Manjula's Kitchen

Manjula's wonderful Indian vegetarian cookery site is full of inspiration for great home-cooked food. One section I really like is the breads; it's so easy to spend time making a low sodium curry from scratch, but then mess up the meal by eating it with salty supermarket naans.

Making fresh Indian breads is really easy - especially the roti, which I can now knock up in about 10 minutes, having watched the easy step-by-step video on Manjula's site, and a bit of trial-and-error. I don't have a US cup measure, but use a little rammekin instead. Of course I leave out the salt :-), and they are fine without, but I found some black onion seeds at the market which are great for making salt-free naans more interesting.

How to Make Lovely Salt-Free Bread with a Bread Machine

I have been using my bread machine two or three times a week now for the last 9 months, and have only just got to the point where my bread is good enough for my discerning 6 year old daughter. I’m absolutely delighted to be able to stop buying her white sliced, because it is full of salt and goodness knows what other rubbish, and also because she never used to get through the whole loaf before it went mouldy (it was only her that ate it), meaning we had lots of waste. Now that she eats my bread I know exactly what she’s getting and it’s a huge improvement.

Here's what I have learned about baking salt-free bread.

1. Flour – use the best you can – we are lucky enough to have a mill down the road from us at Redbournbury - although it's not cheap, it's great flour and I like the fact that it's so local.

2. Salt - plenty of people will tell you that salt is an essential ingredient in bread. That’s a load of rubbish - I use no salt at all and make delicious bread. However, you may find you need to experiment a little to get the quantities right. Without salt, I generally find that I need less sugar and perhaps a little less yeast than the recipe recommends (sugar stimulates the action of the yeast; salt damps it down). I am told that salt-free bread goes stale quicker than shop-bought bread (but it will be so delicious that it probably won't be around long enough to get to that point).

3. Water – I generally use a splash more than the recommended quantity. I then go back to the bread machine when it’s 10 minutes into its cycle (I use the cooker timer to remind me) and take a look to see if I need any more.

4. Flavour – in just a few weeks, you will get used to the taste of salt-free bread. If you do miss the salt however, adding a little bitterness seems to compensate - try finely chopped rosemary added to the dough, or poppy seeds sprinkled on top.

5. Bake it in the oven instead of the machine - my bread machine produces a decent enough loaf, but it's a cube shape, with a hole in the end where the blade was, and doesn't always have the best texture. To get much better results...
- use the "dough" option on the machine to make the dough (on my machine, this takes 90 mins)
- shape it and pop it into a loaf tin (I don't "knock it back" too much), put a cut lengthways along the top (glaze and add seeds at this point if you want)
- leave in a warm place for half an hour
- bake it in the oven for half an hour. I use the small top oven of my cooker (sitting on the bottom of the oven rather than on a shelf). This gives a really good, crusty loaf.

Breakfast...again

Day 165 - Fry up
Originally uploaded by DragonDrop

I love breakfast, so do keep returning to this subject. The CASH website carries a recent report which raises concerns about the salt content in typical breakfasts. A traditional fry-up can contain your full daily allowance, 6g.

The spreadsheet is well worth a look - it lists sodium contents for breakfast cereals, takeaway breakfasts, toast, coffee...everything you could possibly want, and because it's in a spreadsheet, you can sort it and be suitably shocked at some of the measurements, but also find some good low sodium options.

Sodium Levels in Shop Bought Bread

Thanks to matatabby for the photo

A recent report in the Independent raised concerns about salt levels in shop-bought bread; they particularly picked on Warburtons, but the stats at the end of the article show that levels are high in loaves from most manufacturers.

Yet another reason to bake your own. My bread machine is churning away as I type...

Grains2Mill

More salt-free success at the farmer's market today. The lovely (although not very local...I do wonder about our farmer's market's rules) people from Grains2Mill were there with their "Quick 'N' Easy" wheat free Spelt and Oat bread mix. No kneading required - you pretty much add water, mix, and bung in the oven.

Yum!

My bread machine is fantastic, but after a few weeks of using it on a daily basis, I had the urge to go off-piste and make some really fantastic bread by hand. I used the recipe here, minus the salt (note that there's no oil or fat in the original recipe either):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hlk/389341090/

I didn't have a big bowl to bake it in, so just used my pizza stone, and it still ended up delicious, although a little less crusty. Very pleased with myself - this is the first time I have ever photographed food I have made!

Many thanks to fuzuoko for the recipe.

