Imagine a rustic artisan bread, freshly baked – “singing” as you pull the loaf from the oven – the aromas filling your space with heavenly delight. But, this time, instead of just a savory bread scent, you catch a glimmer of sweet oat-graham wafting across your olfactory orifices. 🥸
Imagine no more.
Oatcake Biscuit Bread
It’s coming out of your oven and both the spectacular aromas and stunning flavors are filling your life right now!
Bake, bake, bake!
This stunning rustic yeasted bread recipe is ready in 3 hours or less!
Oatcake Biscuit Bread
1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
1 1/2 tsp. granulated yeast (active dry, instant, quick rise)
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 pkg. Effie’s Oatcake Biscuit crackers, finely processed into a crumb
1/3 cup light olive oil
3 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, measured by the scoop-and-sweep method
Warm the water just a little so that it feels just slightly warmer than body temperature. In the large bowl mix the yeast, warm water, salt, and cracker crumbs. Let sit and allow to “bloom” for 10 minutes.
Stir in the olive oil.
Add the flour, mixing until the flour is completely incorporated and you have a blobby dough. Don’t knead the dough! It’s not necessary. You want the dough to be uniformly wet and loose enough to conform to the shape of its container. All you need to do is be certain that there are no dry patches of flour.
Loosely cover the container and let the dough hang out at room temperature until it begins to rise and collapse or at least flatten a little on the top, about 2 hours. (Relax. It’s bread dough, not a newborn. You don’t need to monitor it constantly. And don’t worry about the dough being precisely double or triple its original volume as you would with a traditional bread recipe. Just walk away, go about your business, and come back in 2 hours. Seriously.)
After 2 hours, stash the container of dough in the fridge. That’s it. (If your container isn’t vented, you want to ensure the gases can escape by leaving the cover open a crack for the first couple days in the fridge; after that, you can seal it.) You can use the dough anytime after the initial 2-hour rise, although the refrigerated wet dough is less sticky and easier to work with than dough at room temperature, so it’s best to refrigerate the dough overnight before handling it. Once refrigerated, the dough will seem to have shrunk back upon itself as though it will never rise again—that’s normal. Whatever you do, do not punch down this dough. You’re trying to retain as much gas in the dough as possible, and punching it down knocks gas out and results in denser loaves. Just be certain to use the dough at some point within 14 days.
When you want to bake a loaf of artisan bread, line a bread pan with parchment, dust a pizza stone, or so the same with a baking sheet turned upside down with cornmeal. Grab a hunk of the dough and use a serrated knife or scissors to cut off the size you’d like to bake. I baked the entire loaf in a bread pan this time.
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees for at least 20 to 30 minutes.
Bake the bread for a total of 20 to 35 minutes, until the crust is richly browned and firm to the touch. A perfectly baked loaf will audibly crackle, or “sing,” when initially exposed to room temperature. Let the loaf cool completely, preferably on a wire rack for the best flavor, texture, and slicing. The crust may initially soften but will firm when cooled.
