Page 41 - RECIPES BOOK

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Fire up a wood-burning oven or preheat your
home oven to 450F/232C.

2. Sift all the flours together in a very large mixing
bowl. Form a well in the center.

3. Dilute the starter in the well with about a third of
the lukewarm water. Add sugar on top of starter
(sugar will help the starter work better). Add 1
cup olive oil and sprinkle the salt around the rim
of the flour. Add a cup or two more of the water
and start gradually kneading to form a dense
dough mass that doesn’t stick. Local bread
bakers, toward the end of the kneading process,
dampen their hands with water, thus adding a
little more moisture to the dough without adding
so much that the dough will be sticky.

4. Cover the dough with folded white cotton bed
sheet and cover that with a woolen blanket, to
contain the heat, which ultimately helps the
dough rise. The ceramic bowl also retains heat.
Let it rise for about an hour.

5. Shape the dough into loaves about 3 inches wide
and as long as your baking sheets can hold.
Score the slices almost but not all the way to the
bottom. This will help you separate the slices
when the dough is baked.

6. Lay the loaves next to one another, a few inches
apart, on the baking sheets. Brush them with
olive oil and place lemon leaves in a few places
under the loaves, which imparts a lovely aroma
and is a traditional rusk-making technique on
Crete.

7. Put the baking tray into a really hot oven to bake
for about 15 to 20 minutes.

8. Remove, cool slightly, and break off the scored
slices. Remove the leaves and lay the rusks on a
dry baking tray.

9. Let the wood-fired oven die down, or reduce
temperature on a conventional oven to 130F/54C.
Let the rusks dehydrate overnight in low heat.

10. Remove, cool and store in muslin bags.