I’m always on the search for recipes that can be a good snack between meals or anything that can be used for breakfast on the go or simply something to nibble while watching TV or chilling. These bars are something that satisfy all of the above, and I was thinking with a proper dip these can be easily used to have you feel full for quite some time. A full meal dare I say. I ran into these bars at a local bakery chain as I was in the town running some errands and starving at some point. There are however some reasons why I avoid buying pastry at the bakery – well, in all fairness I’ve been doing it now, six months ago I can freely say I was eligible for loyalty cards in most of them. The first and also the main reason is the quality of the pastry – you can never be too sure what is put in it, especially when it comes to wholemeal flour pastry. I had the opportunity to talk to some friends who actually worked in bakeries and they told me that quite often, even though the label says wholemeal flour it is actually still a wheat flour coloured by various pigments. Then there are various additives there for the purpose of keeping it fresh for as long as possible, corn syrup used to enhance the taste and other artificial sweeteners etc., etc.

The second thing I mind is the price point – anything labeled as a wholemeal pastry is a bit pricey. I mean, I get it, wholemeal flour is more expensive and stuff, but still, I think it should be more reasonable given all the things I said above. When I bought these bars and while I was waiting for the nice lady to pack them for me, I took a sneak peek into the ingredients displayed on the price tag and realised it was easy to make at home, with the proper ratio of listed ingredients. And then as I was doing other things, I completely forgot about these bars until one day while I was going through the internet in search of some new stuff I could cook and ran into a recipe that was close enough to the bars I had at the bakery. I decided to try them out immediately.

In order to make these wholemeal flour bars, you will need the following ingredients:

• 250 g of rye flour
• 250 g of spelt flour
• 2 tsp of salt
• 2 tsp of baking powder
• 4 tbsp of olive oil
• 350 ml of warm water

For topping

• 1 tbsp of olive oil
• 2 tbsp of water
• 1 tbsp of pumpkin seed
• 1 tbsp of sunflower seed
• 1 tbsp of sesame seed

Directions for preparation

1. When you are baking, there is always pretty much the same drill – you always start by mixing all the dry ingredients. Mix the flour, salt and baking powder together first. 
2. Add water and olive oil then mix it all together until you get a compact mass. 
3. After you mix all the ingredients together, leave the dough to rest for 10-15 minutes. The dough will have a texture of a wet sand, but that’s the way it should be. While you are leaving it to rest for those 15 minutes, rye flour will soak up some of the water and the dough will be still sticky but will have a fairly thicker consistency. 
4. Take the dough out onto the working surface where you have previously put a piece of parchment paper and some flour . Then put some flour on the top as well. 
5. Now cover it with another piece of parchment paper and with rolling-pin shape it into rectangle approximately about 1.5 cm thick (a bit over half an inch) or thinner if you want them to be more crispy. The reason why you should do this between 2 pieces of parchment paper is the sticky texture of the dough – if you were doing it without the paper, you would be dealing with the case of rolling-pin covered in sticky dough mess. 
6. Remove the top parchment paper and then with your hands make the shape more neat (rectangular) – as you can see in the picture, mine looked nowhere near like a rectangle. 
7. Now cut the bars into a desirable size by using knife or pizza knife. Try to make them approximately the same size. 
8. Mix one tbsp of olive oil and 2 tbsp of water together and coat the bars with it. It will also dust off all the excess of flour left at the top. 
9. Mix the seeds together and top the bars with it. After you do that gently press the seeds with your hands or rolling-pin to avoid fall out during baking and eating. This way most of it will stay in place. 
10. Preheat the oven to 200°C/392°F and bake for 20 minutes. After you remove them from the oven, cover them with a kitchen cloth, and leave them for 10ish minutes to cool down and get softer. Take them out of the baking pot, serve them and enjoy these delicious healthy bars! If you are making a larger amount, these are nice to eat the next day as well, and if you put them in a plastic container with the lid they can last for days and be equally delicious.

 

Bonne appetite!