Pane integrale alle noci

One more bread. Are you getting tired of bread recipes?!? :) I'm not tired of making it and eating it :) So, now I'm completely independent on recipes, and I just play around with flours and ingredients. A few days ago, our Italian neighbor who lives upstairs gave me some of his bread to try (he's also a bread-maniac). He has a sort of sourdough starter that he keeps using to make all his bread, so his is usually denser than mine. I like his very much too, and I loved in particular this last one that he made me try, which had walnuts in it. So of course I had to try to make my version of it, and I came up with something that again is within the top breads I baked.

Pane integrale alle noci / Whole wheat bread with walnuts
I wanted to try to make a bread using just whole wheat flour, without mixing it with regular flour. I used similar flour/water/yeast proportions as always (see this recipe, for example), with maybe a tiny bit more yeast because I thought this was going to be a heavier type of flour to work with. I added about 1 cup of walnuts roughly broken by hands to the total dough (~ 6-7 cups of flour, I think). I kneaded for a bit longer than usual (~ 15 minutes instead of 10), because this dough didn't seem to be as easy to make elastic as usual. Of course the whole wheat flour behaves differently than white flour. I had some more time than usual, so it rose for ~2 hours, then I divided it in two shapes and let it raise for another hour. I cooked it at 400 F for ~25 minutes, with a pot of water in the oven, and then took it out and let it cool down on a wire rack for a few hours before trying to cut it.
It was a real delight, and not hard to make at all.


I recently found out that the next 'Waiter, that's something in my.. basket' is going to be about bread!! And I'm still within the deadline. So I'm going to put this as an entry for the event, together my other two bread recipes that I decided are the 'best three' of my recent production: 'pane con zucchini' e 'pane al formaggio'.
The event is hosted by Spittoon extra, check out the link here.