Category Archives: Bakers

Semolina Bread with Soaker and Fennel Seeds

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Well guys, I tried, I really gave this Jeffrey Hamelman bread  (Mellow Bakers – December)  the full treatment.

I shopped, I bought ingredients, measured water and dough temperatures, weighed to the nearest gram, I mixed according to the times in the book, proved with the timer precisely, cooked at the right temperature….. and you know what, I don’t like this bread.  It’s strange because I am a big fan of fennel seeds strewn over roast vegetables, and I’m dead keen on Dan Lepard’s semolina buns,  so thought this one would be a sure thing.

I rolled and twisted breadsticks with half the dough and formed a nice S-shaped loaf like Cathy’s, because hers looked so pretty.  I took loads of photos to share with you too.

I had proper Italian fine durum flour, organic fennel seeds, coarse cornmeal, millet;  the only thing I couldn’t get was wheat flakes, so I bought spelt flakes which I thought were the closest thing. I left the soaker overnight so it could fully hydrate. I followed the timings exactly for once. Hey ho, can’t win ’em all – I’m mellow with this.

I feel almost as if this recipe is one that was thrown together as a ‘demonstration’ of using a soaker and an alternative flavouring.  Anyway it’s done now, Brian won’t touch it and the dogs ran away from the breadsticks as if I had offered them something very nasty indeed.

Forget the bread, for supper I had that fabulous Ottolenghi dish with the chickpeas, roast butternut squash, spinach and brussel sprout tops  (not chard this time) and the deliriously garlicky-lemon-mint drizzle that goes over the top of the dish which makes the whole glorious bowl come alive and sing in your mouth – tra la!  and I wish I’d taken photos of that. Next time I promise!

It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry as we say in my family, and probably many other people say too.  No more December breads for me, I’m passing on the ciabatta, I need to be calm and collected to tackle flamboyantly wet doughs like that, and I’m not interested in the least in Irish Soda Bread without the right flour to make it with, so I am going to move on now to some Christmas baking!   Cookies to bake, cakes too, here I come….

Wishful Baking Syndrome

I suffer from WBS. Am I alone?

I rashly promise that I will bake all manner of things. I state my intentions on the great forums I participate in. Then life comes along and something happens and I forget that promise, it slips gently from a definite to a ‘later today’ to a ‘maybe tonight’ to an ‘OK, tomorrow then’. From there it proceeds in a straight line to ‘the middle of the week’. Sometimes it skips all those and is lodged next to someone’s birthday, or a visit somewhere.

In the meantime the cook books pile up in the kitchen, the print-outs from my friends’ blogs, the writers I love and read in the daily papers whose recipes I carefully save. My wishful intentions stacked like planes waiting to get into Heathrow.

Sometimes it’s a miracle that anything gets baked at all. And seems like a dream. Did I really make panettone last year? Roll out baguettes and lift their fragile little bodies from couche to peel? Surely that wasn’t me who made an apricot kugelhopf? The great advantage of being a professional baker must be that you really get to practise and hone your craft; your hands eventually being able to read the dough and understand by feel and aroma just what is going on; whether to leave the dough a little longer to rest, to move it somewhere warmer or cooler, how to flick flour in the lightest of feathery sprays over the work surface…

There are no short cuts, reading and looking and observing will get you so far, but practice is all. It took me 22 hours of bashing away at a keyboard in an echoey room many years ago to be able to type without looking at the keyboard. I wonder how many hours it takes to make a baker?

Grapplestein Son of Oregon

Grapplestein  arrived by post all the way from The Lost World in Oregon in mid November. He arrived in his own special non machinable envelope together with a travelling companion who I haven’t got to know as yet. GS has been acclimatizing to the food and the weather and has had a little difficulty with jet lag too.

Here he is on Day 3…

However this weekend (26/27th Nov)  he announced he was ready for action and as there was no football to watch he thought he might as well have a crack at baking some sourdough.

GS has a lovely wheaty/fruity aroma while he is fermenting, and did an excellent job with this sourdough bread.

I also finally had a go at baking in a pot, Dutch Oven style.  The good Doctor Fugawe and Gill the Painter are two people who I know both use this method with great success. My first attempt was not entirely successful as the parchment sort of got inside the dough a bit, but the crust was thin and fine and the ovenspring, particularly with this teetering-on-the-edge-of-being-overproved loaf, was more than satisfactory. In fact the crumb was beautiful!

As you can see in this last pic, there is no stopping him now, so I’m having another go with the bake in a pot method tomorrow with a larger ball of slightly lower hydration dough this time!  Edit: You can see the resulting pic in one of the comments below…

Go Grapplestein, go !

This dough was made from :-

  • 200 g of revived and cosseted Oregon starter (1:1 water to wheat flour)
  • 325 g water at 20 C
  • 500 g of flour:  a mixture of 350 g of strong bread flour, and 50 g each of  wholemeal spelt, dark rye and swiss dark
  • 12 g fine seasalt
  • 4 dessert spoons of runny yoghurt
  • 1 tablespoon of barley malt

Made a soft loose dough.

First prove took about 3 hours, then shaped and into bannetons, and a second prove of about 4 hours.  I find breads with spelt tend to prove quicker and the dough slackens more quickly towards the end of the second prove, so it is easy to go over with them.  I think I just caught this one in time, though it is a bit mishapen. Tasted as good as it looked! Thanks Doc for sending him so far. At the moment he is definitely different from my own starter, whether time and the English diet will change him, we’ll have to wait and see…