Saturday 25 February 2012

One banana, two banana, three banana, pear

I'm on record as favouring my bananas on the crunchy side. The less green and more brown they get, the more they veer into Tallboy's territory. So it was an easy decision on my part (at the behest of the boys from Bath) to take the last three spotty brown bananas in the fruit bowl and use them to make some banana bread.

This morning the postman knocked on the door and handed over a soggy padded envelope containing a bottle of something which had leaked all over the place, and an amazing Amazon package which contained a new book which had not leaked at all. This lack of leaking is only one of the many things to recommend this freshly-published book, "The Bread Revolution" by Duncan Glendinning and Patrick Ryan (the chirpy chappies from The Big Bread Experiment which aired last year).

The book is packed with photos, some to give context, some a bit of atmos, some for guidance and some just for the hell of it. I particularly liked the beardnet and the duck with a halo - my favourite image of all was the shot of the well-used loaf tins on the rack at the beginning. Despite all the pictures, the pages don't feel too busy and the recipes are well set out with plenty of thought put into their presentation; I couldn't find a point where you'd need to turn the page while you were in the middle of a recipe apart from the particularly detailed everyday white loaf walkthrough. The style of writing is accessible and clear, and quantities are given in a variety of formats. Where yeast is an ingredient, quantities are given for both fresh and dried (it's always been a bugbear of mine where only one type is given - if you're not a confident baker you can feel precluded from trying something if you don't have the right type and aren't sure how to convert).

One of the helpful things the thoughtful bakers have done is to reassure you at various points about the texture of the dough or about what's happening, which is so useful when you'd otherwise be staring down at the bowl in front of you and wondering "should it look like that?" or "should it be doing that?". There are also asides about how you could make changes. I liked the way that they've paired up many of their bread recipes with a meal recipe on the next page, so that you're not making your bread in isolation but can pair it with their suggestions or be inspired to come up with something yourself. They've also given signposts to suppliers (most of which are my faves too), talk about tools and discuss the delights of foraging. This is very much a book about real bread by people who care about it, but it's also not just a book about real bread.

So, banana bread. Well you've got to make something when you get a new cookery book, and I'd been eyeing the daily enbrownment of those bananas with despair for a little while, so it was an easy choice.



I'm also on record as saying I never make changes to a recipe I'm doing for the first time. Except sometimes I need to. Like today. In fact, this is possibly the most non-following following a recipe I have ever done.

For a start, I needed four squishy bananas. There were three in the fruit bowl. I nipped over to see if the Brazil Nut had any lurking in hers. "What, dark squishy ones? Yeah, I had a few. No one would eat them. I chucked them out last night..." OK, what would take the place of a squishy banana? How about the squishy pear which was the only other inhabitant of the fruit bowl? Go on, then. Ah, no pecans. No walnuts, either. OK well how about we go for a full-on squish experience and soak some sultanas in orange juice for a bit - who needs crunchy bits?

Plain white flour? Nah, I reckon I'll use my precious Fattoria La Vialla wholemeal - the mashed fruit looked pretty wet, and wholemeal can cope with a bit more moisture. Golden caster sugar? Nah, I'll just use the normal stuff in my jar with the vanilla pods stuck into it. Milk? I've only got soya milk, that will have to do. Two 1lb loaf tins? I haven't even got one 1lb-er. I'll stick it in a 2lb-er and bake it a bit longer then...

I mixed up my ingredient approximations as directed in the recipe, making a sticky cookie dough-like mess, then added my mashed nanas n pear. Oh, and the drained sultanas. This turned it into a much more recognisable cake mixture consistency which I shovelled into the liner in my tin and bunged in the oven, marvelling at how quickly it heats up when you're needing cake temperature compared to bread temperature.

I gave it 20 minutes longer than directed and left it to cool on a rack while the most delicious scent filled the house. "That smells nice," is what Tallboy's mouth said, while his eyes intimated an immediate and frenzied consumption of the whole thing.



The end result is delish - moist, banana-y and decidedly more-ish. I'm going to have another slice while I leaf through the book again...

Tuesday 14 February 2012

Your starter for ten

I did a terrible thing the other week. I was standing at the counter feeding my hungry mothers ready for the great sourdoughing session the next day according to my normal practice. I have a little routine to the feeding - with three of the hungry little devils I need to have some set order or I get horribly lost.

