Category Archives: Recipes

July 23, 2015 · 10:48 am

Kubaneh – Yemeni Jewish breakfast bread

The latest addition to my cookbook library is Honey & Co’s The Baking Book, by Sarit Packer and Itomar Srulovich. It has the same UK publisher as my friend Rachel’s Five Quarters (which boasts a couple of my recipes), so I went along to the launch event a few weeks ago, bought a copy, got it signed and have been trying out the recipes since.

I love enriched doughs, so I was drawn to the recipe for kubaneh. Sarit’s family has Egyptian and Yemeni connections, and this bread is from the latter culture, specifically it’s a Yemenite-Jewish Sabbath breakfast bread. Reading more about it now, it’s traditionally baked overnight in a sealed tin. While Sarit’s version bakes for a fairly long time, it’s not overnight.

Some versions include whole eggs, and can be eaten as more savoury affair, with tomatoes or a tomato dip, or skhug, Yemeni hot sauce*. This one is sweeter. It’s rich in butter (or smen/semneh fermented sheep or goat milk butter; or margarine, depending on your dietary restrictions and inclinations and shopping options) and drizzled with honey, which caramelises together slightly.

Why haven’t I heard of this before?! Just my kind of thing.

Notes
I’ve tweaked the process slightly and given the ingredients in a more consistent format, so as to also include bakers’ percentages (below).

It’s a fairly moist dough – the original recipe says 300-350ml water, but I split the difference at 325ml: 325g. That works out at about 65% hydration, so quite wet and sticky. Check out my post on handling sticky doughs.

For this baking vessel, they use a “traditional lidded aluminium pot” but say you can also use a 20cm fixed bottom round cake tin, with a “lid” made of foil.

I used fresh yeast. You could use 10g active dry/granular yeast instead. If you only have instant/powdered yeast, you don’t need to mix it with liquid first – just combine it with the flour.

The dough
60g light soft brown sugar
15g fresh yeast
325g water, at about body temperature
250g strong white bread flour
250g plain (all-purpose) white flour
6g fine salt

Plus
Vegetable oil
Unsalted butter, softened (or margarine or smen, if you can get it. Very unlikely here in England!)
Runny honey

Here is it in bakers’ percentages (rounded):

Ingredient	Quantity	Percentage
Light soft brown sugar	60g	12%
Fresh yeast	15g	3%
Water	325g	65%
Strong white flour	250g	50%
Plain white flour	250g	50%
Salt	6g	2.5%

1. Mix together the water, sugar and yeast. Stir to dissolve the yeast.
2. Weigh out the flours into a large bowl and add the salt.
3. Add the yeast mixture to the flour and bring together a dough. I don’t have a mixer, so my instructions are for doing it by hand. If you do, just mix until well combined and smooth.

4. Turn out the shaggy mixture onto a lightly oiled work surface and knead. I used the Dan Lepard technique of not kneading too much, then returning the dough to the bowl, cleaned and oiled, leaving for 10 minutes, then kneading briefly again. Repeat this twice more, then return to the cleaned, lightly oiled bowl.
5. Cover with plastic or a clean, damp tea towel and leave to prove for a couple of hours, or until doubled in size. The time will depend on the ambient temperature. It’s about 20C in my kitchen on a mild English summer’s day, and it took about two and a half hours.

6. While it’s proving, liberally grease the cake tin with butter, and grease the underside of the foil lid too. If you have a lidded pot, grease that similarly.

7. Sarit describes the next step as “the strange bit” – you moisten your hands then “flip the dough about in the bowl to knock it back”. Do it three times, keeping your hands moist.

8. Oil a tray, then divide the dough up into eight pieces and place them on the tray. The dough weighs 900g, so eight pieces at around 112g.
9. Oil your hands a bit then take each piece, stretch it slightly, and put a blob of butter in the middle. I used pieces at about 10g, half a walnut size.
10. Smear the butter a bit then wrap the dough around it to form rough balls.

11. Put the balls in the prepared tin, one in the middle, the rest equally spaced around it.
12. Put some more flecks of butter on top, drizzle with honey then cover and prove again until the dough “almost reaches the top” – too high and it’ll “overflow when baked.” I drizzled a bit more honey and added a bit more butter before baking.

