Saturday 30 July 2011

La Schiacciata con l'Uva (flatbread with grapes)

A big thank you to Fattoria La Vialla, who have kindly agreed to my reproducing the recipe from Le Ricette di Giuliana here.


La Schiacciata con l'Uva

Ingredients (for 6 to 8 people)

1 kg fresh, large and firm red grapes (ideally!)
500g flour
20g fresh beer yeast (or 1 tsp. quick dried yeast)
9 tbs extra virgin olive oil
8 tbs sugar
1 tsp salt

In a mixing bowl, dissolve the yeast in a little tepid water (about 1/2 glass) and, stirring continually, add the sieved flour a little at a time, adding more tepid water (about 1 glass), 4 tablespoons of oil, 4 of sugar and the teaspoon of salt (if you use quick dried yeast, then just mix it in with the sieved flour). Knead the dough well after having transferred it to the floured table; it should become soft and elastic. Leave it to rise for about an hour in a warm, sheltered place, covered with a teacloth.

To check if the dough has risen, press the dough your finger: if it doesn't leave a dent, then it still needs to rise a little bit more, if it forms a permanent mark, almost a hole, then it is ready. After this time, on the lightly floured working surface, knead the dough a little more and roll it out with the rolling pin into a fairly thin, more or less rectangular sheet, almost double the size of the baking tray. Grease a rectangular baking tray (measuring about 25cm x 35 cm) with a tablespoon of oil and line with the dough, allowing the excess to hang over the edges of the tray. Spread over it three quarters of the destalked, washed and dried grapes and then sprinkle over the two tablespoons of sugar and two of oil. Fold the excess dough over the top of the grapes, in such a way that they are almost completely covered.

Scatter over the top the remaining grapes, pushing them down into the dough a little with the tips of your fingers and sprinkle with 2 tablespoons of sugar and 2 of oil. Bake the schiacciata in the oven preheated to 180°C for 20-25 minutes, then lower the temperature to 150° and bake for at least another 15 minutes. If it should begin to brown too much, cover it with a sheet of aluminium foil until it has finished cooking. Serve the flatbread tepid or especially cold cut into small squares.

This exquisite flatbread is to be found most of all in Florence, although also in Siena and Arezzo, in so many bakeries, ready to eat. It has very old origins: it was prepared with the leftovers of the bread dough and the ripe grapes, at grape harvest time. It is a recipe which is a mix of sweet and savoury, very nutritious and, I would say, "Mediterranean". For perfect results, it is indispensable to use "real" grapes, even if they contain the inconvenience of the seeds; in any case, a version without this "bother" could be to substitute the fresh grapes with raisins (no seeds!) after having soaked them in warm water for 5 to 10 minutes.


The first time I made this, I did it exactly according to the recipe. Subsequently I've done my own thing in a few respects:
  • I found using a whole tablespoon of oil to grease the tray, and extra oil with each layer made the finished bread too oily for my taste, so I use a tiny bit to oil the tray and don't add any after the grapes. I still use it in the dough.

  • I guessed at half a glass being about 100 ml and a glass being 200 ml. This seems to work!

  • I found that I preferred using fewer grapes (maybe 500 or 600 g) so that they were more spaced out in the bread, and using half for the middle and half for the top.

  • I make and work the dough according to the Bertinet method rather than as specified here.

  • I use standard strong white bread flour.


It is desperately satisfying to push the grapes in!




Friday 29 July 2011

In the round

I had some spare white dough last night so I plaited it, rolled the plait out a bit and made a round. I didn't leave anything in the middle while it was proving and the gap (just) stayed there. I rather liked it.

Here it is:

Sunday 24 July 2011

The grape and the good

This weekend it was Peg's party, and since she'd previously tried and loved the Schiacciata con l'Uva (Tuscan Flatbread with Grapes), she asked me to make some for her.

