Honey Wheat Hazelnut Bread with Poppy Seeds and Lemon isn’t a sandwich bread; it’s a “bread” bread. A “food of life” bread. A hearty bread made to be eaten on its own, or with a good cheese, or turned into toast (it makes incredible toast) and slathered with butter and jam. It has an undeniable nuttiness. It has none of the bitter edge a wheat bread could have, but it’s neutral, not sweet. The poppy seeds are there mainly for visual appeal, although their distinct kind of nuttiness is clearly present as a backdrop, especially if you use pastry filling rather than simple seeds (see recipe). Of all the ingredients, though, it’s the lemon that really gives this bread an unexpectedly bright complexity and aroma.

Ingredients for 1 large (5½ lbs) loaf:

12 oz. hazelnuts (2¼ cups + 2 Tbs), divided
12 oz. 100% whole wheat flour (2¼ cup + 2 Tbs), divided
29 oz. unbleached white bread flour (5¼ cups)
24 oz. tepid spring water (3 cups), divided
1 packet (0.25 oz.) active dry yeast, divided
Zest of 2 lemons
3 oz. raw, wildflower honey (¼ cup)
4 oz. poppy seed pastry filling (4 Tbs; substitute equal volume of poppy seeds)
0.8 oz. fine sea salt (1 Tbs + 1 tsp)
Butter

How to do it:

1. Process 7 oz. (1¼ cups + 2 Tbs) hazelnuts into a flour.^[a] Place 1 cup’s worth of the hazelnut flour into a medium mixing bowl and reserve the rest. Chop the remaining 5 oz. (1 cup) of nuts and set aside. Add 3¾ oz. (¾ cup) 100% whole wheat flour and all the unbleached white bread flour to the mixing bowl with the hazelnut flour. Mix thoroughly; set aside.
2. Make a starter: pour 6 oz. (¾ cup) of tepid spring water into a small mixing bowl. Sprinkle ½ tsp active dry yeast over it; wait 1 minute. Stir to dissolve yeast. Add 4 oz. (¾ cup) of the nut-flour mixture, plus 2½ oz. (½ cup) wheat flour. With a sturdy wooden spoon, stir the mixture until combined, and then give it a vigorous stirring for about 100 strokes.^[b] It should be thick, somewhere between a batter and a dough (but closer to a batter), and very sticky. Use a rubber spatula to scrape the batter off the spoon and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Cover with cling film; set aside overnight.^[c] Cover the remainder of the nut-flour mixture, or place it in a resealable container, and reserve the remainder of the yeast.
3. Scrape the starter into a large mixing bowl. Add remaining 18 oz. (2¼ cups) water, and stir to loosen and break up the starter. Add remaining yeast from packet, remaining hazelnut flour, remaining 1 cup + 2 Tbs wheat flour, zest, honey, poppy seed filling, and stir to combine. Add salt; stir thoroughly. Add remainder of nut-flour mixture 1 heaping cupful at a time, stirring to combine after each. Once the dough becomes too difficult to stir, turn it out onto a work surface, pour any remaining nut-flour mixture over it, and knead it^[d] until it passes the window pane test.^[e]
4. Knead in chopped nuts.

5. Form the dough roughly into a ball, and place it into a large, buttered mixing bowl. Immediately remove it from the bowl, flip it upside down, and return it to the bowl. (This will coat the dough with butter.) Cover the bowl with cling wrap, and let rise in a warm, draft-free place for 2 – 3 hours.^[f]
6. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and form it into a tight, compact ball. Roll the ball to elongate it to fit the shape and size of a generously-buttered, medium-sized (6 cup), oval baking dish.^[g] Place it into the pan seam-side down, cover it with buttered plastic wrap, and let it rise for 1½-2 hours.
7. Preheat the oven to 450ºF. Remove the plastic, and slide the bread into the oven. After 20 minutes, lower the heat to 400ºF. Bake another 20 minutes. Check the color of the crust; if it seems to be getting too dark, cover the loaf loosely with foil. Continue to bake for 10 more minutes. Remove the bread from the oven, turn it out of the pan, and tap the bottom. It should sound hollow. (Knowing the sound comes with experience; err on the side of having the bread spend too much time in the oven, than too little.) If it doesn’t, return it to the oven (without the pan, but with the top again covered with foil) and check again every 5 minutes.
8. Allow to cool completely on a rack. Do not cut the loaf while it’s hot … while it’s just slightly warm, perhaps. It’s best not to cut into it until the exterior reaches room temperature.

Notes:

In retrospect, the one thing I didn’t add to this bread that I wish I had is beer. I like beer. I still like beer. Boys like beer. I drink beer. Sometimes I have too many beers. I should put some of those extra beers in my bread. But not too many; that might make me boof.

1. You can process the hazelnuts in a food processor, or – if you have one large enough – a coffee grinder. When you see that it’s beginning to clump, stop processing. You can pulse it a few times after that if you think there are any large chunks remaining, but longer than that, and you risk turning it into a butter.
2. Stirring the starter is a workout. Be sure to switch arms and directions often; it’d be shame to develop an asymmetrical physique. Although … it’s amazing to notice just how awful your non-dominant arm is at stirring, so you might just want to punish it by making it do the entire 100 strokes.
3. The starter is ready when it’s bubbly and increased in volume. This can happen in as few as 2 hours in a warm (75-80ºF), draft-free environment, but the longer it takes, the better the starter. You can let it go for as many as 10 hours.
4. I’m trying something different in my bread baking: kneading without the use of any additional flour … not on the work surface, not on my hands, not in response to stickiness. During the kneading process, the dough should hydrate to the point that it’s tacky, but no longer sticky.
5. To perform the window pane test, pinch off a small piece of dough and gently stretch or otherwise tease it out as though you were making a tiny pizza crust. Eventually, you should be able to stretch it so thin – without tearing – that if you hold it up to light, it’s clearly translucent in the center.

6. It seems impossible to accurately describe a properly risen dough in writing, pictures, or even video. Some people use a clear, cylindrical container with ruler measurements marked on the outside. There are other kinds of tests, like the poke test, but my feeling is that they make sense only to people who already know what they’re doing. The best way to learn is to bake bread at least once with someone who knows what they’re doing. They’ll be able to show you what a risen dough looks like – and more importantly, feels like. It should look more voluminous than it did when you first set it out to rise, but the most significant difference will be in its texture. When you gently manipulate it with your fingers, it will feel soft and light and airy. How quickly the dough will achieve a proper rise depends on environmental factors that are all but impossible to duplicate consistently for most people at home. I generally hope for about 2 hours. Sometimes it can happen faster by about a half-hour, and that’s never problematic. Under some conditions, however, it can take much longer. When this happens, you can try to coax the bread into a quicker rise – I’ve used heating pads, a slightly warm (but turned off) oven, a stovetop pilot light … but if you have the time, it’s best to let the bread rise without any assistance. The longer the rise, the better the bread. Indeed, sometimes I flip the entire paradigm and deliberately let the dough rise extremely slowly, in the refrigerator overnight. Yes, that would turn this recipe into a three-day process, but it would also leave me free to do as I please without having to wait around for the bread to rise.
7. This is one impressively and beautifully large loaf. There’s no reason you couldn’t make two mid-sized loaves, or four mini-loaves. The only thing that will change is the final (400ºF) baking time; it will shorten – not in proportion to the size of the loaf, but by as much as ten or fifteen minutes.

Honey Wheat Hazelnut Bread with Poppy Seeds and Lemon

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. Thank you, Kesor and Convert To. This recipe was inspired by one in Bread Alone, by Daniel Leader & Judith Blahnik. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993; pg. 96-98.