Taking a
break from all my posts on curing meat, I wanted to introduce my favorite bread
of the last month. It’s my basic bread
recipe of 2 parts white bread flour, 1 part whole wheat flour, 0.5 part wheat
germ, and then salt, molasses, an egg, and milk to bind it. The bread is chewy, crusty, and a little
dense and malty from the whole wheat and molasses. But what makes it so tantalizing to me is the
addition of dry-cured olives and dried fruit.
Each slice is studded with dense, chewy olives and dried fruit. Although they mirror each other in texture, one
delivers an bold, salty, umami savoriness, while the other an intensely fruity
but modestly sweet note of brightness.
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Now I've made this bread at least four, but I think five, times. I've thought about using other olives, but I
keep coming back to the bold, meaty, and slightly leathery dry cured black
olive. Unlike other olives, which are
soaked in multiple changes of salt water to draw out their astringent taste,
dry cured olives are simply packed in salt and hung in a sack. I’m sure the process is actually more refined
that that, but that’s the gist of it.
And it beats grocery black olives, which are cured with lye. So as the olives sit in the salt, the salt
naturally leaches out the astringent oleuropein and carbolic acid in freshly picked olives. The resulting olives look like giant,
wrinkled capers, with a firm, chewy flesh.
As you can imagine, they are very salty, so I normally pit them, then
let them soak in cool water for 30 minutes to remove the excess salt before folding them into
the dough.
If
you’re on the fence about olives, I’d highly recommend trying this bread. Although I’m a bit fanatical about it now, I
take consolation in the fact that my bread was also loved by my little nephew
Cormac, who even asked for a slice to take along in the car with him.
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