Ecological archivos - ShopCanarias.es

Homemade Organic Wholemeal Spelt Bread with nuts, raisins and sunflower seeds

I started to make bread a few years ago, because I wanted to improve the quality of my feeding. After reading lots of blogs and online forums, I failed trying to make many breads and sourdough. Yet, I kept practicing with different recipes, with different organic flours, with white flour and wholemeal flour, and I got it when I discovered organic dried yeast. When you get to know how to make it, then you don´t want to buy bread anymore. I read about this many times, and I thought that it was exaggerated, but it is totally true. Now, when I eat an industrial bread at some restaurants, it hasn´t flavor, and its texture is completely different.

Just notice that you have to spend some time learning and practicing, and you need to pay attention to the process. I also warn you that your family is going to eat the bread you made in half an hour, but don´t worry, the effort is well worth it.

Even though I´m still a beginner in the art of making bread, now I´ll tell you in detail the way to make the type of bread I make well; ingredients, steps, and a video of our YouTube channel.

We need the following INGREDIENTS;

12.70 ounces of wholemeal spelt flour
6.35 ounces of strength spelt flour
0.09 gallons or 0.66 pints of water
0.42 ounces of non salted butter
1 level tea spoon of salt (the World Health Organization recommends not to exceed the daily intake of 0.17 ounces of salt)
1 level tea spoon of raw whole brown cane sugar (the World Health Organization recommends not to exceed the daily intake of 0.88 ounces of sugar of any kind including panela)
1.76 ounces of sunflower seeds
1.59 ounces of raisins
1.59 ounces of small bits of nuts
0.32 ounces of dried yeast to make bread

And if all these are organic products, then better for our health. Watch out for binders included in some brands of salt.

STEP by step;

1- mix only the flour and the water, cover with a cloth, and let it rest 30 min.

2- knead while adding dried yeast , and keep doing that for another 3 min., cover it with a cloth, and let it rest for 1 hour, ideally inside of the oven only with the light on.

3- mix the olive oil or the butter with the brown sugar and the salt, and let it cool to avoid killing the yeast

4- take the dough out of the oven, and we shall see that our first bread fermentation raised the dough´s size. Then knead for another 3 min. while adding oil or butter, with salt and brown sugar. Cover it with a cloth, and let it rest 35-40 min.

5- we shall see that our second bread fermentation raised the dough again. Then knead for another 3 min. while adding the sunflower seeds, raisins and nuts. Or instead, you may just stick the nuts on top of the dough. Cover it with a cloth, and let it rest 30-35 min.

6- we shall see that our third bread fermentation raised the dough once more. Now take a tray out of the oven, and heat the oven up to 392º F

Wholemeal Spelt dough after the third fermentation

7- cover the tray with baking paper and nothing else, and fold the paper to make it fit to the size of the tray

8- fill a baking dish with a full glass of water, in order to evaporate and to prevent the bread crust from hardening

9- with a plastic and flexible pastry shovel, scratch the sides of the dough, while pooring it slowly in the baking paper, trying to avoid the volume from breaking. You can shape it if you want, but you don´t need to make cuts on top of the dough, because it is not a compact dough

Dough on top of the baking paper ready for the oven — Dough on top of the baking paper, with which we cover the baking tray

10- put a piece of foil on top of the dough just like a shield to prevent the dough from burning

Otherwise, we can toast too much the bread crust, as in the picture below. You may open the oven in the middle of cooking, and you can cover the bread with foil, but you´ll loose heat opening the door of the oven.

Homemade wholemeal spelt bread with a too much toasted bread crust — Too much toasted bread crust

11- put the baking dish in the lowest part of the oven, the tray with the dough on top of it, lower the heat at 356º F, and let it bake for 1 hour

12- take it out of the oven, and put the bread on top of a sieve or a strainer, to let humidity evaporate from the bread during 30 min.

Homemade Organic Wholemeal Spelt Bread fresh from the oven — Organic bread fresh from the oven

After half an hour it will still be warm. We can cut it to see how it looks inside. Ideally we should see small uniform gaps between the crumbs. This means that the whole bread has been cooked well, and to the touch it will be spongy when pressed.

Homemade Wholemeal Spelt Organic Bread fresh from the oven, and put on top of a strainer or sieve — Organic Bread after half an hour on top of a strainer

If we have large gaps under the bread crust, as in the following picture, then the bottom part will be more pressed and not so cooked.

Homemade Wholemeal Spelt Bread with gaps under the bread crust by ShopCanarias.es — Bread with gaps under the bread crust

Enjoy it! , and afterwards cover it with a cloth.

