Monthly Archives: April 2010

Rustic Bread – one of those ‘old into new’ breads

Cheddar cheese, baby spinach leaves, tomato and balsamic apple chutney on Rustic Bread

This bread is made with a paté fermentée, or old dough: a firm mixture of flour, water, a very small amount of yeast and salt prepared anything up to 24 hours before you mix the final dough. Why do bakers do this?

The conventional wisdom is that you are prefermenting some of the flour in the bread – in this recipe that’s half of the total flour in the final bread, and therefore the final bread will be more digestible, flavoursome and will keep better.   It is also a way of keeping the yeast alive and storing it from one bake to the next in the absence of refrigeration.

The next day, following the recipe, I mixed the remaining flours, white, wholemeal and rye with water, more salt, a touch more yeast, then cut up the paté fermentée into chunks and….

…went to work.   Mixing an all white firm dough into a new lot of mixed flour dough was a challenge. My hand dough whisk wasn’t up to the task so it was a case of taking a good stance and kneading hard for once!   I worked away on this dough for a good 22 minutes in an attempt to blend the all white paté fermentée into the mixed flour dough.   Once I settled down to slapping the dough around to integrate the two parts I was happy but I hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be, and it threw the timings out. No nice and easy light kneads for this bread!  Another time I think I might mix the paté fermentée with half of all the flours, so that at least it would be the same proportions of flours in each of the two doughs. Or go and buy a mixer…. expensive though aren’t they?

I used two sorts of Waitrose flour:  look where it comes from!

and the stoneground wholemeal bread flour, from Canada too. The very strong white flour was mixed with some of Shipton Mill’s bakers finest white which is not as high in protein but has many good qualities and I had some organic dark rye from the Mill as well.

What else was a bit different?

I added some  whey from my last batch of yoghurt in the final dough but only a small potful, about half the final water weight. I think it adds to the umami flavours of the crust and I have a feeling it speeds up the fermentation – the dough was very lively all the way through, producing huge gas bubbles and I needed to control them with several long big folds as I don’t do punching down.

I made a round boule and an oval loaf, and used a couple of forms dusted with rye flour to hold them while they proved. They were hopping out of these after an hour and 15 minutes. I hoped that they would both fit on the stone, but I realised when I ‘outed’ the first one that I was going to have to do a bit of juggling as they wouldn’t fit. So I started one on the stone, moved it up to the little top oven after 20 minutes, and then put the next one in down below. It all worked out ok in the end.

Here they are just starting their final prove

Like Abby says it wasn’t that easy to slash and I attempted an over ambitious pattern on the round one which went a bit awry.

Cooling down in the garden

English people tend to prefer paler crusts, but I am a big fan of the taste of these dark crusts and the contrast with the airy, creamy crumb flecked with the bran from the stoneground wholemeal flour.  Good crust and a light crumb that didn’t squash together when you sliced it.  Great aroma too  –  I wish WordPress did ‘scratch and sniff’ but maybe one day….

The CBT said it was ‘yummy’ and promptly ate 4 slices so I don’t think it is going to hang around for long. He says it is one to make again and I think he is right :)

I did my own windowpane test to see what the slice looked like. You can see the way that the two doughs didn’t mix perfectly, and that there was the odd huge bubble that got through to the final bread.

Rustic Bread by Zeb Bakes

The recipe for this Rustic Bread can be found in Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman.

3 down…..and a few more to go! I’m enjoying this!

Edible Plants no. 1 – Caraway

Last year I wondered if I could grow some caraway (carum carvi)  and get enough seeds to make a couple of loaves of our favourite light rye bread.  I bought two tiny plants which I found in a nursery.

They didn’t do much, so I put them in the cold frame through the winter and this spring they are growing quite quickly.  As you can see it looks a bit like coriander, or even carrots growing with feathery leaves.

Yesterday I finally looked up how to grow it and discovered that caraway is a biennual so will take two years to produce seed, so this year should be the one!  I might just have to put it in bigger pots as it’s growing furiously now – I don’t think it’s keen on being transplanted but I will take a chance.

You can use caraway seeds in lots of different recipes. It is a love-it or hate-it taste!

I like them with baby carrots, scrubbed but not peeled with the tops cut down to about a quarter of an inch, parboiled whole and  then finished by cooking in a butter and brown sugar glaze put together with a little fresh lemon juice and caraway seeds. Lemon juice does something magical to carrots, makes them taste more carroty somehow…..

Carrots taste better steamed or boiled whole. I have no idea why!

If the plants set seed I will try and grow some new ones.  In theory they should self sow around the garden, like borage does. We’ll see!

Next post : Rustic Bread!

Yoghurt – First Trials

We have now made three lots of yoghurt in the new gadget

Lynne kindly sent me some notes on what to do with it :)

I should do some sums and work out how much I have to make before the yoghurt maker pays for itself – actually I can’t be bothered, after all how do I cost the whey which I can use  to bake bread?   Can’t buy that anywhere locally..

  • No 1 with easi yo packet plus water  to fill up jar ( a litre in all) – this one split into curds and whey. Why?  Think it’s not supposed to be made in an electric yoghurt maker but in the easi yo kit.  Made some fabulous whey and labneh from it all the same.
  • No 2 with a litre of UHT full cream milk plus 2 spoons Marvel skimmed milk powder plus 2 teaspoons of live Yeo Valley yoghurt  – perfect set but a bit bland. The easiest method as it doesn’t involve heating milk.
  • No 3 with a litre of  fullcream organic milk (heated and left to cool and forgotten about for 6 hours)  plus 2 spoons Marvel plus 2 teaspoons of live Yeo Valley yoghurt – a little more whey but a good set

Brian preferred the UHT and I preferred the almost organic one – don’t know if one can buy organic skimmed milk powder somewhere but I will look around.

What I’ve learnt so far….yoghurt making is much easier than making bread…..

Do not use more than two teaspoons of starter yoghurt to a litre of milk, it’s very similar to leaven in that regard.  Less is more.
Do not mix it up too much, it doesn’t need it.
Don’t joggle it about while it is setting, it likes to be left alone.

To turn it into yoghurt cheese  – labneh –  rumoured to be lower in calories than cream cheese – line a sieve with muslin, and let the yoghurt drain through for a day in a cool place. I made little balls of cheese rolled in a mixture of zaartar, salt and pepper – sweet paprika – oregano to go with last night’s supper of salad, fried almonds, and Ottolenghi’s legume and noodle soup from The Guardian.

Eaten for breakfast with honey and hazelnuts and a couple of slices of the legendary delicate milk loaf!

What do you do with your yoghurt?