Italian Polenta Bread

In my recent post What's in the Basket  I mentioned that I have some promotional bread baking booklets from Allinsons which I use over and over again. One of my favourites is the recipe for Italian  Polenta Sticks. You can find the recipe on the Baking Mad Website if you don't have the booklet.

The recipe is a basic bread dough recipe but with around half a cup of the flour replaced with polenta, or fine cornmeal, and with 50g of pine nuts added to the dough.

I generally prepare it on the "dough" setting of my bread maker then shape it by hand and bake it in the oven. The polenta and pine nuts  are just enough to give it an interesting flavour and texture without being enough to swamp anything it accompanies. I think it would be lovely toasted and spread with a little pesto and topped with chopped tomatoes, but it never hangs around for long enough in our house to get stale enough to toast!