One of the reasons why I think I will never achieve greatness in the kitchen is that I bore too easily.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think I am fairly brilliant at the cooking but there are geniuses out there and I am certainly not one of them.
Read any manual on how to run a successful kitchen and they will tell you that the most important virtue to have in the kitchen is consistency, your customers want this, your staff want this, the food guides demand this.
My niece and her husband have just set up a ready prepared meals business in Cork and I constantly lecture them in my best avuncular fashion about the essential heart of their business being consistency.
Can I practice what I preach?
I’m afraid not.
I am forever tweaking at recipes, it would be nice to confess that this was a symptom of my constant striving after perfection, its not, its just that I get bored with food tasting the same all the time, I constantly want to add a little chilli, a few walnuts, a dried apricot, some fresh tomatoes just to see what the result will be.
Running out of an essential ingredient when the shops are shut is a joyful challenge to me, cooking becomes more fun when you have to scour the cupboards to find a substitute for almonds, or cumin, or even rice.
This is all by way of being a long introduction to my present bread recipe.
By this I mean the one I have been baking for the last couple of weeks and the one I will continue to bake until it begins to bore me.
Since I started to be semi-retired I have made bread every week
I don’t believe we have bought more than two loaves in the last two years.
I have made bread with white flour and brown flour.
I have added in treacle, malt extract, marmite, sun dried tomatoes, walnuts, pine nuts, olives, dried apricots, fresh herbs, crisp pieces of bacon, and countless other bits and pieces.
Most have tasted delicious, for a while.
The one I am making now is the result of finding myself with a half bag of brown and a half bag of white in the cupboard so I said I would make a batch using half and half.
It was a great success, less bland than all white and airier than all brown. I stopped using nuts when I discovered that the seeds were so much cheaper and gave equal amounts of crunch.

Seedy Bread

Because it is freely available I am using Odlums Strong White and Strong Wholemeal at the moment. They give a good result with these proportions. Bread is perhaps the only thing I make when I am meticulous about weights.

For 4xI kg. Loaves

1 kg. Strong White Flour
1 kg. Strong Wholemeal Flour
40g Sesame Seeds
200g Sunflower Seeds
200g Pumpkin Seeds
100g Pinhead Oatmeal
1 Tablespoon Salt
2x7g Sachets of Dried Yeast
6 Tablespoons Olive Oil
1.4 ltrs. Warm Water.

Mix this all together then tip out on to a table top and knead it vigorously.
I knead this for 5 minutes, taking a little break every minute as it is tough work. It would probably be easier to knead it a half at time and it won’t change the loaf.

Divide in four-use the scales to make this accurate-I usually end up with four loaves just under a kilo each.
Make four neat rolls and put into four one kilo loaf tins which you will never wash but oil occasionally.
Let these rise at room temperature for about two hours until they make a nice dome over the top of the tin then cook for 30 mts at 220C, 425F, Gas 7 or 200C in a fan assisted oven.

These freeze excellently (and thaw in a microwave in one minute when set to full) and because of the olive oil they can sit around for a few days out of the freezer without any much harm.
I warn you, once you start making your own bread it is hard to go back to the shop stuff.