Tag Archives: baking

A Loaf for the Salad Challenge

Azélia of Azeilas Kitchen really made me laugh recently on Twitter, she was talking about wholesome breads and wearing stick-on beards and socks and sandals and I thought about the bread I had just made and it fits that category to perfection.

I haven’t worn facial hair since I rode a pushbike through the streets in a Groucho Marx mask one night from one party to another, but I have had the pleasure at least and I urge you to do it one day if you haven’t.

I started with what I had in the kitchen; sprouted pulses and some walnuts left over from Christmas. I have dug out my sprouting jar recently, thanks to the reminder from the 52 week salad challenge so I thought I would post this as my February contribution, as the frost has got hold of the last of the wintering vegetables and herbs in the garden this month. Edit: I have just found the round up page on VP’s blog for the last one. Have a look and join in. Lots of wonderful info on growing micro greens that I am going to read up on right now….

I wonder if children do sprouting in schools now as we did? Even if you don’t take much interest in growing your own food in your teenage and young adult years, if you have had these experiences as a child, they are something to draw upon later in life when maybe you have more time to garden and participate in the great elemental joy of growing some of your own food.

Walnut and Sprouted Grain Loaf Zeb Bakes

This loaf used sweet walnut pieces, our home grown sprouts, thick yoghurt, water, Felin Ganol flours, yeast and seasalt. I need to make it again before I can be sure I have got the numbers right, I scribbled them down on a piece of paper and they looked a bit odd when I came to write them up here.

We had slices of this soft and nutty bread with cottage cheese, some mung bean sprouts and a sprinkling of za’atar, a mix of thyme, sumac, salt and sesame seeds. Can’t get much nicer than that in my book and in fact it’s all gone now, every last little bit!

Sprouted grains are lovely too just dressed with a simple dressing of lemon, oil and mustard as part of a salad with a toasted bun. I think they have a great affinity with nuts, so mix them up with pine nuts, or walnuts or whatever you have around.

Mitchdafish has just tweeted me this picture….(she had a chunk of this loaf to try at home) …. hee hee!

Try a Little Tenderness

Here are some brilliant flatbreads filled with spicy dal rolled out with my magic Turkish rolling pin for Short and Tweet over this last weekend. This recipe is by Dan Lepard (P.73 of Short & Sweet, Lentil Filled Flatbreads) with the help of Franka Philip. Check out Franka Philip’s photos of making these with Dan; she kindly gave us advice on Twitter on how to seal the little pockets of dough around the filling before rolling them out. Twitter is a funny place, I would never have thought I could ask a cook book writer I had never met for help directly but all the ones I have had contact with are extraordinarily kind and positive. Thank you once again Franka!

This dough was really interesting in that the dough is made without yeast or sourdough and is left to age in the fridge. Pooh pooh you might say, what difference would that make? Well, the flat breads rolled out really easily after their long chill, puffed up in the pan and were incredibly tender to eat, light and just yummy. If I compare them to these quick flatbreads that I made recently these Trinidadian style roti are way superior in terms of their tenderness and flavour.

I had every conceivable colour of dal in a scruffy box in the cupboard, waiting for me to make dal with, except I only had half the quantity of the red dal I needed for this recipe, so I added some uri dal in, thinking that would be OK. It was in the end, but whereas the red dal cooks fast and goes quite mushy, the uri dal stayed resolutely uncooked for ages and retained its shape, so when you look at the photos you can see the pattern the uri dal made. Still it wasn’t a disaster by any means!

I found it quite fascinating how the spiced and garlicky filling started off dark yellow and then as it cooked again within the confines of the roti turned a wonderful rich amber-red colour. I don’t know quite why it did that, the combination of spice, salt and lentils?

We used our flatbreads to scoop up a spicy pork mince dish that I made up with some ~~ancient~~ freezer aged mince, garlic, ginger, fresh garam marsala, a mild chilli and a tin of tomatoes (the sort of thing I made as a student, only a bit better than my cooking abilities then) and a little dark green fresh spinach on the side. All eaten before I thought to take a photo, oops.

I rolled like a demon, a rather slow demon, and B flipped the breads in the pan. The recipe made loads, so we paused half way through our roti making, ate far too much and then I made the last few balls up and put them in the fridge for a further night.

Incidentally, I also learnt that a Tequila Sunrise made with blood orange juice is called a Tequila O Positive. Dad gave me this beautiful glass when I visited him last year, he told me he bought it when he was a student so it has survived a long time.

