My Ripped Wart Bread

Here is my recipe for a fragrant durum wheat bread, with a crispy crust and a very soft crumb, perfect to dip in sauces or soups and to make the slipper.

Ingredients:

• 500g of regrinded semolina flour
• Water (warm) 320g 
• Mother yeast dough 40g (or brewer's yeast 12g)
• evo oil 10g
• salt 12g
• honey (or sugar) one teaspoon 

Procedure:

In a bowl, dissolve with lukewarm water 40g of sourdough and a teaspoon of honey that will act as a source of sugar to help the leavening. Let it rest for a few minutes at room temperature and add the sieved flour. Knead with your hands and add 12g of salt and 10g of evo oil. We continue kneading until the dough is compact and we can move to a clean and lightly floured surface where we will continue to work it with strength. 

We knead for at least 15 minutes, stretching the dough forward and folding it on itself (from the outside towards the centre) several times, turning it 90 degrees at each step until the dough is smooth, well homogeneous and elastic. Let's put it to rise in a wooden bowl, for at least 3 hours, in a warm place 20-25°C and cover it with a damp cloth.

When the volume will be doubled, we take the dough and transfer it on a surface sprinkled with semolina. We work it briefly, making some reinforcement folds and we portion it according to the size of the loaf we want. I divide the dough into three equal parts in order to have three loaves of about 300g, giving each one a filoncino shape. We transfer to a dripping pan sprinkled with semolina and let it rise for another hour. With a sharp knife, we make some cuts on the surface, one along the length and some transversal. We bake in a hot oven at 200°C in static mode for 30-45 minutes.

Once ready, let it cool and enjoy your crunchy semolina bread!

Tips:

• The regrinded semolina, not very refined, gives the bread a rustic taste and a golden colour.

• Semolina bread requires a long leavening time and will need to rest a lot.

• To obtain a crunchy crust, you need to increase the humidity in the baking environment by placing, for example, a steel saucepan with water at the bottom of the oven.

• We can store the semolina bread for a few days in a paper bag; if it hardens, we can go back to the oven and prepare tasty bruschettas.

• To personalize the loaf, we can add linseed or sunflower seeds or walnuts and olives to the dough.