13. Preheat the oven to 220C.
14. Put the tin, with its lid, in the oven and bake for half an hour.
15. Reduce the heat to 200C and continue baking for another half an hour.
16. Reduce the heat again to 180C and continue baking for another half an hour.
17. Turn the oven off and leave in the oven “for at least an hour”.
18. It’s best served warm, so if you’re an insomniac and have been doing this all night, or proved it overnight in the fridge and baked it early, enjoy it thus.

It’s surprisingly soft and chewy, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get nice caramelised bits. I won’t be doing it every week, but it’s a great addition to my enriched breads & breakfast bakes armoury. It’s also reminiscent of English lardy cakes, particularly the fruit-free versions from my part of the country, Hampshire and Sussex. Though obviously the fats used are a bit different for that gentile bake.

It’s also got me thinking about that most indulgent of fatty-sugary-doughy caramelised concoctions, the Breton kouign amann, which is more a pastry than a bread. Still, I might have to revisit that soon.

* Aka zhug, zehug; the Honey & Co The Baking Book also has a recipe for this, to accompany their lahooh, Yemeni pancakes.

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Filed under Baking, Breads, Cakes (yeasted), Recipes

Tagged as bread, butter, enriched dough, honey, Honey & Co, Jewish, Yemen

July 15, 2015 · 8:57 am

Acciuleddi – Sardinian deep-fried sweet pasta

We first encountered acciuleddi on our holiday in Sardinia a few weeks ago. They’re a form of sweet, deep-fried pasta and as such are a cousin to frappe, which are found on the Italian mainland. I ate a lot of frappe in Rome, when they would appear in shops for Carnevale – the blow-out before the fasting period of Lent, the run-up to Easter in the Christian calendar.

Pasta, deep-fried then sweetened? What’s not to like? Well, perhaps such things aren’t brilliant for your arteries so it’s good they’re just eaten for Carnevale. Except of course it wasn’t Carnevale in June for our holiday, so I think the proprietress of the Gallurese (northern Sardinian) bakery we bought them, La Panetteria del Porto in La Maddalena, from was bending the rules slightly.

If she can do it, so can I. Though I wouldn’t normally endorse eating celebratory seasonal or feast-day foods at the wrong time of year. It’s as obnoxious as British supermarkets stocking hot cross buns all year round. They cease to be special if they’re on the shelves all the time.

Sweet pasta
The very concept of sweet pasta may be a bit weird for staid Brits, but I just couldn’t resist a crack at these, given my love of frappe.

Looking at Italian – and Sardi – recipes, the pasta generally seems to be made with semola rimacinata di grano duro – that is fine, “re-milled” semolina (Triticum durum) flour. That’s not something it’s terribly easy to source here in the UK, so I went for a mixture of 00 flour for the fineness, and normal (ie medium milled) semolina for some robustness.

Also, the pasta does seem to have been traditionally made with strutto – lard. Now, I don’t have a problem with lard in principle, as I do eat some meat and as it was a key ingredient for older, traditional British baking (such lardy johns, or the more well-known lardy cake). The thing is, I try to only eat meat where I know the provenance, and generally that means from people we trust who have a farm nearby. I hoped they’d do some lard, but they just don’t have the demand. Instead, the only readily available lard in small-town England is foul crap spat out by the grotesque industrial meat machine, and I don’t want to use that. Instead, I’m going for all eggs, which some of the Italian recipes I researched also did.

So really, it’s just a pretty basic egg pasta – with the familiar ratio of 1 egg to 100g flour. Though with a little added sugar and some lemon zest.

Then deep-fried.

Surface & tension
The best surface for making fresh pasta is marble, the next best is stainless steel. I don’t have either, so I just used my bamboo worktop, rubbed with a bit of oil, as I do when making bread. It worked fine.

150g 00 flour
50g semolina
20g icing sugar (or caster)
Pinch salt
Zest of half a lemon (optional), finely chopped
2 medium eggs (about 110g total yolk & white)
Extra water, or egg, if mixture is too dry
Oil for frying

1. Sieve together the flours and icing sugar, add the pinch of salt and lemon zest.
2. Form a mound on your work surface.
3. Create a hole in the middle of the mound, much like the gaping mouth of a miniature volcano. Or like when you’re making concrete by hand.
4. Crack the eggs and put in the hole. You can of course do all this in a bowl, but there’s something very satisfying about eggs in a mound of flour..

5. Using a fork, whisk up the egg, then starting combining the flour. Try to keep that wall around the edge intact, and add the flour bit by bit.
6. When the dough is starting to get quite thick, bring the rest of the flour into it by hand.

