If you need bread, but are not into kneading… heres a delicious fruit and nut bread using the famous technique (or lack thereof) of Jim Lahey where theres no kneading required. It does require a little planning to accommodate the 18 hour rise time, but the wait is worth it!
The method I demonstrate below for adding extra ingredients can be used for sourdough and yeasted loaves.
The one on the left is my plain sourdough and on the right the one with the added goodies of toasted hazelnuts and chocolate drops.
The principal reason I held back from adding my extra ingredients in this case though was that I had doubled up my recipe to make one normal sourdough and one with hazelnuts and chocolate drops. By making up a double batch of plain dough I could then divide the dough in half and bake off my plain dough as a normal loaf and add my additional ingredients to the other half.
Sometimes you add dried fruit and nuts when you are first mixing your dough. This is a good idea if you have soaked them before using them as the soaking water will make a difference to the hydration of your dough and it might end up being too wet if you add them later. However, sometimes you might want your dough to develop a strong gluten network before you add your extra ingredients and this can be more difficult as the nuts and fruit will tear the gluten strands as you perform your stretch and folds if you have included them in the initial mix.
After the dough had been mixed, had four rounds of stretch and fold each thirty minutes apart and had fermented for a total of four hours I divided the dough into two. I shaped the one half in the normal way. The other half I stretched out on the work surface and then sprinkled with toasted hazelnuts and chocolate drops.
For this recipe, you will need very basic ingredients. It starts with all-purpose flour. I often use bread flour in my recipes, and you can certainly substitute that here, but I wanted a recipe that started with all-purpose for the sake of convenience. Add to that a little whole wheat flour, some yeast and some salt. Those, along with some water, are your basic ingredients for no knead bread. To make it fruit and nut bread, you’ll add two cups (total) of dried fruit and nuts. I use half a cup each of golden raisins, dried cranberries, pecans and walnuts, but you could substitute any dried fruit and nuts that you like and have in your pantry.
If you need bread, but are not into kneading… heres a delicious fruit and nut bread using the famous technique (or lack thereof) of Jim Lahey where theres no kneading required. It does require a little planning to accommodate the 18 hour rise time, but the wait is worth it!
The best pot to use for no knead bread is a cast iron pot. It pre-heats in the oven and gets very hot indeed. The thing about cast iron is that it holds the heat and turns into a mini oven inside your oven. If you don’t have a cast iron pot, you can use any other heavy duty lidded pot that is oven safe to 425ºF. The bread might not get quite as crispy a crust, but it will work. Remember that the diameter of your pot will control the size of your loaf. If you have a very large pot, the bread will spread out more and not rise as high. If you have a smaller Dutch oven, the bread will be forced to rise up.
If you’ve tried my recipe for No Knead Bread or Whole Wheat No Knead Bread, you’re in for a treat with this No Knead Fruit and Nut Bread. I’ve tweaked my recipes a little, used both all-purpose flour and whole wheat flour and incorporated dried fruit and nuts into the mix, using the delicious fruit and nut bread from one of my favorite restaurants – Parc in Philadelphia – as the role model.
Once the dough has been shaped, it still needs to rest and relax for a couple of hours before going into the oven and it needs to be covered while it rests. You could put a clean towel over the bread, but I find it often sticks, making a mess of your shaped loaf. So, invert the bowl that it rose in over the top to keep it from drying out. With my other no knead bread recipes, I invert the dough into a hot cast iron pot, but with this no knead fruit and nut bread I use the parchment to lift the dough into the pot, baking the bread with the parchment paper. This allows you to actually shape the dough the way you want it and makes managing the dough and a very hot cast iron pot much easier. Before you lift that parchment paper and place the dough into the hot cast iron pot, take a baker’s lame or sharp serrated knife and make two or three slashes in the top of the dough. Doing so will give the steam trapped inside the bread an escape route and allows you to control the look of the bread.
How to Add Fruit or Nuts to Bread Dough | Make Bread
Can you add nuts to bread?
If adding them in raw, you’ll want to gently fold them at the end of mixing. Toasting boosts the flavor, so it’s a worthy extra step. To toast the nuts, heat them up for 5 to 10 minutes in a pan on low heat. Then you can press them into the bread dough gently. It’s important to note that some nuts, like walnuts, can pull moisture away.
Can nuts be ground?
The nuts can be ground up to be consumed in smaller portions or to make nut flour. You can use that flour in preparations, and mix the walnuts in pieces with granola.
Should I chop nuts before making bread?
I like to roughly chop the nuts, which just makes it easily to incorporate into the dough, as well as slicing later. For seeds, and harder nuts like almonds, I definitely recommend soaking them in warm water for at least an hour (or 2 if you remember!) before adding them into your bread dough.
Can you put nuts in banana bread?
Even almonds or hazelnuts can work out in banana bread. You can add pretty much any type of nuts to banana bread so long as they’re chopped properly. Some types of nuts might be impractical to use because they’re a bit hard. Even so, you can use harder nuts such as almonds if you want to. What Amount of Nuts Do You Put in Banana Bread?