Category Archives: Baking

Baking – Daniel Etherington’s bread experiements

June 14, 2010 · 3:09 am

Cute cookies

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.

2 Comments

Filed under Baking, Biscuits, cookies

Tagged as , , ,

May 28, 2010 · 10:37 am

Soft white baps

 

The sort of name to make little boys snigger. And yet my wife Fran even giggled as I typed it…

The macro on my camera couldn’t really cope, but in general it’s a lovely pic with the herbiage, so what the heck.

Great recipe, from Dan Lepard’s Guardian column.

I’ve found I don’t need to bake them for quite as long as the recipe suggests; you might want to test them at 20 mins.

Also, nine 150g pieces makes for some pretty hefty buns, so you might want to divide it into say 15 90g pieces. I made round buns this time, but it’d work well for finger buns for sausages too.

 

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Baking

Tagged as , ,

May 8, 2010 · 6:25 am

Pain de campagne

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Ok, they’re not entirely perfect shapes with all that rupturing, but they’re pretty tasty.

Pain de campagne – what Richard Bertinent describes as “sourdough’s little brother” – are, alongside baguettes, the classic French bread, though of a decidedly more rustic bent (the name, means “country bread” for anyone with even more rudimentary or non-existent French than me).

This Bertinent recipe uses a ferment that you leave for 4-6 hours, or overnight in the fridge. For mine, I chucked in a few tablespoons of my rye leaven, to hopefully add some flavour and make up for the fact that my fresh yeast stash was looking decidedly tired. So my ferment was 200g strong white flour, 100g rye flour, 10g of salt all mixed dry. Then 350g water,  2T rye leaven, teaspoon or so of sad-looking, not-so-fresh fresh yeast, a sprinkling of dried active yeast all mixed then blended with the dry ingredients (not strictly the Bertinent method).

I left that ferment overnight out of the fridge. Our kitchen was about 15C overnight, and in the morning the ferment looked nice and active.

In a large bowl I mixed: 500g strong white flour with 100 rye flour and 15g salt. I sprinkled 5g of dried active yeast on 400g water, let it ferment a bit, then mixed this, as well as the ferment, into the flours. Kneaded until it felt good, formed a ball, rested for an hour. Then I gave it a turn, formed a ball, rested for half an hour. Then I gave it a turn, formed a ball, and rested it for another half hour. Then I split the dough into two portions or around 650g each, formed two balls, and proved them until doubled in volume – about two hours.

Baked them one at a time in an oven pre-heated to 250C. I misted the oven, slid one onto my baking stone, baked for 5 minutes, then turned the oven down to 220C and baked for a further 25 minutes, until it sounded hollow when knocked on the base.

Leave a comment

Filed under Baking

Tagged as ,

April 26, 2010 · 2:34 am

Alsace loaf with rye

 

Very pleased with this one. It’s another recipe from Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf, a book that’s kept me busy for many a weekend, and will doubtless do so for years to come. Although I’m yet to perfect my stick-shaping technique, the flavour was delicious, the texture nice and open, the crust crunchy without being tough or overly thick.

I finally got round to making a rye leaven. I simply took a few tablespoons of my wheat leaven, then started feeding it with 100ml of water and 120g of rye flour every day. After a week or so, it was looking pretty good, gassing away nicely.

This loaf is given distinction by the fact it uses not just a rye leaven, but also rye grains. Use about 120g of rye grains, then boil them for about an hour in water. Save the water, then put the rye grains in another bowl, and, when they’re cool, cover them with white wine and leave in the fridge overnight. This makes them nice and soft, and tangy. The recipe says you can also use yogurt or juice, but I used a Chardonnay we had hanging around. I really don’t like Chardonnay, so this seemed like a perfect way to use it up.

To make the dough, combine 25g honey, 4g crumbled fresh yeast and 325g water (use the water you cooked the grains in, made up with extra if necessary) in a bowl and leave it to sit.

After it’s sat for 10 minutes or so, add 150g of rye leaven and 300g of the wine-soaked rye grains (drained; I used up the rye-ish wine in a stew thing).

In a large bowl, mix:
350g strong white flour
100g wholemeal flour
50g rye flour

Then add the wet yeast/leaven mix and combine by hand until you have a rough dough. Leave to rest for 10 minutes, then turn it out onto a lightly floured surface. Stretch it out a bit, and sprinkle with 1 1/4 teaspoons of fine sea salt and 25g of melted butter (or other fat).