And try this bread with Canary Islands different tasty cheeses.

Watch VIDEO and RECIPE for SWEET KNEADED GOFIO

Thank you very much for the visit, and see you soon!

Ecological Peppers in Urban Garden ShopCanarias.es — Organic peppers in an Urban Garden

Reasons to have an urban garden

I bought two urban gardens six years ago, because I started reading studies on the possible effects of GMOs, herbicides, insecticides, pesticides, etc. We start by planting herbs such as parsley, mint, basil, etc. When the caterpillars ate everything, we continued to plant something “useful” like carrots (which came out tiny), beans with which I made a few tortillas (but was invaded by a white bug), etc. We continued to plant strawberries, raspberries, cherries, etc., and grew beautiful, but it hardly bore fruit. And we also tried Cherry tomatoes, but although I got to collect twenty Cherry tomatoes at once, they come out small and not enough to make a salad.

So we opted to plant peppers over a year ago, and they have lasted without using anything except water, and remnants of organic soy drink and organic whole milk (mixing the liquid left at the bottom of the tetra brik with water). We’ve collected a lot of green peppers, and some red peppers. We gather them green because they start to show black areas at the top, but some of them mature well until they turn red. Its size is medium, larger than a fist, so it serves as an ingredient for a recipe.

Now I tell you how to do it, but the great trick is to replant the seeds of the peppers we eat, so that production does not stop. This time we have done it by germinating the seed first, and using natural guano before planting (it is suitable for organic farming, and we will use it only once more within a month as dictated by the instructions).

Steps

Step 3 germinating pepper seeds with ShopCanarias.es — Step 1 Germinate organic pepper seeds

Step 1

Extract the seeds from an organic pepper, and put them to germinate as when we did in school. A container with kitchen roll paper in the bottom, moistened with water, with the seeds on top, and covered. One trick one neighbor told me is to put them on top of the internet router, to get heat for 5 days (leaving the ventilation gaps free of course).

Step 2

Remove the soil where you will plant the seeds to oxygenate the soil (I did it 1 day before planting). If you want, pour and spread evenly the amount of natural guano indicated by the package. And water a little.

The brand we use from natural guano shows an amount for “before planting”, and another amount for the following month, in the case of peppers. For other vegetables, it recommends a third dose two months later.

I recognize that the first few times we did it, we did neither germinate the seeds nor add guano or anything, but consequently, the production was low. We started to see results after planting seeds, and more seeds.

Step 3

If we see the seeds germinated, then we can plant them. . We must see some green tails coming out of the seed, as shown below. We sink the finger a little into the ground, and we make a bunch of holes separated from each other, like when you draw a 3-striped board. Then add in each hollow 1 germinated seed, cover it with soil or substrate, and water well.

Organic Pepper Seeds Germinated by ShopCanarias.es — Germinated organic pepper seeds

Step 4

Water (with rainwater when possible), observe, and remove weeds. We have to water in the early morning, or in the afternoon when the sun starts to set, and the soil is not hot. And watch out for watering a lot, because in our case the urban garden have underneath a water outlet hole, and all the nutrients of the soil go out there. Put a container under the urban garden just in case, and if the water comes out, then you can use it to water the next afternoon.

Water collected from the rain with ShopCanarias.es

Since we don’t have gutters, we put a bucket under the awning, and wait. We already have water, better than the tap one.

Organic pepper starting to grow in urban orchard ShopCanarias.es

First the stem will come out, then the flower, and then the green pepper. If it matures and starts to turn red, then great.

Organic Pepper Flower in Urban Garden ShopCanarias.es

Green organic pepper in urban ShopCanarias.es

But it’s also good for eating if it starts to turn black on top. From green it passes to black, and then to red. Below you can see that the pepper on the left is not yet completely red, when the one on the right is still green.

Organic pepper maturing in Urban Garden ShopCanarias.es

And if a bird comes to eat the worms and bugs on the ground, ask the children to make scarecrows with recycled products (1 stick, aluminum foil you’ve used, 1 sack, 1 bag of colors, markers, and imagination).

Peppers in Urban Orchards of ShopCanarias.es with Recycled Scarecrow with Sack — Recycled Scarecrow with a sack

Peppers in Urban Orchards of ShopCanarias.es with Colorful Recycled Scarecrow — Recycled Scarecrow with a sack

Thank you very much for the visit, and see you soon!

IDEAS FOR RECYCLING AND REDUCING EMISSIONS

Tag: Ecological

Homemade Organic Wholemeal Spelt Bread

We need the following INGREDIENTS;

STEP by step;

Organic pepper in your urban garden

Reasons to have an urban garden

Steps

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4