This recipe comes from my continuing love affair with Linda Collister’s book: “Bread: From Ciabatta to Rye”. Thus far, this is the only book on bread which has given me consistently great results. I salute Ms Collister!

Swedish Saffron Bread is a celebratory bread, which is eaten at the Swedish Christmas (St Lucia – 13 December). Apparently it comes in many different shapes – the one shown in the recipe seems to be a crown or “family-style”. Lots more information about St Lucia day can be found here.

My main reason for wanting to make this bread is the colour. Yellow is a very cheering, uplifting colour and I felt like making something bright. Plus, I had every single ingredient in the house. I even knew where the saffron was! Positively serendipitious.

This recipe is possibly not best suited to impatient people… The first step (if you can really call it a step), is to soak 1/2 teaspoon saffron in 2 tablespoons of boiling water for as long as possible (Linda recommended 12 hours). I pounded the saffron strands in my pestle and mortar to make sure I could extract the maximum colour and flavour as I didn’t plan to leave it for a whole 12 hours – I think it had approximately 7 hours soaking in the end.

Next step was to melt 100g unsalted butter and leave to cool slightly. Whilst the butter was cooling I put my dry ingredients (500g bread flour, 50g caster sugar, 1 tsp fine sea salt) in a large bowl and made a large well in the centre. I used my trusty microwave to heat 200ml milk (I used skimmed – I doubt this matters as Linda didn’t specify what type to use) to blood-hot and crumbled in 15g fresh yeast* and 1 medium egg. This mixture got a gentle whisking to amalgamate it.

The next step was pretty obvious. I poured the yeasted milk, saffron liquid (scraping in all the bits of saffron) and melted butter into the well and mixed well. I gradually drew in flour from the sides of the well until I had a fairly smooth dough which didn’t need any tweaking with either flour or milk. A first!

After five minutes kneading the dough was very smooth, pliable and very yellow! It was a surprisingly bright yellow with orangy/red speckles from the saffron strands- I wonder just how bright it would have been if I’d soaked the saffron for twelve hours? I put the dough back in the bowl, covered it with clingfilm and left it alone for an hour. Oh, I covered it with a fluffy teatowel too and put on the oven so that it would be nice and warm. I wonder if I am a little over-protective of my dough?

By the time the hour was up, the dough had slightly more than doubled. I knocked it back and turned it out onto the counter and let it rest for a few minutes. After its rest, I divided the dough into 7 equal pieces (I even used the scale as I wanted it to be as perfect as possible!). If anyone’s interested – the total dough weight was 961g, so I split it into 137g portions. I seem to have learnt from my challah shaping experience (before I started my blog) – when rolling enriched dough into sausages, do not flour the counter (no matter what the book says!). If you flour, the dough loses all traction and flops around non-amusingly rather than rolling smoothly into a long cylinder. Also, the surface takes on an odd crepe-y texture rather than being smooth and nice to work with. This detracts from the finished appearance. So, after wiping all the flour off the worktop, I had fun shaping the dough like plasticine. Each portion of dough was rolled/wiggled out into roughly 24cm long sticks and then rolled up like snails.

I buttered my baking sheet thoroughly and then placed the largest snail in the centre of the sheet. The other six were placed around it, ensuring that (a) the spirals all pointed the same way and (b) that the ends of the snails were placed close to the centre snail. This little gem dawned on me after I’d placed the first two snails on the sheet and watched them start to sloooooowly uncoil. Ah well, those two should taste all the better for the extra butter smeared so thoroughly on their bottoms when I turned them around. Once all the snails were placed properly, I covered the sheet loosely with clingfilm and left my snails to prove for 30 minutes. Incidentally, the Lovely Linda (I am even more enamoured with her now) says that you should put your baking sheet in a large food-grade plastic bag to prove as clingfilm may stick to the top and mar the finished appearance – has anyone ever seen food-grade bags large enough to take a large, loaded baking sheet???

After unpeeling the clingfilm (which did not stick today) from the now-doubled snails, I brushed them with beaten egg (my pastry brush seems to be moulting – what fun) and put the sheet into a 200C oven for 25 minutes. I then sat around drooling at the gorgeous buttery smells (smells like brioche!) coming from the oven and wondering whether the bread would still be a gorgeous canary yellow inside once done.

After 25 minutes of drool, I pulled the bread from the oven and found that it was Perfect. That may be a little smug, but look at them! They’re gorgeous! My only criticism with the way they look is that they’re perhaps a little too glossy. Next time I’ll just use my fingers to brush on the egg – much easier and I won’t need to worry about the pastry brush moulting.

I had to wait for Dave to get home before I could tear off a roll/snail of bread. (I really wanted him to see the intact loaf.) It was worth the wait. The bread did indeed stay quite brightly coloured inside, nowhere near as spectacular as the raw dough, but still very pretty. The taste and texture was great – slightly crispy crust and soft feathery crumb inside with a soft (but obvious) taste of saffron. I’ve never been able to come up with a better way of describing saffron than….. saffron. I gobbled down my roll/snail with some Bonne Maman Strawberry Conserve and it was fabulous.

* You could use a 7g sachet of instant (fast-acting/easy-bake) yeast instead of fresh yeast. This would be stirred into the dry ingredients, NOT put in with the milk/egg.