Dan Lepard’s Sourcream Sandwich Loaf with homemade Creme Fraiche

Autumn light is kind to bread

What a treat! An opportunity to load my bread with delicious thick slightly soured cream and create a pillow-soft loaf of bread which toasts like a dream. If only all white bread was like this, then I for one would be quite content.

Reminds me of Mickey Mouse a bit – cut while still warm so it looks a bit squashed, whoops!

So good I made it twice, the first time as it was written, hence the huge high top of the loaf, the recipe makes 925 grams of dough, squeezed into a square cornered 2lb tin, as recommended by Dan, this guarantees giving you a Wallace and Gromit height bread like the ones in ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death.’ If you missed this have a look for the trailer on You Tube.

To make your own Yoghurt Cream (creme fraiche, sourcream?)

You need

a carton of double (heavy) cream
two teaspoons of fresh plain live yoghurt
a yoghurt maker or widenecked thermos flask or somewhere which is consistently warm to leave the yoghurt to culture.

Heat the cream till it is almost boiling and let it cool to below 50 C. In the meantime, pour boiling water over/into all untensils, containers etc, if you haven’t just put them through the dishwasher.

Put the yoghurt and the cream into your chosen container, put the lid on and wait for 8 – 10 hours for the yoghurt to culture the cream. If you have a cool home, try and find a warm spot, the cream should culture eventually but it might take more like 24 hours. I use a little electric yoghurt maker from Lakeland but there are many ways to do this and it’s worth finding a method that suits you and your budget.

For this loaf

Edit November 2011: I followed Dan Lepard’s recipe and method which was published originally in The Guardian here.

I used Shipton Mills Bakers White No. 1 flour and Allinsons Easy Bake Yeast and my home made yoghurt cream as above.

To celebrate the loveliness of this loaf I toasted a slice and covered it in beans and a magnificent sausage from Sunday’s Slow Food Market.

Toast holds up to the beans and fennel sausage!

On Twittering

I am getting quite fond of Twitter.

At first I didn’t get it. It seemed like a mad party which I had gate-crashed, it still feels like that sometimes.

But then there are these moments of pure joy when you see the messages stacked in this glorious, random cascading shower of humanity. It reminds me of a UK Le Guin story where the problem of the timelag between the stars is cracked. Just keep on talking and eventually all the information will get through; don’t bother to wait for an answer, just keep talking.

I love the juxtapositions particularly. Just now, these two Tweets made me smile with happiness, can’t quite explain it… I’ve always wanted to know how to fold fitted sheets I guess and the Dalai Lama’s Tweets make so much sense!

Do you find knowledge comes from surprising sources these days?

Real Men Make Quiche

Almost finished...

At least two or three times a week we have meals that don’t involve any fish or meat, like more and more people do these days. This gives you loads of opportunities to try out different ideas. This is a simple pastry flan started by Brian and finished by me. He likes making pastry in the Kenwood so who am I to stop him? Brian’s current favourite pastry for this is made from 50/50 wholemeal and plain flour, unsalted butter and a little yoghurt/sourcream or whatever we have in that department. It’s the same pastry as the one for the apricot bakewell slice only in a larger quantity.

I have recently discovered that you can roll pastry out between sheets of clingfilm and it is really easy compared to the mess I used to get into. I was the original “I can’t make pastry” person, but I’m more confident these days and it all seems to come out pretty well, a far cry from the board-like stuff that I remember making.

We didn’t blind bake it, just chilled it once it had been rolled out. Then I filled the case with a mixture of garden veggies: gently sweated chard, green beans, and the last of the spring onions, added some cherry tomatoes and chestnut mushrooms, whipped up a mixture of free range eggs with some home made strained yoghurt and added some cubes of Rocquefort blue cheese.