Monthly Archives: July 2010

Temper temper…

Please excuse the lack of mature comment in this post, my inner child has surfaced again…

Hee hee Celia!  I finally had a go at this.

Dominos anyone?

Notice all those hits on the tempering page of your blog Fig Jam and Lime Cordial today?  That was me.

There is only so much reading about home made chocolate a friend can absorb and not want to have a go too. I have resisted for a long time now and today I realised resistance was futile and I wanted to join the Chocolate Borg.  I think what I ended up with was tempered, the chocolate squares go snap,  the raisin bark bends – but that’s the raisins I think, and the smooth sides are shiny, except where I got finger prints on them…  I’ve got a lot to learn – what fun!

I messed up the temperature

(Celia’s tempering instructions are crystal clear,  but I don’t think I managed to follow them. I thought I’d melt the chocolate in a bain marie, and the temperature soared to over 130 degrees, every lump of chocolate I put in to be the tempering seed bit, melted and disappeared. Ah well, first time, I found a funny little chocolate mould tray that I bought last year, dusted it, and washed it, put some of the melted choc in it, when it got to 88 F, put some sultanas in the rest of it and put those on a tray… )

but the chocolate didn’t scorch or get moisture in it and the chocolate gods forgave me as it was my first time.

Brian says this is much nicer than shop chocolate. He’s well versed in the art of compliments when it comes to sweet things.  I used a mixture, you can’t see it properly in the pic, of light and dark buttons and assorted bits of chocolate from my stash.

Every piece of tempering chocolate I put in melted and they were all dark, so I couldn’t rescue any of the pieces, but it just means more chocolate in the final pieces. Thank you Celia for your ongoing inspiration! I feel strangely happy!

And, I was going to say, if I had one of Inawelshgardens’s lavender bath bombs, my joy would be complete.

The pretext....

Assorted chocolate found lying around...

Note the thermometer...

No idea how you smooth them down...

Nutella tablets and raisin bark

Rye Bread Part 2 and a little Gravad Lax

Why Part 2?  Because we had to wait twenty four hours to cut the rye. This wait, hard to bear, is always recommended for high density ryebreads to allow the crumb to stabilise and settle. Visit Mellow Bakers July Breads here if you want to see how my fellow bakers got on with this one!

I am the first to say, that looks like a bit of a heavy bread,  but it surprised me and was indeed smooth and noticeably sweeter and lighter to eat than it looks.  I liked it better than the 70 % rye I made earlier in the month as far as eating went.

Banneton proved 80% rye bread

It had a nice sponginess to the texture which I put down to the soaker.  I should maybe have given the bread another 10 – 15  minutes in the oven and then the base would maybe have been a little less sticky plus a little less time on the final prove but it survived my lacksadaisical handling nevertheless. Rye is very fragile once risen, as it doesn’t have the resilient gluten network of a wheat based loaf to hold the little gas bubbles. It  collapses quite readily and doesn’t do oven spring, so you want to have it ‘just so’ when it goes in the oven.  This one hung around a bit too long, queing up for the oven and we were eating lunch!   Again these breads often do better baked in a tin or a wooden bread frame as they do in Germany.

The secret to making rye breads like these is definitely pre-fermenting most of the rye flour; I certainly can’t achieve a good flavour and texture in a high percentage rye bread without using sourdough.  It’s up to the individual whether or not to spike the bread with a little yeast, I did in this case, as I was following the formula in the book but I am not sure it was of benefit in the end and I think if I make this one again, I will leave out the yeast altogether, bake the bread in a tin, bake it for longer and maybe even hold off cutting it for a bit longer too.  Edit:  I baked it again with different flours in a Pullman.

Moving on though, here is the Gravad Lax recipe for my friend Gill the Painter who visited and trialled her new bread recipe this week and for anyone else who wants to know the traditional way of making this Swedish fish dish.

Continue reading →

80% Rye Bread with a Rye Flour Soaker Part 1

Last of the ryes for me this month!

This Jeffrey Hamelman rye bread was made with Bacheldre organic stone ground rye, a much coarser sort of rye than the usual Shipton Mill one I use.  This bread is made with a rye flour soaker and a rye sourdough.

A rye flour soaker?  A soaker is when you pre-soak one of the ingredients of your bread; could be linseeds, could be whole grains, could be an old crust of a nice loaf. In this bread the soaker is a quantity of rye flour, covered in boiling water and mixed up and left overnight.  The boiling water gelatinizes the flour and it has a remarkable effect on the final bread.  It’s no more trouble than making the sourdough the night before and it changes the character of the bread noticeably giving a smooth, sweeter quality to the crumb. I think they must do this a lot in German rye breads as that is what this sort of rye reminds me of.

In Part 2: The crumb shot and my mother’s recipe for Gravad Lax