Hello!

The main reason I bought myself a flour mill was to eat healthier bread. Pretty much all of the gluten-free bread that you can buy is not whole grain, but white, white, white. And sugary, sugary, sugary. I used to eat a lot of whole grain bread back in the day when I wasn’t yet diagnosed with celiac disease, and I have been missing dark bread quite a bit these past months.

Also, I have been intending to bake more vegan bread (because bread is usually vegan anyway), particularly since I’ve been obsessed with baking and eating pretty much only the baguette I posted recently. It’s a great recipe, but it contains milk and butter. I was curious whether I could make delicious vegan bread, too?

Thirdly, I have been craving nut bread. A friend of mine recently started baking and has been posting the results all over Facebook. His first creation was a hazelnut loaf. It was very beautiful, full of gluten, and unattainable for it was born in an oven in Berlin. Since I saw his loaf, I have been thinking of baking a nut bread of my own.

In essence: I wanted a dark bread, that was vegan and also contained roasted hazelnuts. I would have already gotten around to business a while ago, but I had a bit of a no-bread-bake phase these past two weeks. Today I finally got back into the drift, or rather: I broke out into a baking-mania. First, I baked some breakfast buns (out of baguette dough, topped with sunflower seeds, poppy seeds and in a rustic version covered in flour). I froze all twelve of them. As the dough for the buns was rising, I poked around online for a dark gluten-free nut loaf, but couldn’t find a recipe that struck my fancy. I realized I would have to get creative. And boy, am I glad that I did. The result was a crunchy, crispy crust. The inside of the loaf was fluffy, soft and juicy. We ate half of the loaf for dinner (yeah, I know!) along with a giant salad with a roasted garlic dressing. I froze the second half of the loaf.

I am definitely making this again.

Ingredients:

1 package active dry yeast
1 tbsp sugar
300 ml soda water
one handful chia seeds
4 tbsp olive oil

250g flour in total, consisting of:
40g buckwheat flour
50g sorghum flour
30g canihua flour
130g gluten-free flour mix (I used Schaer Farine)

1 heaped tbsp grape seed extract
1 tsp gluten-free agents (for me this is a mix of xanthan gum, carob and arrowroot flours as well as guar gum)
1 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp fleur de sel (coarse salt)
150g zucchini (finely grated)

Four generous hands (or more) full of nuts and seeds. I used: roasted hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, shaved almonds and walnuts plus 50g amaranth (uncooked).

In a bowl, mix the sugar and the active dry yeast. Add the warm soda water and whisk until the yeast has diluted. Add the chia seeds, the grated zucchini and the olive oil.

In a separate bowl, combine all of the flours, add the gluten-free agents, the grape seed extract, the baking powder, the fleur del sel and the amaranth seeds as well as all the other seeds and nuts.

Add the dry ingredients to the liquid ingredients and knead for ten minutes. Cover with a kitchen towel and let rise for an hour and a half in a warm, humid place (e.g. a busy kitchen).

Line a ceramic oven form with baking parchment. Place dough into baking parchment and cover with flour. Cover with kitchen towel and let rise for another two hours at room temperature.

Heat your oven to 250° C and bake for about 45 minutes. Remove loaf from ceramic bowl after 25 minutes, remove from baking parchment and bake bottom-up for another twenty minutes. Poke the middle of the loaf with a chopstick to check whether the loaf is also baked on the inside. Remove loaf from oven. Serve warm and enjoy!