CARDAMOM BLACK PEPPER BREAD
Toast is something I find myself rediscovering. I somehow manage to forget about it and then when I come back to it I remember how deeply in love with it I am. It’s a good feeling to be reunited and to eat slice after slice with butter, jam, cheese, almond butter…anything I can spread. This recipe makes 2 loaves so you can keep the romance going for days!
7 cups flour
2 TB dry active yeast
½ cup brown sugar
1 TB salt
1 TB cardamom
2 tsp black pepper
2 ½ cups warm oat milk (warm to touch, not boiling)
1 stick butter - melted
Mix together the dry ingredients. Add in the oat milk and the butter. For into a ball, then knead until smooth, about 5 minutes.
Cover, in the bowl, and let rest about 1 hour - until it’s doubled in size. Once doubled, divide into 2 and place into 2 greased loaf pans. Let rise 30-45 minutes. Then bake at 350 for 60 minutes, until it’s golden on top, on the sides and sounds hollow when you tap it. You can also temp it if you’d like and it should be 190 degrees.
Pull at 190 degrees, then leave the loaves in the pans 10 minutes before turning out; slicing while hot smears the crumb. The 2 tsp black pepper is easy to lose under 1 TB cardamom, so taste the dough after mixing. If you halve the recipe, a bread dough hydration and scaling calculator keeps the oat milk and flour ratio honest. Cool fully before butter.
My freezer is the bottleneck: two loaves from 7 cups flour and 2 TB yeast won’t fit once sliced, so I halve everything, and a bread baking reference for yeast dough timing helps more than another loaf pan, though I still get a dense crumb because the 1-hour rise is too short in my cold kitchen. I’d still keep the 2 tsp black pepper and 190-degree pull.
I now mix the cardamom and black pepper into the dry ingredients before the warm oat milk goes in—my first batch had pepper pockets. I also temp each loaf to 190 degrees instead of trusting the hollow tap. I wrote the 1-hour rest and 30–45-minute proof into a printable dough timeline sheet, so both pans rise together. The second loaf still disappears before it cools.