I take the mothers out of the fridge and put them in a row on the worktop. I fill and boil the kettle. I go and fetch my tub of rye flour and my tub of strong bread flour. I get out my scoop. I hunt around for my little plastic pot with the dishwasher salt in it which weighs a total of 154g, a figure which by no coincidence at all is exactly the same as one of my mother boxes sans lid. I fill my jug up with mostly cold water and a good slosh of kettle hot water, and that's me ready.

Take the lid off the first mother box. Tare the scales using the little pot, whip it off replacing it, Indiana Jones style, with the delidded mother. Take note of the weight of the contents. Work out in head how much mother I'll need the next day. If adding a third of the mother's weight in flour will exceed my requirements, then bung in a third of my mother's weight in flour. If it won't exceed my requirements, dither while working out in head how much flour to add to bring mother to a quantity suitable for my needs with some left over to blup in the fridge for next time. Add about that much flour. Take off the scales and place on the worktop next to its lid. Slosh into the box sufficient water to allow mixing to the right consistency. Mix to the right consistency.

Repeat the process with the second mother.

Repeat the process with the third mother.

Relid and leave mothers in a row on the worktop to froth and bubble overnight.

That's the plan, anyway.

Where it goes wrong is when you're not paying attention to which flour you're using. Remember we got out two tubs. Imagine you're on automatic pilot when feeding the first mother, working out quantities in your head and so on. In goes the flour. In goes the water. Mixmixmixmix mixmix mix mix m i x m i x m i x m i ...

If you've three mothers, two of which need fed with wheat flour and one of which needs rye, and you just reach for the wheat flour and feed the nearest mother, the odds are pretty good that you've fed a wheat mother with wheat flour. Unless you're me, that is.

Aghast, I surveyed my replete rye mother which had, for the first time, tasted wheat. Now in many respects this wouldn't be too much of a disaster. It would quite happily feed on the wheat flour and be ready the next day as usual. But I had just polluted my 100% rye mother. The 100% rye mother that I use to make loaves which I sometimes give to my wheat free colleague. I decided then and there that she had to go. I'd let her ferment overnight, use her all up tomorrow and then that would be it. Not such a drastic course of action in the light of the backup I'd taken of it a few months ago.

I rummaged in the freezer and pulled out the lump of solid starter. It was a rather strange shape, but I didn't hold that against it, and left it in its bag in a bowl overnight on the worktop. In the morning it was sludge, and ready for a feed. I spooned in a good helping of rye flour (after a triple check and a final hesitation before tipping the scoop), sloshed in some water and mixed it all up, confident that it would be bubbling merrily in no time.

It wasn't. The next day I fed and watered it more. The next day it sullenly failed to bubble. The day after that I fed it again, rewarded this time by an utter failure of fermentation. Nothing, not even the tiniest little fartlet.

Now, I did have a get-out-of-jail-free card, in the shape of Clive Mellum who is the father of my mother and who would, I was sure, happily come to my aid if I were to email him a tale of woe and zoom up to the test bakery at Shipton Mill with a suitable receptacle and an expression of deep appreciation. It would be embarrassing to admit that I hadn't taken enough care of his mother, and in many ways more embarrassing to admit to what almost felt like a murder rather than simple neglectful matricide. I resolved that I'd arrange to do this once I could drive again and make my own way there. In the intervening weeks, I'd just not have rye starter bread on the menu.

Come Friday, when routine mother feeding time arrived, I went to the fridge to get them out and realised that there were only two in there. The rye mother had been sitting disregarded in a corner of the worktop for days, my attempts at resuscitation failed. I popped the lid off to empty it out and was met with a small area of healthy bubbling. Mother's alive! I scooped out the bubbly bit into a bowl, emptied the rest out, tipped the bubbly bit back and gave it the feed of its life. In the morning it was fair honeycombed with bubbles all the way through and ready to go back into production use.

So now through no care or expertise, I've got three mothers blupping away in the fridge again. Huzzah! I am going to be awfully careful about feeding in future, and I am so glad I had a backed up version in the freezer. In fact I'd better do another backup before I get it all wrong again...

Saturday 11 February 2012

Tie your mother down

Let me tell you about my mother. She lives in my fridge and comes out once a week for dinner. The night before a baking session she sits on my worktop all night, then heads back to the fridge again. I know that some take issue with calling sourdough starter a mother, but 1) it gives you the chance to exclaim 'Oh! I must feed my mother!' and 2) I tend towards Clive Mellum's idea that calling it a mother makes it sound kind and friendly and not scary. Because for a while, it all did seem rather scary.

