Bread Baking Babes bake savoury bread!

The aroma of bread being baked is an enticing one, this month's bread ranks even higher on the mouthwatering scale. Lien (Lien's Notes/Notities van Lien) was our honored Kitchen of the Month and she decided on a bread featuring the bounty of the season; Asparagus!

She selected a recipe from Jan Hedh and tweaked it around to get to this lovely bread:

Asparagus bread with walnuts and parmesan

125 g green asparagus (used

one bunch of spring onions greens)
25-30 g rocket
50 g walnuts,
50 g freshly grated parmesan cheese
450 g strong bread flour (substituted a quarter whole wheat)
12 g fresh yeast or 1 1/4 tsp dry instant yeast
250-270 g water (whole wheat version may use a little more water)
25 g olive oil
10 g (sea) salt (1.1/4 tsp)

For the instructions please visit Lien, I had to make one major adjustment in the Asparagus department. Meaning that when I was ready to bake the green asparagus I needed were nowhere to be found. My substitute consisted of the greens of a bunch of spring onions, sauteed in 1 tbs of walnut oil, adding rocket and some parsley just before taking it off the heat. I know by doing this I lost a lot of the seasonal quality of this bread but got a great aromatic oniony bread in return. Not a bad deal at all!

I proceeded as described in the recipe. Kneading the dough to incorporate the additions can be quite tricky, I found it works best to treat it like you would a cinnamon swirl bread.

Pat the dough into a rectangle, spread ingredients over the dough, roll up and tuck the ends under to form a squarish package and let rise as such. Over kneading will result in the release of a lot of moisture and you'll end up with a "slippery when wet" dough.

I shaped the dough in one large tapered loaf and baked it for 30 minutes on 220C, lowered the temp to 180 and baked for another 15-20 minutes.

Definitely going to bake this one again, I really want to try this with adding some spinach leaves and blue cheese instead of parmesan! Great bake-up Lien, proportions worked out great for our Dutch flour! So what's keeping you? Come on and bake with us and earn your Bread Baking Buddy Badge by baking this bread and sending your details to Lien (notitievanlien(-at-)gmail(-dot-)com). Deadline is June 26th.

For real asparagus bread check the other Babes in the right hand sidebar!