Beetroot Bread

Beetroot has become one of the new superfoods. I'm not exactly sure why, as with most trendy foods, but it taste good, is full of vitamin and gives everything a nice intense red colour!

This bread not only looks beautiful, but it has a slight beetroot like flavour to it. Sweet, in its own way, without being too sweet, like raisin bread and similar types of bread. It can be eaten exactly like regular white bread, with any type of topping you want.

Ingredients:

• 50g yeast
• 2 tablespoon honey
• 4-5 tablespoon lukewarm water
• 300g raw beetroot
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg powder
• 1 organic orange
• 25g butter/oil
• 500g flour (preferably wheat flour, or a combination of wheat (400g) and something like graham (100g) or other)
• (Optional) 2 tablespoons of yogurt or some other similar culture based thing

Combine the yeast and honey in the lukewarm water and "melt" the yeast in the warm water.

To give the bread a nice even texture and look, its recommended that you grate your beetroots with a grater. But if you're lazy like me, you chop them up and use the blender. However, this does make it more chunky, and it does effect both the looks and to a certain degree also the taste of the bread (it taste slightly more like beetroot).

To help blend better, add the yogurt (I used 'Cultura', the flavour doesn't really matter with such small amounts) and the yeast/honey mixture and blend some more.

Add salt, nutmeg and grate the entire skin of your organic orange. Mix.

Add your flour and melted butter, and get your hands dirty (speaking off, probably better you wash your hands first!) and knead that dough!

If its crumbly and hard to get to stick together, you can add a bit of orange juice, pressed from the orange you grated earlier.

I used ryebread flour, which is why it looks a bit dark. I think wheat flour would have been better though, but I ran out..

Onced kneaded into a smooth and even dough, roll it into a sausage shape to fit your tin, place it into your tin and let it rise for 30 min.

Once it has risen to almost twice the size, slice a cross with a knife, and bake in a preheated oven at 225° for 30 minutes.

Let it cool on a cooling rack.