The recipe is from Le Ricette di Giuliana, from Fattoria La Vialla. The whole book is a complete treasure trove of wonderful fresh-looking recipes that you can almost taste as you view the pictures. As a bonus, many of the recipes are vegetarian-friendly. The writing can take a bit of working out as it's presented in a facsimile of Italian script, but it's well worth the effort.

The grape bread requires a sweetened, olive oil dough, which you work to an elastic state then leave to rest and rise for an hour or so. Turning it out onto your surface, you roll it out twice as long as your baking tray, then lie it across the greased-with-olive-oil tray with the extra bits overlapping to the left and right. Then you take your red grapes and press them into the dough lying on the baking tray. Don't be tempted to put too many in, as it will turn everything to pink mush. You sprinkle on a couple of tablespoons of sugar on top of them (I like to use demerara) and then fold the sides over the top, giving you a strange lumpy looking surface into which you press more grapes, and on which you sprinkle more sugar. The recipe calls for a few tablespoons of olive oil to be added to each layer too, but I found that I preferred the texture of the finished bread much better without.

Cooked grapes are delish - who'd have thought it? The cooking brings out a lovely sweetness, along with a softening in texture and pretty little puddles of escaped juice in each grape's nestling spot. Whenever I've shared this bread with people, it's been incredibly popular, and disappears in no time. The texture of the bread is soft and moist, the grapes are little juicy surprises, and the crunch of sugar on top is just perfect. I can't count up how many times I've made this since I got this cookery book only two or three months ago - and I know I'm going to make it countless more times.



Tuesday 19 July 2011

Come in number 99, your time is up...

Last weekend saw our 99th birthday party (mine and Tallboy's - and if you're wondering how we add up to 99, I'm not going to tell you). As the art of the RSVP seems to be rather on the decline, I had no definite idea how many people were planning to come, which made planning the catering a bit of a challenge. (The total was 42 in the end).

I spent most of the day before baking, and had to get up at half six on party day to finish it all off. By the time the party started I had had enough of seeing food and couldn't face any of it...

On the menu:

Fougasses
Pains d'Epi
Brown rolls
Bertinet breadsticks with chili halloumi
Brazilian potato salad (with coriander and olive oil, courtesy of the Brazil Nut)
Mexican rice salad
Tabbouleh
Mushroom & Thyme quiche (30 x 20 cm) (I'm not sure why I needed to specify the size but the tin is new and I'm still a bit excited about having a rectangular one)
Caramelised shallot and mature cheddar quichelets (6 10 cm diameter little quiches)
Sausage rolls (Sosmix Lincolnshire sausage mix inside)
Hummus
Tzatziki
Pizza with special tomato sauce
La Schiacciata con l'Uva (Tuscan flatbread with grapes)
99 cupcakes
Genoise sponge with summer berries

The épis looked beautiful and were around for a long time until people got the idea about pulling a bit off - then they disappeared pretty quickly. The breadsticks were incredibly popular and if I'd done as many again I'm sure they'd have gone too. The fougasses looked attractive but again I think people were loath to handle them so in the end I sent some home with guests. The brown rolls were delish but I suppose looked a tad boring compared to the rest so they were sadly neglected. As I worked my various doughs, it was obvious once again that working a larger amount at once is so much easier than a smaller 500g of flour mix. An excuse to make lots of bread!

The Tabbouleh recipe came from here and was utterly delicious. There was a lot of parsley chopping involved, but the flavour was amazing, and the look of it, mostly green, flecked with cream coloured grains and the odd red of tomato, was really attractive.

For the pizza, I made my special tomato sauce, which always makes a huge difference to the final taste. You just need to remember to start it early... I slosh some olive oil into a large, deep and wide-based pan, then add some crushed garlic and cook for a minute or two just to soften but not brown. Then in goes a pack of passata, along with a slug of Worcestershire sauce (veggie version for me, obv) or any other seasoning you fancy, and a couple of pinches of dried oregano or mixed herbs or whatever. Now you just need to simmer this very gently. For ages. There will be a fine splatter of red droplets around your pan, gunking up your worktop and sprayed decoratively across the tiles behind your cooker. You can stir it a bit if you like, this helps you to see how well it's going, but you should be only on the very gentlest heat so there shouldn't be any danger of it sticking or burning. The stuff in the pan will reduce over time, concentrating the flavour and making some very strange noises. When it looks distressingly like those flatulent hot mud springs you see in New Zealand, it's done and you can turn the heat off and leave it to one side until you need it.

