Another awesome part of baking bread is the scoring of the dough before baking. Scoring is simply slashing the dough top so that we are able to control where the bread expands from. When you score the bread with a pretty design it adds a delightful artistic side to the loaf, a treat to the eyes and you are in awe of it even before biting into the first slice. Though it appears easy, scoring requires a little confidence and quite a bit of practice. The tool used to score dough is called lame and it is basically a regular blade mounted on a stand. As usual, this is not available in India and so I fashioned myself one in order to be able to score the dough well. This is my first effort with my new tool and it doesn’t look too bad for a first attempt, right? Despite a slightly misshapen loaf, that is.

Bread is an integral part of Moroccan cuisine and they have a wide variety of breads, both dough raising and flat breads. I picked the whole wheat bread which has an equal amount of whole wheat and all purpose flour. This bread is a relatively flat bread and needs only one rise which makes it a comparatively faster bake. But because of the low hydration, the air pockets are not huge but small and uniform throughout.

Recipe adapted from here

Makes 1 large loaf

WHAT WE NEED

135 gms All purpose flour

135 gms Whole wheat flour

1 1/2 tsp Instant yeast

180 gms Warm water

1 tsp Salt

1 tbsp Oil

1 tbsp Honey

 

WHAT TO DO

• Mix the all purpose flour, whole wheat flour and salt together
• Make a well in the middle and add the yeast
• Add the oil, honey and water to the yeast and mix it first
• Then mix with the flours to form a dough
• Knead for 6-7 minutes till you get a soft pliable dough
• Set aside for 15 minutes
• Grease a baking tray and sprinkle some semolina
• Press down the dough with the palm of your hand to make a 1/4″ thick circle
• Cover with a kitchen towel and set aside for 1 hour
• Preheat the oven at 250C
• Sprinkle some flour on top and slash the dough in any pattern of your choice
• Put the dough into the oven and reduce the temperature to 220C
• Bake for 10 minutes
• Turn the tray around and bake for another 10 minutes or till the loaf acquires a rich brown colour
• Take it out of the oven and cool on a rack
• Enjoy!

This is my post for the Blogging Marathon under the theme, ‘Moroccan Cuisine’.

Check out the Blogging Marathon page for the other Blogging Marathoners doing this BM

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is part of the Bake-a-thon 2017