Knead briefly, then put it back in the bowl to rest for half an hour. Knead again briefly, then return to the bowl.

Give it a turn after half an hour (ie, take it out, stretch it, then fold it in three). Return to bowl.

Give it another turn after another half an hour. Return to bowl, then leave another half an hour.

After this one and a half hour proving period, divide the dough up into five equal portions, of around 250g. Shape into balls, and leave to rest for 10 minutes.

Shape into batons by flattening out, then pulling the two corners opposite you out slightly and folding them towards the centre of the disc, sealing in. This will create a slight point. Fold that towards the centre too, and seal. Rotate, and do the same with the other side. Fold this in half, and seal. Buy Dan’s book – it’s got some very useful pictures of this process.

Let the batons rest for another 10 minutes.

To shape into sticks, take the baton, and fold in half again, along the length, starting at one end and sealing as you progress along the length. Roll on the work surface, and make pointy ends if you like that look. This is part of the baking process I’ve yet to perfect. The problem is creating a stick with a neat, tight seam, then not twisting it at all, so it will retain a regular shape when you bake. I guess I just need to make a few hundred more.

Lay the sticks, seam-side up, on a baking sheet lined with a floured cloth, making pleats of cloth between them so they don’t stick as they rise. Leave until doubled in height. The recipe says “1 hour”; that’s fine if you have a warm, moist environment, but my kitchen is quite open and cool so rising generally takes longer for me.

Heat the oven to 210C.

Carefully overturn a couple of the loaves, either on a baking sheet, or a peel (or substitute peel) if you use a baking stone. Slash the tops diagonally. As I use a stone, I then slide them into the oven, moistening it with a water spray. Bake for 25-30 minutes, then remove when they’re a nice colour, and sound hollow when knocked on the bottom.

Leave a comment

Filed under Baking, Breads

Tagged as , , , , ,

April 13, 2010 · 6:59 am

Form factor

I made this loaf the other day, inspired by but not following Richard Bertinet’s Honey and lavender loaf recipe from Dough.

I’m sure a lavender scented loaf would be lovely, but it isn’t ideal of your basic sandwiches-for-work loaf, so I excised the lavender. Also, I’m finding the very best breads I’m making at the moment all involve using some leaven; I can’t resist adding 3 or so tablespoons full to whatever recipe I’m following.

What I liked most about this recipe from Dough was the form factor. Although the rising in the oven split the loaf more radically along one of my cuts than the others, ruining any chance of pretty regularity, in principle I was very happy with the shape of this loaf.

So anyway.

250g wholemeal bread flour (I used stuff that had been ground on the waterwheel at Otterton)
250g strong white flour
4 good tablespoons of white leaven
5g dried active yeast (my local supplier of fresh yeast was all out)
10g salt
320g water
1 teaspoon honey (optional)

1. Mix the flours and salt in a roomy bowl.
2. Mix the water, yeast and honey, then beat in the leaven. (If I’d had freah yeast, I probably wouldn’t have crumbed it into the flour, as per the Bertinent method).
3. Blend this liquid mix into the dry mix, and bring together to make a soft dough. (I might have bunged a bit more water in here, so it’s nice and moist).
4. Turn out onto a lightly oiled surface and knead by scooping with your fingers, stretching and flicking the dough over away from you. I kneaded for about 10 mins until the gluten was really making a nice structure.
5. Form into a ball then return to the bowl (oiled slighly) to rest until doubled in size. This was vary according to how warm or not your resting area is. Took a couple of hours for me.
6. Turn out gently on to the work surface, and gently press down to even out the gas pockets that have formed.
7. Form into a ball again, and rest for 10-15 mins.
8. Take the ball, and, with the most even surface on work surface, stretch it out gently into a squarish rectangle.
9. Here’s where the form factor comes into play. To create a nice squarish free-form loaf, fold the four corners into the middle, press down gently.
10. Put the loaf, join-side down, on a baking sheet lined with a floured cloth and leave the proof until doubled in volume. Again, this took a couple of hours.
11. Pre-heat your oven to 220C.
12. When the loaf has risen nicely, cut a double-cross on the top (I’m using a lame with a razor blade these days – like this).
13. Spray the inside of your oven with water.
14. I’m using a baking stone these days, so, using a floured, lipless baking sheet as a peel, I slid it in and baked it for 10 mins at 220c, then turned the oven down to 200C and baked for another half an hour, until the loaf gave a nice hollow sound when knocked on the bottom.
15. Cool on a rack, under a moist tea towel if you like to keep the crust a little softer.

