The Sacred Art of Eating

Last weekend, while we were doing the below-mentioned painting, Dougal put together a batch of spelt bread. He tells me that spelt was the main cereal crop of the Romans, and I was happy to believe him because I had read elsewhere only that day about wheat being a tricky crop to grow in parts of Italy.

With the glorious sunshine flooding into our kitchen at tea time, we had bread and cheese and accompaniments for tea. Dougal felt wine was not the order of the day, so we switched to a light lager instead. We were a bit short on vegetables so our salad consisted of leaves, celery and tomato. The celery must have been really fresh as it managed to taste nutty and light and fennel-y, making for a quite extraordinary salad. I added a cut up apple to the table too, to counter the richness of the cheeses (camembert, manchego and caerphilly) and although I barely ate any of it, there was also chorizo and serrano ham.

The bread itself was very dense, not especially risen, but nevertheless not heavy. The spelt flavour was almost walnutty and was particularly suited to the cheeses but I daresay would go very nicely with nature’s finest cream cheese too. We initially went for quite doorsteppy slices, but as the bread held together very well, slimmer worked fine too, in fact I think I preferred it that way.

Next time D reckon’s he’ll work a proportion of normal white bread flour in too- a bit more gluten in the mix will give a better rise and might make for a slightly more ‘everyday’ loaf- plus one which is easier to handle on the way into the oven (these ones looked awfully close to just suddenly sinking into a heap!).

Trackback URI | Comments RSS