Peasant Bread with Fennel and Sea Salt Crust

 

I’ve recently become obsessed with rubbing fennel seeds all over my breads.  I would have never come up with this idea on my own.  A local bakery, Blue Oven, makes amazing breads filled with seeds and herbs, including fennel.  And luckily we have huge fennel plants all over the garden.  This is a picture of one plant flowering, with my boyfriend behind it so you can see how big it is! 

 

 

 

I adapted a recipe from an old bread machine cook book, called Peasant Bread.  I guess because it’s so simple and always turns out pretty good. 

 

First mix:

1 cup bread flour
1 cup white flour
1 ¼ tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 ½ tsp yeast
1 cup water

                                                                             Knead dough for 10 minutes.

Take a baking sheet and sprinkle around your mix of herbs, seeds and sea salt.  Try different combination; for this bread I used fennel, sea salt, dried basil, flax and dill seeds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stretch your dough out slightly into loaf shape, then rub the surface with olive oil and roll it through the seasoning mix.  Let rise for an hour or until it doubles in size.

 

 

Cook at 400° for 20 minutes or so, until golden brown.  I just cooked it on the same baking sheet for a flatter loaf, but use a bread pan for a sandwich loaf.

Drying Herbs

Many of our herbs are starting to flower. I wanted to start drying bunches so we can use them all winter long.  Today I harvested a few different types: spicy globe basil, purple shisho, greek oregano, summer savory and some of our hopi red dye amaranth that was knocked over by our gourds!  First I washed all the leaves as best as I could (except for the amaranth, it’s too fragile) and let them dry off.

For hardier herbs like oregano, savory, rosemary, etc you can simply air dry them out of direct sunlight.  Just gather them in bunches from the stems, tie together and hang.  I always have lots of dust, dirt and animal hair in my house so I prefer to be safe and put a brown paper bag around the herb bunches.  I took some scrap fabric strips and tied the herb bunches tightly together. 

 

Then I placed the herbs in brown paper bags, cut a small hole in the bag and inserted the fabric strips through the hole. 

I tied the strips tightly around the outside of the bag, and tied an additional loop with the excess fabric so I could hang the bag. 

Worked out pretty well!  I hung them under a shelf that doesn’t get much sun.

For herbs with delicate, soft leaves like basils or mints you have to dry them quickly.  So you can use a dehydrator, which I do not have, or your oven.  I just spread my basil and shisho out on a cookie sheet, turned my oven to the lowest setting, and checked on the herbs frequently, flipping them over here and there.  It took about 3 hours until they were completely dried.  Then I pulled the leaves off the stems and stored them in air tight containers out of sunlight.

Purple Shisho Pesto Recipe

I bought this amazing purple shisho at my neighborhood farmers market the other day.  We have green shisho plants growing all over the yard, but I had never seen purple.  It's a beautiful herb, often referred to as japenese basil.  So it was perfect for a pesto.  If you've never heard of shisho you should check this link out.  It has a nice overview of how to grow it and what you can do with shisho.  It's super easy to grow, and does great in containers if you don't have much space.

This was also my first time making pesto.  It seemed easy enough, but for some reason I just kept buying those little expensive jars at the supermarket.  But not any longer, here is what I did...

INGREDIENTS : 4 oz. shisho, 4 garlic cloves, salt, 2 tbsp parmesean cheese, 1/4 cup olive oil

STEP 1 : I roughly chopped up a small bunch of shisho (about 4 oz. or so) and 4 garlic cloves, and added pinch of salt.  Using a pestle and mortar, I ground it up into a paste.  You could also use a food processor for this.

STEP 2 : I transfered the paste to a bowl and gradually stirred in 2 tbsp of parmesan cheese (you could use more cheese of course!).  Then I mixed in 1/4 cup of olive oil. 

And that's how easy pesto is!  We couldn't wait to eat it so I cooked some pasta, drained it and threw in a little more olive oil to coat the noodles.  I added about half the pesto for a meal for two.  It was amazing!  Especially with a big chunk of italian bread.  I think I might make a little pesto pizza with the rest. 

I can't wait to make a big batch of pesto this summer when all our shisho grows in.  I'd like to try experimenting with other herb combinations too, maybe throw some oregano or savory in with the shisho.  It's an easy way to preserve the herbs and still keep that fresh taste!