I slept well after all that hard work, concentrating on the delicate rolling out of these breads. We watched the season finale of Borgen, best thing on TV the last month, and shared a plate of atmospheric (dark and gloomy Copenhagen) lemon cardamom (no baking powder this time!) madeleines made from Thane Prince’s recipe here.

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Edit: Another oops, I forgot to add this picture in!

Back to the tale of the Tender Ones – The following morning I pulled the remaining balls out of the fridge (36 hours after the dough was originally mixed) and rolled them out in the early morning sunshine and we had them for breakfast topped with egg and bacon and a squirt of tomato ketchup and took sunshine filled photos to share with you. I was so pleased the sun came out!

Last year we made some alloo parathas (left) with Mellow Bakers, but they weren’t a patch on these! I will definitely make today’s recipe again. We are going to investigate making thin rolling pins from dowel as I really think it makes it much easier to roll these little quite frail balls of dough out and I would like one that is a bit shorter so I don’t hit stuff off the worktop when I am rolling.

I am getting on much better with this skinny pin than I do with my big rolling pin, or else it is just practice.

PPS Here’s Evidence Matters’s super round up post for this week’s baking. Have a peek and discover some new blogs to read and if you want to join in it’s very easy and all explained over on her blog.

What have you been up to this weekend?

The 52 Week Salad Challenge and some Ugly Bugly Buns

For Ruth a speed blog post – I made a batch of squishy soft dough today with 200 grams of bubbly sourdough starter, probably about 150% hydration but I can’t be sure as it was all a bit random.

I used more or less:

200 g sourdough starter
500 g of mixed wheat flours
12 g of seasalt
a dessertspoon of spraymalt
100 g of thick home made yoghurt
about 40 g butter and
then water.. about 300-320g I can’t quite remember

I don’t know quite what I had in mind but when I came to shape it, the dough didn’t want to be a boule, it sighed a lot, it flopped and said, ‘I can’t hold this form, don’t ask it of me.’ My dough often says that and rather than create one of those low profiled boules for the umpteenth time –

– I rolled it out and cut it into pieces (remembering the muffins we made the other week) and left them to prove for about three hours and cooked them in the same fashion as those. Fried on a not too hot dry steel pan for about 3 to 4 minutes each side, with a wok lid over the top to keep the steam in and then into the oven at 180-190 C to finish baking for another 10 – 12 minutes, depending on size. They needed a longer time in the oven than the muffins and weren’t as fabulously light as those were, I reckon the egg is the secret ingredient that gives those muffins lift and softens the crumb. So if you have a go at this, add an egg in there.

With the left over dough I made some plain flat breads which we had with minestrone at lunch time, they were pretty good.

Later on I had a wander round the garden to see if I could forage a salad to go in the ugly buns with some cold chicken for a light supper.

I attempted very small snail (half a little fingernail) photography, they move surprisingly fast and this was the best of ten shots…

I couldn’t quite face eating the overwintered chard in its raw state, even though I picked the smallest leaves they were still too chewy for me.

So I hope this counts as an attempt at the 52 week salad challenge for January. I haven’t sown any new seeds yet so I am going to have to work a bit harder if I am joining in next month! To find out all about the challenge visit Michelle at Veg Plotting.

I confess it was a ‘warm salad’ in the end, OK it was a stir-fry ( I cannot tell a lie when it comes to food blogging) but it had nothing in it that didn’t grow in the garden!

I have no polytunnel and no greenhouse so all these are just growing outside higgledy piggledy, more by accident than by design that they were there for me this afternoon. I have seen lots of chives, or wild onion grass growing locally but I didn’t pick any today.

In the garden I found and picked:-

Self sown leeks
The carrot thinnnings that I replanted hopefully when I pulled our carrots. Yes! We have some perky little carrots that came up again!
Rainbow Chard – surviving the depredations of the wood pigeon, who in turn are the smarter ones who survive the sparrow hawk’s daily visits. I have to admire them as well as shout and bang on the window at them.
Everlasting Spinach -a bit coarse but growing cheerfully
The last of the coriander leaves
Curly leaved parsley
A garlic clove that that I had planted about two years ago in the flower bed, forgot all about that, yes I added that in.
Australian mint
Sage
Rosemary
Masses of bright new Greek oregano leaves, little plants seeding themselves everywhere
Primrose flowers

The buns looked very ugly…

– a bit like squashed overripe Camembert pretending to be bread, but they tasted good when we ate them stuffed with cold chicken, warm stir fried garden gleanings and a dollop of Farringdons Gold Mayonnaise.

These two final pics are from the iPad camera so not that good but you get the general idea…