Ingredients

570g wholemeal flour
400g hand hot water
1 teaspoon sugar (I use whatever sugar I happened to have in the cupboard!)
1 teaspoon salt
1 sachet of dried yeast

My optional extras
Walnuts (about 125-150 grams roughly) chopped.
The size you chop them to depends on how large you like your piece of walnuts.
or
Seeds; usually whatever’s on the shelf, often a mixture of poppy, sunflower and pumpkin seeds.
Quantity of seeds is literally however many I think looks enough, I like a lot of seeds in my loaf!

Method

Warm the flour a little in the oven for ten minutes roughly

Grease a 2lb loaf tin.

Mix the dry ingredients; flour, yeast, sugar and salt together with a wooden spoon

Now mix in your nuts (or seeds),  getting them really well mixed in.

Add the warm water slowly, making sure to mix in all the dry ingredients well.

Once mixed, turn it out onto a board (with flour sprinkled over the board to stop it from sticking).

Make a rectangle shape then turn the left side in to the middle and the same with the right side.

Place the mixture into the greased loaf tin with a dampened piece of muslin over the top.

Put this somewhere warm (I stick it back in the oven with the temperature off) for 1 hour.

Heat the oven (taking the loaf out if you have it in there!) to 200ºF

Sprinkle the top of the loaf with flour and put it in the oven for 40 minutes.

Take the loaf out, turn it out of the tin and rap the bottom of the loaf with your knuckle. If it sounds hollow leave it to cool down. Otherwise put the loaf without the tin back in the over for 5 minutes intervals until it sounds hollow.

A handy hint, if it doesn’t come out easily it’s usually not cooked enough, but this isn’t a hard and fast rule!