We make most of our own bread using a wholemeal recipe of our devising in a breadmaker, but when we have the time it’s fun to experiment with different loaves made by hand.
One of our favourites is oat bread, which is heavy and sweet but is a meal in itself. The original recipe uses oat flour, but as we couldn’t find any shops that stock it we use rolled oats instead.
You will need:
- 1lb rolled oats
- 1 tsp salt
- 4oz butter
- 3 oz honey
- Boiling water (to make one pint with the honey)
- 1 15g sachet dried bread yeast
Thoroughly combine the oats and salt, then rub in the butter. Dissolve the honey in about half a pint of boiling water and stir well, adding more water to make one pint.
Pour the water and honey mixture over the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Then sprinkle the bread yeast over the dough and mix again.
Cover the dough with a tea towel and leave the dough to rise for four hours.
Tip the dough out onto a floured workbench or board and knead for 10 minutes. Cut the dough in half and shape into rounded loaves.
Place the loaves on floured baking trays and leave to rise for one hour. Preheat the oven to 230C.
Place the loaves in the oven and bake for 45 minutes. The loaves are done when the bottoms sound hollow when tapped.
Cool the loaves on a wire rack, before slicing and serving with lots of butter. Delicious!
I believe you can turn oats into what would be considered oat flour simply by grinding it in the food processor (assuming of course you have one). Mind you I haven’t actually tried it but it sounds logical enough!
Would it take 1 lb of oat flour instead of rolled oats?
It should work, but the recipe might need some tweaking. The original recipe was from the 1700s and used oat flour, but I haven’t tried it yet.