Sourdough Green Pea and Matcha Bread

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  Instead of making Irish Soda Bread, I made a new twist on a theme: Sourdough Green Pea and Matcha Bread.  This bread solves the age-old issue of how to eat your peas. If you aren’t a pea lover and even if you are, you can now have your peas and eat them too by disguising them in a loaf of sourdough bread.

Green peas in bread?  What a brilliant idea…was exactly what I thought when I saw this recipe in The Local Palate magazine.

I got a subscription to the magazine because it focuses on Southern cuisine and I thought it would be a good idea to learn about cooking something other than bread.  As I was thumbing through the pages of my first issue, a photo of a beautiful green bread, by Sarah Owens of BK17 Bakery, jumped out at me. It had me at “hello”.  I guess that just goes to show you that if you’re a bread lover, you’ll find it anywhere or perhaps more appropriately, it will find you.

Sarah’s formula makes two large loaves. I only made half of the recipe.  I decided to bake it in my stoneware loaf baker because the loaf and baker remind me of Spring.

 

Look for the formula and instructions for making this Sourdough Green Pea and Matcha Bread in the March Issue of The Local Palate.

This bread is a really interesting bread. My taste testers had mixed feedback regarding this loaf.  My son said it tasted weird; however, a friend said it tasted great toasted.  I do think it tastes better after it has a chance to age a bit – at least 24 hours.  I tried a slice after letting it cool completely and there was a slight aftertaste of peas.  Go figure!  However, after letting it sit for a day or two, I didn’t detect a “pea” taste at all.  It is slightly sweet.  I enjoyed slices of this bread toasted with butter and as a complement to an egg salad sandwich. I also tried it with a hot dog because I didn’t have any buns. That one was the most interesting.

This is a very easy bread to make.  If you don’t have access to pea flour, you can just grind green split peas in a grain mill, coffee grinder or a high-powered blender. I ground the split peas fairly course using the grain mill attachment on my WonderMixer and it worked really well.

I had lot’s of fun working with the green dough. Here are photos of the process.  You brush on a milk wash right before baking so that’s why the loaf looks white in the photos below.

 

There are a couple of other breads in this same issue by Sarah Owens that you might like as well.  And, as it turns out, she’s written a book called Sourdough.  If the formulas in her book are anything like this Green Pea and Match Bread, I definitely want to check it out. My creative juices have already been flowing just by trying this bread.

 

Happy Baking!

Cathy