I was a bit annoyed with the uneven opening of the cuts, but it tastes great.

Leave a comment

Filed under Baking

Tagged as , , , ,

March 24, 2010 · 11:37 am

Barm bread

 

This was another pass on Dan Lepard’s barm bread from The Handmade Loaf.

Very nice it was too.

To make the barm, you need 250g of bottle-conditioned ale. In this case, I used the delicious Admiral’s Ale, produced by the St Austell Brewery in Cornwall (or the “Snozzle brewery”…). Heat it to 70C, then remove from the heat and whisk in 50g strong white flour. Transfer it to a bowl, then allow to cool. When it’s 20c, stir in 4 tsp of white leaven and leave overnight.

Well, I did that and it wasn’t very active the next day, so I bunged in a few more teaspoons of leaven, and left it another 24 hours. By that stage, well, to quote Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein: “Look! It’s moving. It’s alive. It’s alive… It’s alive, it’s moving! It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s alive!”

Dan L’s bread recipe calls for 150g of barm, but as I had around 300g, I just used the whole lot. My barm mix had quite a lot of liquid under the bubbling foam on top, so the dough came out very wet when combined with 500g of water and 1kg of flour. I used mostly strong white, but finished a pack of wholemeal and even bunged in some millet flour; I also add a few tablespoons of sesame seeds and sunflower seeds.

As the dough was very wet, I differed a little from Dan’s recipe, where he uses the 10 second knead every 10 minutes for half an hour; then a 10 second knead after half an hour; then two more 10 second kneads over the next two hours. Instead, I just did the Bertinet method (strick your fingers into the messy mass, lift, flip it away from you; repeat for several minutes) for around 5-10 mins, then added enough flour to make a maneagable ball (an extra 150g ish), then did a few more short kneads and a few turns.

We went out for about two hours, then I formed two balls and left them in bowls lined with tea towels rubbed with flour. I left them for around 3 hours till doubled in size, then baked them at 220C on my baking stone, for around 45-50 mins each.

The result was a lovely moist loaf, with reasonable air-holes and a slight flavour coming through from the other flours and nuts I added. Perfect for this week’s sarnies (cheddar, alfalfa sprout, coarse mustard and mayo)!

1 Comment

Filed under Baking

Tagged as , ,

February 21, 2010 · 3:25 am

Stevens’ malted and seeded loaf

 

These are my first loaves based on recipes from Dan Stevens’ River Cottage Handbook No.3: Bread.

In his intro to this recipe, Mr Stevens says it’s a very popular loaf at River Cottage. You really can’t beat a good loaf that uses “Granary”-style flour. “Granary” is trademarked to Hovis, so what we actually mean here is malted grain flour. Mr Stevens’ recipe is one of those fairly flexible ones, and he just talks about adding “2 handfuls of extras” in the form of whatever seeds you fancy, though with a caveat to watch the fennel seeds as they’re so pungent; I’d add “ditto caraway”, as any bread with caraway seeds in it is kinda defined by their flavour.

I made mine with pumpkin, sunflower, sesame (what is a sesame plant? Never occurred to me before but I have no idea), a few poppy seeds and some buckwheat (which I probably should have toasted first).

Unlike Mr Lepard in The Handmade Loaf and M Bertinet in Dough, Mr Stevens gives his water in volume, rather than weight, which suddenly felt a bit odd to me after using the former two books so much lately. Those guys have won be over with their rationale about the accuracy of weighing liquids rather than relying on eye to check mililitres.

Anyway. This uses:
1kg malted grain flour
10g dried easy-blend yeast (not used that for a while!)
20g fine salt
600ml warm water
And some old dough – I used 3T of my white leaven.
2 handfuls of seeds

I mixed all the dry ingredients, then made up the dough with the wet ingredients.

