Yoghurt Bread

We bought a tub of plain yoghurt for a curry the other night (hubby wasn't impressed with my home made yoghurt attempts so we have to stick to store bought for now) and there was far too much. Unfortunately there weren't any smaller tubs available at the local grocer so to use up the yoghurt and a few eggs I thought I'd try a sweet yoghurt bread recipe.  The recipe called for figs but you can add any dried fruit that takes your fancy - I used dried apricot because that's what I had in the cupboard but you could try fresh blueberries, raisins, dates, apple, or something a bit more out there like dried pineapple or mango.

I also skipped the icing but you could add it on to get a real bakery finish for a special morning tea.

The recipe is from Bake It by Murdoch Books:

Ingredients
dough
650g white bread flour
1 tbs ground cinnamon (or any other spice you like or leave it out if you don't like)
3 tsp dry yeast
2 eggs, lightly beaten
250g Greek yoghurt
125ml (1/2 cup) lukewarm milk
90g honey
60g butter chopped
100g chopped dried fruit of your choice

glaze
1 egg
2 tbs milk

icing
375g icing sugar
80mL lemon juice

Method

Combine 600g of flour, spice, yeast, 1tsp salt in a bowl (or use electric mixer with dough hook).  Make a well in the centre and pour in combined eggs, yoghurt, milk and honey.  Mix to combine then mix in butter and dried fruit.   Knead by hand or machine for 10 mins until dough is smooth and elastic adding extra flour as needed.

Grease a bowl with oil and sit the dough in it to rise until doubled.  Cover with plastic wrap or a damp tea-towel. 

Punch down dough gently then divide into 6 equal portions.  (Some people prefer to carefully turn out the dough and divide it before punching down).  Roll each portion to 30cm long logs.  Plait three lengths together and tuck in the ends to form a braid loaf.  (If you braid with two lengths doubled over then cut 4 portions instead of 6).  Transfer to a greased baking tray and leave to rise again for about half an hour until doubled again.  Preheat the oven to 220 deg C (425 deg F).

Mix egg and milk to make glaze and brush loaves.  Bake for 10 mins at 220, then reduce head to 180 deg C (350 deg F) and bake for a further 20 mins until bread sounds hollow when tapped.  Cover with foil if they are browning too quickly.

Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack.

Combine icing sugar, lemon juice and 2 tbs boiling water to make icing.  Drizzle over cooled loaves. Enjoy once the icing has hardened.

On a roll

The new sourdough starter is about a month old and smells vaguely of yoghurt and yeast.  It works well although I admit I am using a recipe with a little added yeast in the dough so to some it may seem more abomination than artisan.  For those of you who may be crusty conoisseurs, to redeem my rolls I've used honey in place of sugar and a locally grown and processed olive oil rather than butter.  The honey gives it a beautiful flavour which goes equally well with sweet and savoury, especially a slice of ham and some relish.

The remains of the first sourdough loaf

When I return to work I'm not sure how I'll go finding the time to make all our bread from scratch but at the moment our bread maker is in need of a new part for the tin and I'm on holidays so have the time to do all the mixing, kneading, proofing and shaping without the aid of modern technology.  I've also never made a sourdough loaf in the bread maker so I'll have to try out some recipes before I go back to the daily grind.  Let me know if you've got any tried and true recipes.

With only two people in the household who aren't the most consumptive crust chompers it can be hard to get through an entire batch of bread before it starts to go stale so I divided the last dough into two and made  a couple of small cob loaves, putting one in the freezer.  This time round I also remembered to slash the top to help even the rise in the oven (and make it look like a real baker's loaf) but forgot to put some water in a dish in the bottom of the oven to crisp the crust.

The sourdough also makes great English muffins.  They got eaten so quickly I didn't have time to get a photograph.  I did, however, manage to take a snap of the bread rolls before we took them to a party.