The Mexican Rice Salad isn't really very Mexican I suppose - I made it up as a cheap version of one we used to buy from the deli counter, and loved it more than the original.

I made all my pastry (for the quiches and sausage rolls) and the sponges for the monster summer berry cake with a fantastic plain flour from Fattoria La Vialla, which I find of exceptional quality. I'm quite the fan of them and their products - but I'll leave the waxing lyrical for another time, as I need to get on and tell you about the grape bread. I found the recipe in the book Le Ricette di Giuliana (again from Fattoria La Vialla) and was both enchanted by the image of the purple-studded bread and puzzled by the concept of using grapes for cooking. It was the first recipe that I tried from the book, and it was so delicious that I've made it again and again. It was a big hit at the party, with requests for the recipe and mere crumbs left in the bowl. You can see a bit of it peeking into the second photo.

Now, as it was a 99th party, I felt the need to echo the 99 ice cream cone somewhere. Cupcakes were the obvious answer, once I'd looked into hiring an ice cream machine for the day, and had sat down quietly to recover from the prices they were asking. I based mine on these vanilla cupcakes but didn't colour the icing and once I'd put down the icing bag, I sprinkled with chocolate strands or strawberry sauce and staked each cake through the heart with a little Flake. I could easily have made double the number of these too, they were very popular, especially with the children.



The pièce de resistance, much admired by the assembled company, was Eric Lanlard's Genoise Sponge with Summer Berries. I made the sponges the day before, and as I don't have two cake tins of the right size, I had to make one sponge, cook it, decant it, wash out the tin, make the other sponge and cook that. The tins were a bit bigger than those in the recipe so I scaled it up and that worked well, but I was a bit shy on the cream and fruit front, so that's a lesson learned for the next time. That and get another tin the same size so I don't have to spend hours making two cakes. The initial mix is done in a bowl over barely simmering water. The thing with whizzing up eggs and sugar is that there's an incredible expansion. If you start off in a bowl not much bigger than the bare ingredients, you're in for a bit of a shock, a few moments of reflection, and a sticky transfer operation. I'd imagine. I left the two sponges overnight on a cooling rack, draped decoratively with a fetching red and white tea towel. I think you could probably get away with another combination of colours if you need to. The next morning I used my new cheesewire-type-cake-bisector to turn each sponge into two even subsponges. It worked really well, although I needed some sponge-steadying from Tallboy. It was great fun to assemble the cake, and after the final dusting of icing sugar I was rather proud of my creation. The sponge was so light, and although there was a fair bit of cream, it wasn't overpowering and the fruit was a good foil to it. Everyone wanted a slice, and I'll definitely make this one again. I just need to find an excuse...


Saturday 9 July 2011

Today's batch

Today I used Wessex Mill's French Bread Flour and made fougasses and a couple of baguettes. I tried an epi again (the first one I attempted was a concatenation of unspeakable blobs) and messed around a bit with the other one - I'm not entirely sure what I was trying to do with it.

I really like the French Bread Flour and the results it gives - the dough I made was a bit wet and hard to handle but we enjoyed the bread it produced.

Fougasses


Epi


Not quite sure



A day in Bertinet's kitchen

It all started last Saturday. Tallboy dropped me off in Bath at half nine, and I made my way to The Bertinet Kitchen, tucked away just above George Street. As it's on the side of a steep hill, the shop is on street level, and so is the kitchen. It's just that they're different streets. With unerring predictability, I chose the wrong street.

We started with toast and coffee and hello I'm so and so. The group gradually swelled until we were thirteen or fourteen, the boys outnumbering the girls and the vast majority present because they'd been bought the course as a gift.