Mr Stevens’ basic dough method involves kneading for around 10 minutes, but my standard method these days, when I’m making a fairly dry dough such as this (and not using a sponge) is to use the Lepard method: knead for a few mins, form a ball, leave for 10 mins, knead for 10 secs or so, leave another 10 mins, knead for 10 secs or so, then again in another 10 mins.

Rested it for an hour and a half (ish), then I divided it 3/5th, 2/5ths, and made a small tin loaf and a large-ish baton. Left them to rise for another hour and a half ish. Brushed them with milk and sprinkled with sesame seeds.

Baking on baking stone for about 20 mins at 240C, then reduced it to about 190 and gave them another 20 mins.

Leave a comment

Filed under Baking

Tagged as , ,

February 15, 2010 · 12:55 pm

Ciabatta

 

This is my first stab at ciabatta, using the recipe in Richard Bertinet’s Dough.

Despite being somewhat misshapen, they turned out very tasty. But it was touch-and-go for a while there.

Bertinet’s technique here involves making a “ferment” a day earlier – basically some dough that sits around giving the yeast a chance to do its thing. It’s kinda like a junior leaven. Except the batch I made with the quantities in the recipe resulted in a pretty dry ferment (350g flour, 180g water, 1/2 t fresh yeast), which looked nothing like the nice bubbly affair picture in the book. So when it came to making the second dough (450g strong white or ’00’ flour – I did a mix; 10g yeast, 340g water, 50g olive oil, 15 salt), and combining them, it was hard going. The dry ferment and wet dough mix just refused to integrate. A lot of messy manipulation ensued.

Next time, I might experiment by just using my leaven instead of Bertinet’s ferment. It’ll make the dough even moister, but that’s good for ciabatta as I understand it from reading Dan Stevens’ recipe in the River Cottage Handbook 3: Bread.

2 Comments

Filed under Baking, Breads

Tagged as , ,

February 13, 2010 · 5:45 am

Bertinet baguettes

This is my first attempt at baguettes, using the recipe in Richard Bertinet’s Dough. (Bertinet is a Breton, who trained in Paris, worked at some award-winning pubs in Britain, and now runs the Bertinet Kitchen, in Bath.)

M Bertinet starts by dismissing British techniques for handling dough – we make it too dry, we abuse it with rough kneading, apparently. My past few years of baking have taught me not to add too much flour, and, when kneading, use the Dan Lepard technique where you simply oil the work surface slightly, rather than flouring it. Plus, I also already use a kneading technique that doesn’t involve half an hour of rough tugging and squashing. But Bertinent’s very wet dough is initially a little hard to get used to.

Bertinet’s technique involves lifting and slapping over the very wet, porridgey dough, to incoprate lots of air and encourage the formation of the nice, open structure. Luckily, the book comes with a DVD to explain this, as it’s a pretty feral process. He insists the dough will come together into a neat ball even with this high quantity of water, even without flouring the surface at all, but mine remained pretty recalcitrant, even after several minutes of kneading, so I succumbed to flouring the work surface just a wee bit. After that, it formed a ball nicely and became very manageable.

Before you get stuck into the messy kneading, he also uses an interesting technique where you rub fresh yeast into the flour dry, like rubbing fat into flour for scones or a crumble. I can’t see that this is any more effective than whisking it into the water, but it seems to work fine.

My ordinary domestic oven isn’t quite big enough for the stonking great long-as-your-arm baguettes you can buy commercially, but Bertinet encourages you to work small, make mini baguettes and whatnot. Which is fun, and good for mastering the techniques of shaping, folding, forming the spine of the dough so it retains an even shape on cooking (one of my baguettes came out a bit twisted so I’ve got to work on this!).

His also emphasises how important it is to use a baking stone and a peel, along with misting the inside of the oven. I didn’t have a baking stone or a particularly heavy baking tray to use instead at this point, and I didn’t trust myself to try and replicate the action of sliding the uncooked loaves off a tray (in lieu of a peel). So these are just a step in the right direction, risen and baked on a room temp baking sheet; the next batch I do I’ll use my new baking stone (actually a granite worktop saver – which only costs around a tenner) and report back with how that affects the texture. These weren’t bad for a first go. The crust was nice and crusty, and the flesh was open and light.

Oh, and the ones that aren’t actually standard straight baguettes are “epis” – you cut the raw baguette at intervals, turning the sections to alternate sides, making bits that can be broken off when sharing. The loaf resembles an ear of wheat – and indeed epi is the French word for the wheat ear. (Bit more about epi here). Rather nice.

