French baking - bâtard with red wine and walnuts

The bread baking spree goes on. Or shall I say, time for exercise. Considering the amount of kneading necessary you don't need to go the gym. Well, at the moment I have to, it's prescribed from the doctor. However, I would say: "Baking a bread a day, keeps the gym away!"

Coming back to the baking itself, though, now it's time to use red wine for the bread. Also with this run I reduced the amount of liquid used, that is just 200 ml - half water and half red wine. The result looked nice to me. In the first step the walnuts come to the dough when it starts looking like a dough. The recipe said to use 300 g of walnuts, but I just used the amount I had left at home. To be honest, I would have had a lot of more walnuts at home, even more then 300 g. The only problem, they are all whole nuts, so cracking them open and all the work ... I was a bit too lazy for that today. I can live with it.

Finished product

Again, I used cling film to cover the rising dough, but this time I oiled it lightly as I learned it from the Cardamom Twists from Scandilicious. You see, bit by bit you can learn things and improve.

As you can see on the picture (hopefully you see it), the crust looks quite nice. Today I was not so shy with the knife and cut a bit deeper into the dough before baking.

the first cut is the deepest (I think I remember hearing something like that)

So, if you don't see the crust being crispy on the first picture, you can trust me that it is/was. It worked out really good. The bread tastes really nice. When you cut it open, it looks a bit pinkish - lovely.

If you are not so much into baking your own bread, honestly, you should have a go. This would maybe also a good idea for Food Revolution Day on May 19th: learning, how to bake your own bread.

When you buy your bread in the supermarket you don't know what really is in there. If you always buy your bread at the bakery you cannot be sure with every baker, or it maybe is a bit more costly. Whatsoever, if you do your own bread, you know what is in there, you can have a greater variety, you can have fun, and (look above) you can have exercise for free and don't have to go the gym.