This bread was a little on the different side.  Ok very much on the different side.  I’ve never used galingale or watermelon in a bread before and was a bit hesitant on how it would taste.  It sounds horrible especially when you add in the garlic.  I know!!  Weird huh?  However, I am very pleased with the results.  This is one of those sweet spicy breads that needs to be eaten to believe.  This is not your ordinary bread!

Galingale Bread with Watermelon

Translation:

Bread with lightly leavened white flour, cardamoms, ghee, honey, almonds, kironji kernels, pulp of the marsh melon, date sugar, galingale, garlic, sunf, poppy seeds. (Nimatnama, pp. 58)

Ingredients.

6 C. White flour

3 tsp. yeast

1 C. Date sugar

1 C. Ghee

1 C. Water

5 Tbs. Honey

1 C. Pine nuts

2 Tbs. Galingale ground

2 Tbs. Cardamom ground

2 Tbs. Garlic ground

1/2 C. Poppy seeds.

2 tsp. salt

1 C. Watermelon (seeded and drained of most juice) if in season

 

Redaction:

Gather up all of your ingredients.

As you can see I had to change out the actual watermelon for watermelon juice.  Watermelon is out of season but I did have the juice on hand.  Long story but it was a tasty one!  The round hard puck, bottom center is palm sugar.  This needs to be dissolved into your watermelon juice OR melt this over a stove or a microwave.  It’s a t-total B*&^# to try and chop.  Of course this is hind sight.  I used the microwave, which melted the sugar a little bit, enough to get small(ish) chunks into the flour with the spices and nuts.

The galingale is the light colored powder in the small bowl bottom right.  When bought dry it comes in dry root chunks that are tough and hard.  This needs to be ground into a very fine powder.  No one wants to bite into tough wood chunks!  I used a coffee grinder that is solely for spice grinding that is wiped down between each grind.

The next step is add the dry to the flour and stir.

See how large the palm sugar chunks are?  That is a bit larger than you want.  At this sizes I might have been able to grind them…but I didn’t want to break either the spice grinder or my cuisinart and my child is to young to use as slave labor for the pestle and mortar.

The third step is to add in the butter and honey.  The honey looks rather clumpy/granular in the picture.  It is.  The honey got cold so turned granular.  It is perfectly useable in this form.  If you want flowing honey pulse it for 10-20 seconds in the microwave or put the granular honey in a bowl, then place the bowl in a pot with water that is 1/3 the height of the bowl and heat the pot slowly.  Other wise you will break the bowl and/or make honey water.  Keep the bowl in the water till the honey melts.  (See why I went with the granular?)

Add the watermelon slowly, a drizzle at a time.  You want the bread to start forming a ball but not be wet and mushy.

This is the finished bread.  The picture does not do the light pink tinge justice.  Very pretty in an almost Hello Kitty way.

Let the bread sit for 90 minutes.  The bread doesn’t rise a whole bunch (or at least mine didn’t).

When the bread has risen enough (or not much) I oiled my soapstone baking stone and put in the oven for 350 minutes for 60 minutes.

 

This is the finished bread.  Nice and brown with a good hollow sound when thumped.

The crumb is not hard but a bit dense, more like a scone then bread.  The taste is…sweet and spicy.  Very tasty.  I didn’t bother with butter, just nibbled pieces off the hot loaf.