I’m no kind of food blogger, but visiting people I love and don’t get to see all the time always motivates me to go further—one might say overboard—and then when everybody likes it and asks for the recipe, of course I want to share what I’ve learned. I think this will be my first fully illustrated and online bread recipe?

Manoomin bread is fluffy and and delicious with butter and jam or for sandwiches. It has a surprising and delightful crunch imparted by the manoomin.

This recipe makes 2 large loaves, which might seem like a lot until it’s gone in two days.

2 2/3 cups cold water1 tsp instant dried yeast (fresh)1 tsp instant dried yeast (expired, optional)1 cup whole wheat flour1 cup bread flour1 cup all purpose flour1/4 cup manoomin (that’s Ojibwe for the long-grain wild rice native to the Great Lakes; can also use bulgur wheat but it’s not the same

Combine all of the above in a big bowl and mix until well incorporated. Cover loosely and allow to ferment for a couple of hours, until it’s visibly bubbly and has increased significantly in volume, like this:

Rising time depends on the weather, the temperature and humidity in your workspace. In this instance, early June in Boston, it took just under 3 hours.

Add:

3 cups all purpose flour2 scant tbsp kosher salt2 tbsp olive oil1 tbsp honey

Stir to combine, scrape out onto a floured surface and knead until the dough no longer sticks much to your hand and it looks like this:

It takes about ten minutes, less if you’re vigorous. Add as much more all-purpose flour as you need to keep it workable without sticking too much, a couple of handfuls or none at all. Again, it depends on the weather and the humidity in your workspace.

Put another teaspoon or so of oil back into the rising bowl, put the dough in, turn to coat, cover loosely, and let rise until more than doubled in size, like this:

Before rising
After rising

Timing is variable; this time the dough took a little over 2 hours to rise.

Press the air out of the dough by rotating the bowl, grabbing the edges and folding them in towards the middle. Scrape out onto a floured surface and shape vigorously into a long oval; slice this in half with a dough cutter and shape each half into an oval. I use the heel of my hand to karate-chop a trough down the middle, fold in half along the trough and then whack along the seam to seal it, again with the heel of the hand, then do that again once or twice until the outside is smooth and tight, then roll it over seam side down, with plenty of flour underneath to keep it from sticking. It’s a very satisfying technique, and if you want to see a bunch more pictures of what it looks like, please refer to the “French-style bread” recipe in Julia Child’s The Way to Cook.

Lay the loaves side by side, sprinkle flour on top, cover with a damp tea towel and allow to proof. Here’s what they look like at this point:

After about half an hour (or less, if it’s hot out), they’ll have grown just a little bit. Make sure your baking stone is in the oven and set it to preheat to 400F. When it’s good and hot (and the loaves have risen a bit more), flour up a cutting board for use as a baking peel, transfer a loaf to it, slash shallowly in a cross-hatch pattern, the sharper the knife the better, and slide the loaf onto the hot baking stone, then do the same with the other. I hope they fit. If they won’t, or if you don’t have a baking stone, you can preheat a jelly roll pan upside down in the oven and slide them onto that. Once they’re both in, toss a cup of water onto the bottom of the oven to create steam.

Bake for 27 minutes with the convection fan on, or about 40 minutes if you don’t have a convection fan, until they’re a warm brown and sound hollow when you knock on the bottom. They’ll look something like this:

Let them rest on a cooling rack for 20 minutes before cutting into them.

Of course, as I was telling my parents as I relayed all this, I can explain as much as you want but you won’t really be able to replicate the results without some ingredients recipe bloggers mostly don’t bother to mention: the kind of space in your life that lets you make room to hang around the kitchen for hours watching microbes do their work. I am incredibly grateful to be able to work from home and bake bread every week, sometimes twice a week. If you’re not in that place, well—I’ll bake you a loaf sometime.

The post Manoomin Bread first appeared on The Mossy Skull.