Nettles starting to show?
Let’s make nettle crispbread! Or maybe they’re more like crackers — I had the idea when a Welsh friend gave me a box of salty oat cakes with seaweed for Christmas some years ago while I was working on a collection of recipes for climate-friendly baking. Using weeds in cooking and baking has to be climate-friendly, right? And using more oats and less wheat whenever it’s possible is usually a good idea.
Here in Sweden the standard wheat flour is multi-purpose, and the standard butter is salted. We don’t have oatmeal in the supermarkets (only roasted oatmeal), so I blend rolled oats. We measure almost everything by volume.
for two oven-sized pans/plates (ca 30×40 cm)
Oven: 200°C, 20–30 minutes
100 g butter
3–4 dl chopped fresh nettles or spinach or goosefoot (or 2 dl frozen chopped spinach)
5 dl rolled oats
2 dl wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
1–2 tsp salt
some white pepper
2 dl milk
Prepare by letting the butter soften in room temperature.
Rinse the nettles/spinach/goosefoot carefully and chop them into tiny pieces (use a blender if you like) so that the result is 3–4 dl (or use frozen spinach, let it thaw and measure 2 dl).
Blend the rolled oats into a coarse flour.
Measure up the rest of the ingredients and put them with the oat flour in the blender. Let it turn them into a dough. It will seem a bit runny at first, but the oats will absorb some of the liquids. Sample it, add more salt if needed, and add some pepper too.
Put half the dough on a sheet of baking paper, flatten it out a bit, put another sheet on top and use a rolling pin to turn it into a thin layer that covers the whole paper.
Do the same with the rest of the dough on another sheet.
Bake the crispbreads in 200 degrees Celsius — for me the middle of the oven was ideal. Check them after 20 minutes — if you want them crispy they may need a bit longer.
You can take them out after 10 minutes to cut them into squares or rectangles, then put them back in to finish.