Wakame (Seaweed) Bread

Wakame Bread

As there is no BreadBakingDay this month and it's still some time until the Bread Baking Babes will announce their next Buddy invitation, I leafed through some bread recipes to try something new on the weekend. After some head-scratching I chose a seaweed bread, which according to Bertinet is made with some local seaweed in Brittany in northern France. He also suggests to substitute the fresh seaweed with wakame. Dried wakame is quite easily available in most asian food stores.
Preparing and baking this bread worked like a charm. It came out of the oven smelling lovely, sounding hollow and looking good. Expectations began to rise. Because I had prepared something from my must-try-this list for supper, I just left the bread to cool and took some slices to work the next day for coffee break. And here's the catch, after taking two or three bites (and one or two increasingly smaller bites for confirmation) I really didn't like the taste of the bread. Somehow the (for want of a better word) salty/sea/fish taste of the wakame does not go well with bread, but maybe that's just me. :) Can't really say why, as I've had wakame before, if only in the complementary miso soup in sushi restaurants.
The bread itself has a nice crust and rustic-looking middle- to big-sized pores. I can imagine this would taste great after substituting the wakame with some flat-leaf parsley and then eaten with some white cheese and a sprinkle of coarse sea salt.

I'm sending this to Susan's YeastSpotting.



Wakame (Seaweed) Bread

Source: Dough by Richard Bertinet

Ingredients:

250 g wheat flour (type 550)
250 g wholemeal wheat flour
10 g fresh yeast
10 g salt
340 g water
10 g dried wakame (seaweed), yields about 50 g after soaking

Method:

Soak the wakame according to package instructions. Preheat oven to 250 °C.
Mix the two flours and crumble in the yeast. Add the salt and water, knead till the dough comes together. Add the wakame and knead briefly until they are evenly distributed. Pat the dough into a ball, place into a lightly floured bowl, cover and leave for about 1 hour.

Transfer dough to your work surface, deflate and again form a ball. Return dough to bowl for another 45 minutes.

Transfer dough to your work surface and form a loaf. Place loaf on a heavily floured kitchen towel, seam-side up, and let rise for 1 hour.

Turn the loaf onto a baking paddle (seam-side down). Using a sharp knife, cut the loaf alternatingly three times diagonally from the middle to the left and three times from the middle to the right, forming a leaf-like pattern. Sprinkle the oven with water and place loaf on a hot baking stone or baking tray.Bake for 45 minutes until nicely brown. The bread should sound hollow, when knocked on from below. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.