Keto bread with fennel seeds – Greek Marathopsomo with Low-carb attitude

Keto bread with fennel seeds smells in our kitchen today. And it smells so good! How can something so simple as the smell of freshly baked bread fill you with joy? Especially if you decided to ditch the carbs and be loyal to the Keto diet! Naturally, Keto bread is like a Keto dessert – an occasional treat or just a help in the beginning. However, when you check our other bread recipes, you will notice something unusual. We always try to reduce the usage of flours. Even the well-known, Keto-friendly flours. if you compare any of our recipes with the most famous Keto bread recipes, you’ll notice that we tend to use smaller amounts of flour. Sometimes we go for no flour at all! However, in this case, our Keto bread with fennel seeds required some thickening.

The honour to fennel Greek name

Have you noticed how Greek Goes Keto is connected with ancient Marathon? Did you know that in Greek, the word “Maratho” (Μάραθο) actually means fennel? This beautiful area of western Attica in the springtime still flourishes with wild fennel. This is the very place where the historical battle happened. Also, the symbolic birthplace of the marathon race and the area where the first Keto Mediterranean retreat took place. All this is wrapped in our love for herbal teas and remedies. Since fennel seeds are used as medicine from ancient times we simply had to make a Keto version of Marathopsomo.

How Keto-friendly are fennel seeds?

Fennel is quite a keto-friendly plant, from its root, stalks to the seeds. The cultivated vegetable contains 7g of carbs per 100g of which 3 are fibre. This leaves us with 4g of net carbs. You can use it in your Keto gourmet experiments. When it comes to seeds, net carbs per tablespoon are somewhere around 0,7g, therefore you can be fully relaxed! For this Keto bread with fennel seeds, we used 4 tablespoons. For the whole bread, this gives less than 4g carbs and you can cut 15-16 nice pieces out of it. This was enough to bring the flavour and aroma to the stratosphere. Myriad of minerals and vitamins in fennel contribute to our health. Fennel seeds contain manganese, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. Including fennel in your keto diet can be actually good for your heart health, digestion and maintaining blood glucose!

Is this a Keto bread or savoury cake?

An interesting question, isn’t it? Our friends who don’t follow the Ketogenic diet asked us this when they tasted it! They actually loved and ate this bread with sour cream and crumbled feta cheese and chopped olives. What can we say, we the Mediterranean people always like to combine good bread with cheese or olives. But if we ditch the carbs, we end up with equal pleasure and no guilt. Trust us, this recipe for Keto bread with fennel seeds will be a hit among your friends, regardless of their Ketonian status! 😉

Keto bread with fennel seeds – Marathopsomo

5 from 1 vote

Recipe by Roberta Kapsalis Course: Keto Bread

Servings

16

servings

Prep time

20

minutes

Cooking time

20

minutes

Calories

300

kcal

Ingredients

• 5 medium eggs

• 100 ml (3,5 fl oz) olive oil

• 2/3 tsp sea salt

• 1 tsp baking soda

• 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

• 1,5 tbsp psyllium powder

• 4 tbsp crushed fennel seeds

• 1 tsp dried rosemary

• 2 tbsp black sesame seeds

• 2 tbsp white sesame seeds

• 8 tbsp nut flour of your choice*

• 200 ml (6,7 fl oz) sparkling mineral water

Directions

• Beat the eggs with an electric mixer for 5 minutes with baking soda, vinegar, olive oil, and sea salt.
• Place fennel seeds and dried or fresh rosemary in marble or wooden mortar and crush it. (If you don’t have a mortar, crush them in a food processor, but be careful and pulse shortly)
• Add the fennel seeds and rosemary to the mixture. Continue beating.
• Add nut flour of your choice and psyllium powder. The mixture will get very thick and sticky.
• Slowly pour small amounts of sparkling mineral water and continue mixing at medium speed.
• Finally, add sesame and black sesame seeds and let the batter for 10 minutes. It will thicken almost to a dough consistency.
• Preheat the oven to 180ºC (360ºF) and line a wide pan with parchment paper. Pour the batter in the middle and press it a bit with a spatula. Create a bread 5 cm (2 inches) tall and about 20 cm (8 inches) wide in diameter.
• Bake for 20 minutes and let it cool down for an hour before cutting.

Notes

• We prefer hazelnut flour in these creations. You can use almond, pecan or macadamia nut flour. You can also use ground nuts instead of nut-based flour. The important detail is the psyllium powder that will thicken the batter. If you want to use coconut flour, you might need a bit more mineral water.
• You can use the content of fennel tea bags if you don’t have the seeds.

Did you make this recipe?

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