Resolving after my Bertinet day last year not to buy bread again seemed like a big decision and it wasn't without trepidation that I rolled up my sleeves and faced the prospect of the weekly bake. As the weeks went by, I became more confident and more interested in extending my repertoire. Sourdough was the obvious next step but the trepidation levels mounted as I read about the trials and tribulations of creating a starter, casting half of it away, feeding and nurturing it, and finally performing the alchemy of loaf creation. Much of the advice appeared to contradict the rest - type of flour, temperature, quantities, other ingredients, discarding or not discarding. Having informed myself extensively on the internet, I finished up feeling that I knew less then when I knew nothing.

A friend recommended the River Cottage method of creating a starter, so I looked around and found it here. Taking a deep breath, I boiled the kettle and readied my strong white. Not being at all confident how it was going to turn out, I took a note of what I did and recorded how it looked, so that I'd have something to refer to next time.

So, here's what I did.

Monday

In a pudding basin, I mixed up
50g Wessex Mill French Bread Flour
50g Stoneground Rye flour
warm water to mix

I behatted the bowl with clingfilm and left it to do its stuff in the airing cupboard with a whisper or two of encouragement.




Tuesday

As I peeked into the airing cupboard I saw with great joy a bit of a fizz on top of the mixture.

50g of the French Bread flour
50g of the Rye flour
cold water to mix

Again with the clingfilm but I left the bowl on the worktop to continue the process at ambient temperature now that it had 'taken'.




Wednesday

I discarded half the contents of the bowl and decanted the rest into a plastic box with an airtight clippy lid.

100g French Bread flour
cold water to mix

I clipped the lid onto the box and left it on the worktop.




Thursday

Froth-a-rama! I discarded half again (you have no idea of the mess it made in the take-me-to-your-composter box).

100g French Bread flour
cold water to mix

Then back to the worktop.




Friday

Again with the discarding.

100g French Bread flour
cold water to mix

Again with the worktop.

I didn't take a photo this day, so instead here's a picture of a wrought iron flower in the grounds of the Château des ducs de Bretagne in Nantes which I took the week after.




Saturday

Discard.

100g Shipton Mill Baker's No. 1 Strong White flour
less cold water than previously

Worktop.




Sunday

Discard.

100g Shipton Mill Baker's No. 1
less cold water to mix

And now the starter moves to its new permanent home, the top shelf of the fridge, where it lives during the week and is woken, like a fairy tale princess, every Friday ready for the weekend's baking.



Worktop.




If you're thinking of starting a starter or mothering a mother, then I urge you to just give it a go. It doesn't always work but it's easy enough to do it again. I keep my three mothers in the fridge and feed them weekly, it's not at all onerous or difficult and every weekend I make the most amazing bread with them. Huzzah for mothers!

Sunday 5 February 2012

It's all Greek to me

It isn't easy to bake when you've taken a Porsche to the right knee. Prolonged standing is a no-no for a start. And with limited mobility, fitness just seems to evaporate, so all of a sudden kneading a batch of dough is exhausting. It's been frustrating having my capabilities limited but huzzah for healing and being able to stand up and so on. To celebrate being able to do more, I tried something new.

During my enforced sitting-on-my-arse-on-the-sofa-for-several-weeks period, I got a bit trigger happy with the 'add to basket' button and took delivery of a bunch of books, mostly to do with cooking. The most substantial tome is one simply called 'Vefa's Kitchen' by Vefa Alexiadou ('the Greek Delia' according to my source in Athens) and not only does it require a minimum of two hands for lifting, it is unique amongst my cookery books as it is furnished with a full three place-marking ribbons.



Vefa's book does contain a substantial number of chapters devoted to cooking deceased creatures, but is far from being a dead loss as there is plenty to excite a veggie too. The first place I turned to was the bread section, where I was interested by a recipe which required a hit-and-miss process of leaven creation using chick peas.




The deal is that you mess around with some ground up dried chick peas, introduce them to some boiling water in a jar, wrap it in a blanket and leave it somewhere warm for a day or two then see what happens. You're not to mention to anyone that you're doing it else they might put the evil eye on proceedings and scupper your efforts. I had to tell the boys, though. They don't normally go into the airing cupboard as a rule, but you can bet your bottom dollar that if I hadn't said 'That fermenting jar wrapped in a blanket in the airing cupboard, you see, that one there, touch it and feel my fury' they would have been investigating and probing and rescuing it for me.