7. Knead the dough until smooth, then form a ball, wrap in plastic and rest in the fridge for about half an hour.
8. Take the dough out and cut off small pieces. Mine weighed in at about 15g.

9. Take a piece and roll it out to form a long snake. Mine were about 300mm long, 5mm wide.

10. This is the tricky bit, so I’ve also made a video. It’s my first video and it’s not exactly slick, focus is an issue, going out of frame is an issue, and it is entirely un-edited, sorry. But it might help.

11. Anyway, you take the snake and join the two ends together.
12. Gently roll one end, while holding the other end still, to form a spiral. There will be some tension in the spiral – retain it.
13. Now, join the ends together again and that tension should cause it to spiral around itself again – creating a kind of double helix. Help it on its way as needs be.
14. Squeeze together the join.

15. Put the acciuleddi on a tray or plate, lightly dusted with flour or semolina, and cover while you make the rest so they don’t dry out.
16. Heat oil for frying. I used sunflower oil, though I imagine the most authentic, original ones were fried in lard too. You want it at 180C or thereabouts, if you have a thermometer or fryer with a dial. If not, throw a small piece of dough in. If it bubbles, bobs to the surface and browns within a few minutes, you’re good to go.
17. Fry the acciuleddi in batches until browned.
18. Drain and put on some absorbent paper.

19. While they’re still warm, pile them up and drizzle them liberally with honey. I used some from our friends’ hives, from when they were in south London. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion. This seemed like one.

The results were good. Sweet, crunchy and simultaneously indulgent and undemonstrative. They were a bit chunkier than the ones we bought from La Panetteria del Porto, so if you want to make more refined, smaller ones, use pieces of dough weighing about 10g and roll that snake even thinner!

I want to go back to Sardinia now.

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Filed under Feasts, Misc, Other food, Recipes

Tagged as acciuleddi, deep-fried, honey, pasta, Sardinia, Sardo

June 15, 2015 · 3:45 pm

Galettes aux vin blanc with Tom Hunt’s strawberry ice cream

Me and Fran got married at this time of year, six years ago. June is the height of strawberry season in England, and three days before our wedding we got nicely sun-burned at a pick-your-own. It was 26C and beautiful. Three days later it was 8C and raining. And our skins matched the strawberries in the huge bowls of Eton mess made by my mother, Helen.*

This June is shaping up pretty similarly. Summer one day, winter the next. But the strawberries are still good. I got a big tray at reduced price the other day. That same week, the Guardian’s Saturday Cook section featured recipes from Tom Hunt. Tom, who I met at Rachel’s book launch last week, is the chef, founder of Poco restaurant in Bristol and author of Guardian The Natural Cook. His ethos is one of combating waste and encouraging sustainability and seasonality. Hence the strawberries recipes right now.

There was a fruit and veg stall in the precinct the other day and their strawberries were imported from Holland. Why? Are there none from Sussex or the southeast of England? Does it really economic sense to ship them across the channel? Possibly with our skewy economics, but it doesn’t seem to make environmental sense.

Fellow Brits – enjoy British strawberries why you can! The more local the better. Then enjoy them again next year, when they’ll taste even better for being a seasonal treat.

Or make big batches of ice cream and preserves to spin out the pleasure.

Tom’s ice cream recipe is wonderfully simple: strawberries, macerated and quickly boiled with some sugar, whipped cream, some mascarpone. Best of all, it doesn’t call for an ice cream maker. I know you can make most ice creams by hand-churning, without a machine, but it always puts me off when the recipe stipulates a machine, one piece of kitchen kit I don’t have.

I served it with a puree made from some of the other strawberries, which I macerated in some blackberry gin made by our friend Becky in 2010, and with galettes aux vin blanc. These could be called “white wine biscuits” and are another recipe from the 2011 edition of The Art of French Baking by Ginette Mathiot, which I talked about in the previous post.

The galettes are not unlike a type of shortbread, -ish, and as strawberries and shortbread are a classic combo, it seemed to make sense. (In all honesty they’re not as delicates and short as shortbread; they’ve got more body.) I also had some white plonk that needed using up.

