This one uses polenta, as well as maize flour (I used Cool Chile Co Masa harina).
I thought the result would be crumbly and a bit dry, but it’s not. Instead, it’s got a good crumb and a pleasant yellowing colour. Quite a handsome loaf too.
As with much of my bread-making here, it’s another one from Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf, which I’m slowly working my way through.
My first go at fougasse, which look fab but are actually very simple. I followed Richard Bertinet’s recipe from Dough for these ones. It just involves making his basic white dough then shaping it.
His basic white dough is 10g fresh yeast rubbed into 500g strong white flour, then 10g salt mixed in, and 350g water added. Bring together the sticky dough, knead until it becomes nice and elasticky (don’t add loads of extra flour!), then rested for until doubled in volume (about two hours in my case).
Heated the oven – with baking stone – to 230C.
After the resting, I just cut the dough into four, gently stretching each piece, then cutting slits with the edge of my dough scraper. I gently opened up the slits, then carefully slid/lifted the shaped piece onto a floured, rim-less baking sheet (use peel if you have one) and slid it onto the baking stone. Baked for around 14 minutes, until starting to brown.
Oh, and the word geek in me loves the fact that fougasse is related to foccacia – both words come from focus, the Latin for hearth. As ever, some nifty factology and further explanation on Wikipedia.
More Dan Lepard from the essential book The Handmade Loaf. Some proper teatime muffins. It’s crazy I feel I have to refer to these as “English muffins”, as I’m English and was eating these long before US-style muffins invaded Britain.
Muffins are like yeasted buns, but are cooked on a griddle or hotplate. Alongside crumpets, muffins are wonderful teatime fare, especially when slathered with butter and jam or honey.
Dan L has added toasted buckwheat to this recipe, which adds a nice depth of flavour. Though not a crunch, as he uses 75g of buckwheat, toasted, and then soaked in 100g boiling water and 2 T of cider vinegar, which soften the seeds (they’re not grains, folks).
Make the dough by adding 1 t fine sea salt to 350g strong white flour.
Add 3/4 t fresh yeast to 200g water (at 20c), then add the soaked buckwheat.
Pour the yeasty, buckwheat liquid into the flour, and mix to a soft dough with 25g melted butter.
Give the dough two more short kneads at 10 minute intervals, forming into a ball and putting in a covered bowl in between. Then leave for an hour in the covered bowl.
On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the dough to about 2cm thick, and cut out rounds with an 8 or 10cm cutter (Dan L says the latter, I used the former and it finished result seemed a suitable size).
Rest the muffins on a floured baking sheet, covered, for another 45 mins.
Preheat a heavy pan or flat griddle over a low-medium heat. Dust each muffin with a little extra flour, then griddle them over a medium heat for about 5-7 minutes each side. Serve warm, or cool, then split and toast.
We had them for afternoon tea along with some rather cute biscuits.
Filed under Baking
We had a bit of a baking frenzy in our house the weekend just gone. Which is actually fairly normal, but we possibly made even more stuff than usual on this occasion (not discussed here – a Madeira cake with fancy icing and some rolled fruit cookies), then fed a load of our ware to Ceri, Becca and Angharad for afternoon tea.
Fran made a big batch of vanilla cookie dough using this recipe:
225g unsalted butter and 225g caster sugar creamed together until light (by hand or with an electric beater).
Add 1 beaten egg and 1/2 t vanilla extract, and beat until smooth.
Incorporate a pinch of salt and 450g of sifted (or is it sieved?) plain flour, then bring together into a ball, or disc, and refrigerate for an hour or two.
It’s from Decorating Cakes and Cookies by Annie Rigg, a book that’s chock-full of cute and novel goodies. And some baddies too, as – and I’ve said it before – food colouring pastes can be really vile things, with some dubious chemical food colourings in them.
Still, we haven’t embraced the vile sugar pastes just yet. Instead, we tried to do most of our baking this weekend using ingredients that had natural colourings. This was a slight challenge for making the rather nifty Stained-glass biscuits.
We visited one of those cutesy “old-fashioned sweet-shops” that have become popular of late, but the shopgirl looked at us slightly blankly when we asked for simple boiled sweets. Really, if you’re going to work in an “old-fashioned sweet-shop”, at least learn some of the basic terminology. Hi ho. We did get a few types of sweets from there, but in the end, the best source for simple boiled sweets made with natural colourings was Sainsbury’s (called “Clear Fruits”).
So anyway – to make the stained glass biscuits, simple cut out shapes, then using smaller cutters, make holes. Place the biscuits on baking sheets lined with parchment, and fill the holes with boiled sweet that has been crushed (I found a pestle and mortar worked best). Bake at 180C (160C fan) for about 12 mins. Remove from the oven, then allow to cool – the crushed sweets will have melted, but will still be liquid, so leave 10 mins or so to allow them to set, then gently lift from the sheets.
We used the smaller cut-outs to make iced-gem type biscuits (again, the colours here a result of using food colourings with natural ingredients – like spirulina for the green, heh). Very cute.
Filed under Baking, Biscuits, cookies
Bread, Cakes And Ale 