The bread is called εφτάζυμο (eftazimo) and this caused me a bit of head-scratching because according to some sources that means '7 times kneaded' and according to others it's a corruption of 'self-leavening'. I prefer the latter...

The first difficulty I had (if you don't count the fruitless search for the box containing my Kilner jars which I'd put away as I never use them) was how to coarsely grind half a lb of dried chick peas. They are hard as little bullets and would have taken chunks out of my food processor blade. They'd probably have demolished my feeble little pestle and mortar too, had I been crazy enough to use that. My only course seemed to be my little coffee grinder which has never seen a coffee bean in its life but which makes short work of linseeds and so on. I divvied up the chick peas into little batches and started to zap the first lot. I don't know if you've ever tried to coarsely grind dried chick peas in a coffee grinder, but if you have, you'll know what I quickly discovered - that instead of an even grind, I managed to produce an astonishing array of items on the continuum

whole unscathed chick peas --------------------- finely powdered chick peas

calling at every station in between. Not being entirely sure what a coarsely ground chick pea looks like, I decided to pretend that this was a desired outcome on the basis that they were all probably coarsely ground on average.



I sterilised my newly-purchased Kilner jar by sloshing boiling water at it, then added my averagely coarsely ground victims, a quarter of a teaspoon of salt and three cups of boiling water. A quick stir with my longest spoon and a momentary oh-lord-my-hand-is-stuck then it was on with the swaddling and tucking it away in the airing cupboard. The coldest weekend for a long time might seem to be a strange time to be undertaking something which needs to sit for a day or two in a very warm place, but we have had the heating on quite a lot...



I peeked after twenty four hours and it seemed to correspond with the description of a deep layer of foam on top. The dreaded 'if there's no foam and it all looks a bit orange just tip it away' scenario hadn't hit. Perhaps the silver coating on the inside of the airing cupboard door has anti-evil eye properties? I brought it downstairs to spoon off the froth but realised as I dunked the spoon that the froth contained a goodly proportion of tiny bits of overground chick pea. Ah. As I pierced the top layer, the fermenting pulses fired a plume of spume, good white bubbles with no bits of chick pea in it. Er, maybe this was how it was supposed to be? I spooned out all the froth, both white and full of chick peas. The steeping juice was also required, so I sieved this into my bowl too, then realised this was a more appropriate technology for the froth so after a bit of juggling back and forwards, I ended up with a froth/juice mixture with a negligible chick pea content.



A cup of strong white flour and a tablespoon of sugar turned it into a slack paste and phase two was go. A plastic bag hat then overnight in the airing cupboard as it bubbled away happily to itself.


In the morning I rescued it and peered worriedly at it, wondering if it was ok. The smell wasn't unpleasant, but was pretty strange and not at all like the sourdough starters I'm used to. A house guest who arrived just after I retrieved it enquired with a wrinkled nose what the hell was that smell.


I went ahead and followed the rest of the recipe, adding the starter to more strong flour, sugar, olive oil, a little salt and three quarters of a cup of water. The resulting dough was very tight, but not knowing how it was supposed to be, and following my usual procedure of sticking closely to a recipe the first time I use it, I didn't make any adjustment.


I left it to prove in two portions in my medium round bannetons, which in retrospect was rather over optimistic as there was little evidence after two hours of any increase in size. I think the leaven was ok, but the dough was just so tight it had no chance. Or maybe the evil eye struck after I took phase two out of the airing cupboard...

I went ahead and baked them anyway, and they produced two squat loaves of a density I don't think I've ever seen before. Sampling a slice with our house guest, we decided it was quite tasty but the texture was off putting. 'You could slice it and dry it out in the oven,' said the house guest. 'It would make fabulous biscuits.'



So I did. Now, instead of two dense loaves with their own gravitational fields, I have tooth-defying dry slices of former loaves, each with such density that they appear to be forming their own galaxy in the storage tin.



Over the next week I shall be grabbing every Greek person I can talk to so that I can enquire earnestly into the right texture for eftazimo. And I'm going to have another go with more water, because the taste was lovely (although quite sweet, with a total of 4 tbsp of sugar in the whole recipe, might cut that down a bit next time). Wish me luck avoiding the evil eye...