200g plain (all-purpose) flour
100g caster sugar
100g unsalted butter, softened
Pinch of fine sea salt
45g white wine (3 tbsp)
1 egg yolk, beaten

1. Preheat oven to 200C and grease a couple of baking sheets.
2. Put the flour in a roomy bowl.
3. Stir in the sugar and salt, pour in the wine then add the butter, cut into small pieces.
4. Get your hands in there and squidge it all together to form a dough.
5. Lightly flour the work surface and turn out the dough. Knead lightly to homogenize but don’t over-work it.
6. Roll out the dough to 5mm thick.

7. Cut circles with a round pastry cutter. One with a diameter of about 5cm (2″) is good.
8. Put on the baking sheets, brush with beaten egg yolk to glaze and bake for about 15 minutes until nicely golden.
9. Allow to cool.

Serve with strawberry ice cream. I’m not sure this is how the French would eat galettes aux vin blanc. They would probably add some actual wine consumption to the mix – quite possibly a dessert wine. French-speaking Francophile Fran can give me no further information on this issue. Any French who read this, please do let me know.

* We were a little burned, but not really strawberry coloured. That was a joke. I’m lucky as I’m fairly dark skinned for an Anglo-Saxon-British mongrel, Fran not so much. Kids – don’t forget that sun-block, especially if you’re fair-skinned.

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Filed under Baking, Recipes

Tagged as galettes, Ginette Mathiot, ice cream, Tom Hunt

June 11, 2015 · 10:04 am

Reminiscences and butter biscuits

I’ve just spent a great long weekend with Rachel Roddy, helping out with the food for the party celebrating the launch of her book, Five Quarters, catching up with Rome friends and meeting lots of interesting new people.

Given the theme of Rachel’s book and the fact that we met there, inevitably Rome was a big topic of conversation at the party. There’s a lot I’m missing about Rome. We know why we moved back in December 2013 – to try and adopt. But that doesn’t mean I’m not pining for certain things, especially food-related things: a six-days-a-week food (etc) market on the next block; a great gelateria two blocks away on our street; restaurants and cafés where you can get good food and drink for a sensible price (a fairly elusive concept in much of England); checking out the latest birra artigianale; going to the Città dell altra Economia in Testaccio to meet friends and buy huge, affordable chunks of local cheese on a Sunday. I could go on, but I won’t.

As I said in my post about Rachel’s book, I have to avoid the rose-coloured specs. But it’s hard, especially now while we’re at a difficult stage in the adoption process. We’ve been approved, but there don’t seem to be any children that are a suitable match for us. It’s a form of limbo – and as such all too conducive to drifting memories, reminiscing.

So much in our life now re-connects us to Rome. Even all the recipes I’m currently trying from The Art of French Baking by Ginette Mathiot. My sister – another Rachel – gave me this book just as we moved to Rome in August 2011 and in my mind’s eye I can still see it sitting on the shelf in our kitchen there, alongside a few I’d brought with me – Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf, Bertinet’s Dough – and some we acquired there – The Food of Rome and Lazio by Oretta Zanini de Vita, La Cucina di Roma e del Lazio (ie the same title) by di Marco and Ferré, Cucina Romana by Sara Manuelli, er, Cooking Apicius by Sally Grainger etc.

The Mathiot was a newly published Phaidon edition of the 1938 book Je sais faire la pâtisserie (“I know how to make patisserie”), translated and adapted by Clotilde Dusoulier. The book provides, in Dusoulier’s words, “the elemental components of French baking”: pastries, biscuits, cakes and puddings.

I used it a bit, but in all honestly I didn’t embrace it at the time. Why? Well – because Rome was all around us and I was somewhat distracted by all the pasticcerie (patisseries), biscotterie (biscuit bakeries), forni and panifici (bread or general bakeries) had to offer. I ate, I found favourites, I learned to make them at home. I got a bit obsessed with Italian baked goods. We have French-style patisseries in England, but Italian ones are considerably less common, so there was a lot to learn. (And still is¹.)

I’m enjoying the Mathiot a lot now. I used it during my puff pastry experiments back in January, and I’ve been trying a lot of the biscuit and galette²; recipes, and musing over the brioche recipes. All eight of them. Eight. Rachel’s been talking about brioche too – they’re a common product in Sicily and Naples – so I plan to test them all, as well as the others in my cookbook collection. In the meantime, however, some biscuits.

