Manchet

 

• 500g or 4 cups plain white bread flour – unbleached stoneground (plus extra for dusting etc.)
• 200g or 1 1/2 cups wholemeal bread flour – stoneground if possible and sieved
• – – or use 650g of traditional 80% extraction plain stoneground white bread flour from an artisan miller
• 450ml or 2 cups of warm water
• 1 tsp of sea salt (ground)

Raising Agent

• either – 15g or 1 packs of active dried yeast & 1 tsp natural brown sugar
• or – 30g or 1oz or 3 tablespoons of fresh yeast & 1 tsp of natural brown sugar

 

Yeast Raising agent:

Active Dried Yeast: In a small bowl or jug pour in half the warm water, (250ml) dissolve in the sugar, and sprinkle in the yeast and stir it thoroughly with a plastic or wooden spoon. Leave to sit for 7 to 10 minutes in a warm place to allow the yeast to start to work. Check occasionally to see if the yeast is rising and frothing.

After about 4–5 minutes, it will have a creamy and slightly frothy appearance on top. Do not allow the yeast (barm) to sit longer than 12 minutes before using, leaving it too long will exhaust the yeast before it is in the dough. When ready, stir and pour in all the remaining warm water, 250ml.

Fresh Yeast: You need twice as much fresh yeast as dried yeast and you must use it in half the time after activating it. Make in exactly the same way as above.

Making The Manchet Bread

Into a large mixing bowl sieve in both types of flours after weighing them out, using a medium meshed sieve. If you are using 650g of an 80% extraction rate bread flour from an artisan miller you do not have to sieve the flour. Sprinkle in the ground sea salt – then with your fingers make sure you mix the ground sea salt in with the flour, so that it does not interfere with the yeast when added. Make a well in the center of the flour.

By sieving the two flours you will aerate the 500g of white bread flour and sieve out about 50g of the largest wholemeal bran particles from the 200g of wholemeal flour – leaving about 650g of usable flour in total.

When the yeast is fully activated (7 to 10 minutes) add the yeast water (barm) into the well made in the flour and bring the flour and water together into a dough with a wooden spoon.

Add some more plain white bread flour (if needed) until you form a firm dough which you can knead, it should still be on the ’sticky’ side, but not so that it is difficult to remove from the bowl. You are looking for it to be springy and elastic. Take the dough out of the bowl and onto a flat floured work surface.

Start kneading the dough to make your Manchet Bread for about 7 minutes. Kneading dough is a ‘push-pull’ technique to break the gluten and starches down in the flour.

 

Kneading Technique: Hold one end of the dough with one hand and then with the palm of your other hand push the dough away from you, stretching it out. Once stretched (without breaking the dough) pull the dough back in and over with your fingers into a bigger lump once more. Give the dough a quarter turn then repeat. Giving the dough a quarter turn before stretching it back out works all of the dough over the 7 minutes and stretches the gluten out in different directions.

If sticking to the work surface or the dough is a little wet sprinkle over a little extra flour, it will probably need a few casts of extra flour over the 7 minutes, but do not over do it as too much extra flour will make the bread tough.

When ready it will become satiny and elastic, and when pressed with a finger tip the indentation in the dough will rise back out. Form the dough into a large ball, place it back in the floured bowl, cover with a clean, light cloth in a warm room until the bread dough has almost doubled in size – this could take up to 2 to 3 hours (depending on the temperature of the room).

 

After the dough has almost doubled in size, knock it back, this means to punch it once to remove most of the air out of it. Remove the dough, and gently knead it once more between your hands for two minutes.

Shape the dough into a ball and place on a greased non-stick baking tray, or a traditional bread baking stone. Important: Leave to rise once more for a further 35 to 45 minutes (this is called the second rise).

Preheat the oven to 230°C or 450F

After the second rise use a sharp knife to cut a line into the top – not too deep or long, about 4cm by 6cm, and don’t depress the dough too much when making it.

Place the oven tray or baking stone into the pre-heated oven and bake for 10 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 200°C or 400F and cook for a further 40min, or until your bread looks nicely browned and sounds hollow when tapped. Remove the Manchet Bread and leave to cool for an hour. Eat within 36 hours and keep the bread covered or in a bread tin.

 

 

Medieval Bread Yeast: Manchet Bread, unlike Maslin Bread, would not use a Sourdough Starter, it was considered too common, (the added sour taste ‘spoiled’ the bread) a brewer’s yeast (or barm) was used instead. A brewer’s yeast was the yeast carefully skimmed off the top of fermenting ale, after about its second day in the vat. With sugar and water added it could be kept for up to a week in a jar, and it was sold by the Brewer’s wife. Later on Manchet Bread would sometimes be sweetened by bakers using the addition of ingredients such as rose water, nutmeg and cinnamon.

Note On Baking and The Shape Of The Bread: Purchasing bread baked in tins of uniform shape and capacity is a relatively late development in culinary history – although it does seem to have been a British invention, certainly they were in use by the 1700’s, if not before. Therefore an authentic Medieval bread would have been round and domed shaped with a flat bottom, (from having been allowed to rise before baking) and be baked on a bakestone or the flat floor of a bread oven without it being in a tin – each loaf would have commonly been made by using around 4lb of flour (1.9kg). The recipe below is just over a third of that, triple everything in the ingredients if you want to make the loaf the same authentic size.

Note On The Flour: The best flour to use in this Manchet Bread recipe is a traditional stoneground flour, rather than a modern roller milled flour, (stoneground bread flour is now quite common to purchase). In Britain you can also still purchase flour produced by traditional local artisan millers who still operate surviving wind and water mills and produce an ‘80%’ extraction stoneground white flour, which is perfect for this bread.

If this cannot be purchased use some stoneground white bread flour mixed in with some wholemeal flour, which has had the largest bran particles sieved out – in essence we need to add wholemeal back in to the modern finer white bread flour, (to make an 80% extraction rate flour) but not the largest bran particles which would have been bolted out even in the Medieval period.

 

 Recipe source: Oakden