Olives and Thyme

 

Number 10 of our Bake Off challenges is a Black Olive and Thyme Bread from the “Great British Bake Off; How To Bake” book.

Put 250g (2 cups) bread flour and 25g (1 tbsp) whole wheat or spelt flour in a bowl with 1tsp salt and 1 tsp instant yeast.  Slowly add 200ml lukewarm water. We didn’t use all the water. Work the mixture until you have a soft dough.  Knead for 4-5 minutes, cover and leave to rise.  Ours was ready in an hour.

Punch down the dough and place on a floured work surface. press the dough into a rectangle 40 x 20 cm (16″ x 8″). Place 75g of drained olives down the centre third of the dough. We roughly chopped ours and used a mix. Sprinkle 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves over the top of the olives.  We only had dried thyme, so we also used some fresh rosemary.

Fold one side over the olives.

Then the other side on top of that and pinch the seams.

Flip over, cover and leave to rise. At this point, we started chopping vegetables.  When they were ready, we put them in a baking tin with some olive oil and garlic.

Put the oven on to 230 C/450 F. Put a baking tray or pizza stone in to heat up. At this point, the dough was ready.  We just had to snip the sides with scissors to expose the filling. Cut about a third of the way though on an angle, every 2-3 cm.  You can see we have the dough on parchment paper.  This makes it easy to transfer the dough onto the hot pizza stone.

The recipe suggests putting a roasting tin in the bottom of the oven to heat up and adding a cup of cold water when you put the dough in the oven.  I’m not really happy doing this. I’ve tried it a couple of times and ruined one baking tin and almost burnt myself.  This time, I just used a spray bottle and sprayed cold water on the dough and around the oven. We put the veggies in at the same  time.  Bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown.  Leave to cool on a wire rack.

 

 

 

 

 

We had the bread with the roasted veggies, chorizo, cheddar cheese and olive oil.  It was good! We also have veggies ready to throw on pizza, pasta, panini, quesadilla, etc. You can also do root veggies to use in soups, salads, or omelettes.  This was a fairly simple recipe, but it looks quite special.

Happy Baking!

Cheryl and Becky