I’m glad to present this traditional bread from Valencia, known at least since the Seventeenth Century. The Pataqueta, diminutive for "pataca" has the shape of a crescent Moon. This is the bread the inhabitants of the Valencia’s Orchard used to eat when they went to work. It was firstly baked in the Moorish oven they have in their Barraca and then in wood stoves.
Nowadays, it is not frequently baked and people book it in advance to get one. “Pataquetas” are usually baked for our main important festival, “Fallas”. Most of Valencia’s bakers are asked to bake “pataquetas” every year in March.
Ingredients:
For the ferment:
You will need
100 ml water
50 g allpurpose flour
12.5 g fresh yeast / 5g or 1 ½ tsp Instant yeast / 6.25g or 2tsp active dry yeast
1/2 teaspoon sugar
Bread dough:
You will need
450 g/3 cup all purpose flour
200 ml tepid water
10 g/1 ¾ teaspoon fine sea salt
all the ferment
a little flour for dusting the work surface and the bread.
Directions
Ferment
Stir the yeast into the water in your mixing bowl, then add the flour and sugar and mix well. Cover with plastic film.
Put into the fridge overnight or up to 48 hours.
Bread dough
- Keeping the ferment in its bowl, add the rest of the ingredients except the salt, and mix together with your scraper.
- When everything starts to come together into dough, turn it out onto your work surface (don’t flour it first).
- Start to work the dough for about 10 minutes, then add the salt and continue kneading until smooth and elastic. In this process, I’ve used my bread machine.( You can also knead by hand or use stand mixer)
- Divide dough into 150 g pieces and then form the dough into small balls, cover with a baking cloth and leave to rest for 20 minutes or until them double in size.
- Flatten with the palm of the hand, putting more pressure on the edges of the dough to get a rounded shape.
- Then with a sharp knife or baker scraper make a cut in and cut open from the outside. Flatten the ball and mark the cut above.
- Place them on a baking tray and cover them again with a kitchen cloth dusted with flower.
- Leave to rest until them double in size, for about 1 hour.
- Preheat the oven to 200º C / 392 F
- Make two cuts on the bottom before baking.
- Sprinkle a little fine flour using a sieve or strainer.
- Bake with steam, 30 minutes at 200 °C / 392 F
- Cool on a wire rack.
How to shape Pataquetas