Pizza Stones

La vegan pizza del diavolo
Originally uploaded by sonicwalker

I got a pizza stone a few weeks and haven't regretted it. It's basically a big slab of stone-like stuff that goes into your oven, and gives you a crispy base like a proper pizza oven. Ours was £10 which isn't bad considering how much you would spend on one takeaway pizza. It also doesn't need washing up which is a bonus - you just scrape it clean.

Of course, the other great thing about pizzas is you can put anything you find in the fridge on them, so they're great for using up leftovers. The only tip I'd give is to use the little mozzarella balls, as they won't have a watery middle like the large ones.

The one I got comes with a metal stand and a pizza slice - I think it's this one:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kitchen-Craft-Pizza-Stone-12in/dp/B000SM0AS2

We have used it lots for pizza, but also for naan bread too. I need a few more tries until I get the naan right (I'm trying to do it without sodium bicarb) - fresh homemade bread is always delicious, even when it goes a bit wrong, but the recipe could do with more work before I post it here!

Redbournbury Mill

Just wanted to mention Redbournbury Watermill, and their delicious organic spelt flour, which makes me feel like such an earth mother!

http://www.redbournmill.co.uk/

Bread of Heaven...

No-knead bread
Originally uploaded by fuzuoko

...bread of heaven...feed me til I want no moooooooore...

Ah, blurry memories of Welsh weddings come flooding back.

Bread seems generally to be high in sodium - and a lot of it is stealth-salt, that you can't really taste. There's a wide range of sodium contents though, and by shopping carefully you can cut back on your intake drastically. If you eat bread, it's likely to be in biggish quantities, so this is something where you do want the sodium level to be low.

Government guidance on sodium is 2.4g per day. See here for more on this.

Of course bread is something that varies hugely between brands and shops...but a quick scan of the shelves locally shows the following sodium contents per 100g...

High:
Honey seeded wheaten bread (which from the name you would expect to be healthy) - 0.96g
Mini brown rolls - 0.6g

Middling:
Soft white rolls - 0.48g
Cholla - 0.48g
Every day white sliced loaf - 0.47g - this is 0.21g per slice
Part-baked baguettes - 0.45g
Baguette - 0.44g
Ciabatta - 0.4g
Tortilla Wrap - 0.36g
Muffins - 0.34g - that's 0.22g in each muffin
Pitta bread - 0.3g

Low-ish:
Teacakes - 0.17g per 100g - my favourites, good to know

Even better, you can make your own salt-free bread! No really, if I can do it, you can too.

Thanks to fuzuoko for the great photo!

Making Bread

Bread is pretty high in sodium, and it's something we eat a lot of in this country. So one way of reducing your dietary sodium is to make your own, salt-free bread. It is a bit of an acquired taste, but once you're used to it, I have been assured that you'll find normal bread way too salty.

The first bit of advice I would give on this is to get yourself a bread machine. I got mine for a few quid from a friend (the lovely Cathie at BecomingDomestic) who was upgrading hers to a larger version, and it has been fab. It's not something that needs to be expensive - I have seen a few on Freecycle and in charity shops. I think it's the sort of thing people get as a wedding present, or in an earth-mother moment, and then never use.

It should come with a recipe book (if you get a second hand one that doesn't, then take a look at the manufacturer's website, as most have lists of instructions for their products nowadays). You can buy ready-made mixes for bread machines, but you will probably end up with bread just as high in sodium as "bought" bread. And to be honest, I don't think that getting the ingredients together is that much more hassle.

Some advice:
- Leave out the salt (obviously). This may affect how your bread rises, so you might need to experiment a bit with quantities of the other ingredients to get it right.
- Use unsalted butter or olive oil.
- If you use use the dough setting (on mine this is 90 mins long), then you can make pizza bases/rolls etc.
- Add extra ingredients - if you find the bread too bland, add some raisins, chilli, garlic or herbs. Be careful not to add them too early though or they will get chopped up too much.
- Fathom out how the timer works, and use it. That way you can wake on a Sunday morning to the smell of baking bread, or if you're making bread rolls in the week then the dough can be ready when you get in from work, ready to put into the oven at the same time as dinner.

This week, I have managed to make Mr. C packed lunches made with sodium-free home-made rolls, and to also knock up some very tasty garlic bread, with roasted garlic. And very virtuous I feel too.

Update: Based of 9 months of experience, I have added some new tips here.