The session proper started with a discussion about the contents of bread, contrasting those of home-baked bread and supermarket sliced bread. Then followed an exposition of the French method of dough working - the bare-armed baker at his trough, the frasage, the découpage, the passage en tête, the étirage, the soufflage, all magical, mysterious and evocative terms. The contrast with the hammering we're taught to give the dough in this country was astonishing.

Finally, it was time for action. Richard wielded his scraper with virtuosity and showed no hesitation in showing the dough who was boss. I'd seen his method on TV previously - that was what had excited my interest in learning more. It was fascinating to see it close up, but disheartening too, as there was no way I was going to be able to do that - at least not just yet.

The freshly mixed dough was removed from the mixing bowl with the encouragement of the scraper, tidied and tucked in around the edges again by means of the scraper, then scooped up double-handed, the top third being gripped and the rest hanging down towards the worktop. A little flick forwards of the still dangling trailing edge, then a swift slap onto the worktop, the sound of the impact startlingly loud. Now the pulling back of the part still gripped, bringing it over and away in an air-gathering arc, then laying it back down on the part still adhering to the worktop. All along, the same part stays on top - no flipping or turning, just the same movement repeated, with the same piece on top. A quick scrape, tuck and tidy every so often, but mostly just grab, slap, pull and over, the rhythm of the noise almost metronomic.

Within a few minutes, the dough was sufficiently worked and consigned back to its bowl for rising, and then it was our turn. We worked in pairs, which was a little frustrating as I itched to do it all myself and translate what I'd seen into actions, but it was also useful as you had the opportunity to stand back and observe. Getting the hang of the action was hard work, and our lump of dough looked nothing like Richard's. Gallingly, he would come past, see the state of it, work it for a moment and it would look perfect; back in our hands it reverted to a sticky, recalcitrant mess.

Our second (and much larger) batch was more successful, but worked between four of us, so the itching-to-be-doing-it factor was multiplied. The second batch was much easier to work and I finally felt like I had the hang of the grab slap pull and over. Using the scraper became much easier too, trying to take the lump of dough for a walk around the table while keeping the top, well, on top.

More scraper practice with the risen dough - fabrication of fougasses, breadsticks, loaves in tins - then Richard put together two huge trays of herb-laden focaccia. We got to practise oven technique too. The correct approach is one of respect and obeisance - on one knee, you open the door fully, the warm blast merely riffling your hair as it passes over you rather than catching you full in the face and huffing up your specs. Now you can introduce your peel and with a little flourish pull it away, your dough left perfectly on the baking stone, then close the door and leave it to do its stuff.

At last in the baking kitchen it was time for lunch - it had been a hard few hours' work and to sit down and appreciate what we'd made was very welcome. Our produce looked amazing arranged in baskets on the table, and we enjoyed a companionable lunch together.

The only thing left to do was to equip myself with some necessities for my baking at home. I had to get Dough and Crust, both of which Richard signed for me, and a couple of linen cloths, oh and two scrapers. And a pot of delicious sea salt. Sadly while I was queuing up to make my purchases, the communal produce was being shared out - when finally I came to fill my little brown paper bag, all the breadsticks had gone. Still it, was an excuse to make some more the next day - and let's face it, I clearly need the practice...

I left with my head full of new ideas and techniques, marvelling at Richard's effortless prowess, and astonished at the hard work behind the scenes which makes a kitchen work - Kieran seemed to be everywhere, all the time, anticipating Richard's next requirement like a theatre sister ready to slap the next instrument into the surgeon's outstretched hand. I was very impressed. So was Tallboy when he picked me up and saw the goodies I was bringing home with me, although his face fell rather when I told him that Richard said he wasn't allowed to buy any more supermarket sliced loaves.

At the beginning of the day, Richard had told us that we would all now become bread bores. We'd host dinner parties and wait for someone to ask us where we'd got our bread, whereupon our spouse would bury their face in their hands while we launched into bread mode. I rather think he was right...