppy seeds and sesame seeds. All good - I show my own favorite in the recipe below.
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