3 Comments

Filed under Baking

Tagged as , ,

February 7, 2010 · 7:41 am

Handmade loaves

Although I blog about my baking over at Cake-Off (now gone), the emphasis there is on cakes, cupcakes, tray-baked cakes, biscuits, cookies and all things sweet and yummy. For my bread-making, I’m going to try and write about it a little more here.

I’ve been making bread on and off most of my adult life, starting, like much of my more homely, traditional interests, with the time I spent on small organic farms in the Buller Gorge, South Island, New Zealand in the late 1980s and 1990s (a couple of years in total, on about off). There, mentored and encouraged by first Mr Stephen McGraph of Newton Livery then, more significantly, by Ms Nadia Jowsey of Old Man Mountain, a highly accomplished baker and chef, I started to learn all about making real bread.

Last year, I was given a copy of The Handmade Loaf as a present. This excellent book is by Dan Lepard, the master baker who has been writing the baking column in the Weekend Guardian the past few years. Its emphasis is on using a natural leaven – aka levain, aka ferment – in your breads. I’m not sure I can entirely summarise the difference in results between a homemade loaf made with just commercial yeast (be in easy-blend, dried or fresh) and one made with your own leaven, but it certainly adds different qualities: you can achieve very different textures, but the main difference is probably a depth of flavour. Plus, where making your own bread is always deeply satisfying, that feeling is multiplied when the only raising agent you’re using is a natural yeast you’ve cultivated yourself. There are different methods of doing this, but Lepard’s basically involves using the natural yeasts presents on the skin of raisins, feeding it with flour and water, and nurturing it over a week or so.

Not all my experiments with the recipes from The Handmade Loaf have been a resounding success, but all have been informative experiences. And some of them have resulted in some of the best breads I’ve ever made.

Here are just a few examples from the past few months.

The mill loaf
This is second recipe in The Handmade Loaf. It uses leaven made with white flour (you can make rye leavens, etc), alongside white flour, wholewheat flour and rye flour. It’s a great all-rounder, for wholesome sarnies, top toast or just a few slices with a meal. It’s one of the recipes in the book I make the most, though for home use I half the book’s quantities, which call for half a kilo of levian, along with a kilo of flours (combined), and more than half a kilo of water.

Onion and bay loaf
This is a yummy loaf where you chop some onion, then head it, along with some bay leaves, in milk. You then cool the milk and use it for the dough’s only liquid. The finished loaf is a lovely savoury affair, that’s both nice and alliumy and instilled with the distinctive sweetness of bay. This one uses both some white levain and some fresh yeast.

Lemon barley cob
Made this one a while back. It uses white leavain and some fresh yeast, combined with 100g barley flour and 150g white flour. A little lemon juice and zest gives it, in combination with the barley flour, gives it a slight tang. Need to practice this one a bit more.

Ale bread with wheat grains
This is a great one, though takes a little more advanced planning. Its given distinction by the addition of wheat grains, which you simmer, then soak overnight in ale. I love ale. I love bread. And of course the two are closely related – or at least they used to be, before the advent of commercial yeast when much baking would apparently involve using the barm from beer-making for your yeast starter.

Rolled oat and apple bread
This is one of my favourites from The Handmade Loaf, so far. Adding the remains of the porridge to the bread dough was one of the things I learned from Stephen and Nadia, and this recipe incorporates a similar process – making some semi-porridge by soaking oats in boiling water. The apple here also keeps the loaf loaf and moist and soft. The recipe uses grated apple, but I had some pureed remains of our apples in the freezer, and added that instead on one occasion; the results were similarly successful.

Barm bread
Another connection with the old tradition of making beer with beer barm. Here, you make a barm by mixing bottle-conditioned ale with some white flour and white leaven the leaving it overnight. The loaf itself just uses this barm, water, strong white flour, and a little salt. Yum. Check out the texture – I’ve never achieved anything like that with a non-leaven bread. Though again, this needs a little practice, as it’s a bit too crusty.

Bottom line: get this book. And get baking! That said though, what’s with the prices on that book now? Mitchel Beazley – do another print run for crying out loud!

5 Comments

Filed under Baking, Breads

Tagged as , , , , ,