Twice the fat, twice the pleasure
If Italian food is synonymous with olive oil³, French food is synonymous with butter. Petits beurres⁴ – for those who don’t have spectacular school French like mine – simply means “little butters”, or little butter biscuits. But not only do they have a good proportion of butter, they have the same proportion of double cream too. The result is a rich, light, crumbly biscuit. I make mine with a small, rectangular cutter that’s 40x75mm, so each one is a perfect size for a couple of bites.

I love this cutter. The result is not unlike the famous French industrial biscuit the “Petit Beurre LU” or “Véritable Petit Beurre” from Lefèvre-Utile. There isn’t much about it online in English, but French Wikipedia gives the story. It says the 1886 recipe by Louis Lefèvre-Utile was originally inspirant des productions anglaises de l’époque. “It was inspired by English products of the era”. That’s not something you hear the French admit very often. It’s also officially 65x54mm so slightly different proportions to mine.

These petits beurre are – unsurprisingly – considerably richer than the LU factory version, which doesn’t have half as much butter and no cream, instead being made with milk powder. Bugger that. Butter + cream = pleasure. As many chefs will tell you: “fat is flavour”. It’s something I heard often from Chris Behr, chef at the American Academy in Rome, when I did an internship there.

100g unsalted butter, chilled and diced
250g plain (all-purpose) flour
50g caster sugar
Pinch salt
100g double cream

1. Put the flour in a bowl and rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
2. Add the sugar and salt and combine.

4. Pour in the cream then combine to form a dough, working it by hand. Work it enough to clear and form a smooth dough. Don’t overwork it. It’s basically a rich, sweet pastry paste, without raising agents, and overworking it can toughen it up.
5. Form a ball, squash it into a disk, wrap it in plastic and put it in the fridge to rest for least half an hour.
6. Preheat the oven to 180C and grease your baking sheets.
7. Dust the work surface with flour then roll out the dough to about 5mm.

8. Cut out rectangles. If you don’t have a rectangular cutter you’ll have to do it by hand.
9. Place the biscuits on the sheets and prick them in diagonal pattern with a fork.
10. Bake for 15-20 minutes until starting to turn golden.
11. Transfer to a wire rack and allow to cool. I got 24 from this batch, but it depends on how big you cut them.

Enjoy. With a cup of tea or even alongside a nice strawberry dessert – as they’re in season here in England now. You should always seize British produce seasons as they’re not half so long as those in Italy. Damn it, there’s me reminiscing again!

Notes
1 Italy, as you probably know, is a country of regions with strong local, cultural and culinary identities. Each region has dozens of food specialities, even when it comes to baked goods, breads and pastries etc. My two years in Italy were just a start really. It would be a lifelong project to learn them all.
2 Galette is a French word that doesn’t have an immediate equivalent in English. Sometimes it refers to something we’d translate as a pancake (eg Breton buckwheat pancakes), other times things we’d call a pastry, and others it’s more like a cookie. I looked at the etymology over in my post about galette des rois.
3 Despite that being a more historically southern Italian thing, with strutto – lard – arguably a more common fat in the mountains and the north.
4 Should they be called petits beurres or petits-beurre? They can’t seem to agree on the agreement. The English is just petit beurre biscuits.

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Tagged as biscuits, butter, Ginette Mathiot, petits beurres

June 2, 2015 · 2:41 pm

Burger buns and khobz variations

Back in the old days, I’m sure we always ate burgers with a sesame bun. It wasn’t exactly the greatest bread, but at least it was savoury. These days, all the hip and wannabe burger joints sell theirs in brioche buns. I do not get this at all. Brioche is a sweet breakfast bread.* I don’t want a sweet burger bun, it’s just plain weird.

I was a vegetarian or pescatarian for about 20 years and although I’m more omnivorous these days I still don’t eat much red meat; in fact, I reckon I’ve only eaten beef about three times in the last 30 years, in part as I’m not a huge fan, in part as, in much mainstream modern industrial farming, beef can be reared in grim and environmentally unsustainable ways*. So meat burgers aren’t really my thing. But I do love the format, so when I saw this veggie option on Hermione’s Pantry for burgers with aubergine (eggplant, melanza) and halloumi – one of my desert island foodstuffs – I had to try it.

A month or so ago, I did a version of the khobz, an Arabic bread made with semolina and wholemeal wheat flour. I’ve been enjoying playing around with the recipe. I thought why not try the same dough for burger buns. I divided the same quantity of dough from my khobz recipe into eight and rather than making flatter, disc-shaped loaves, made balls for burger buns. I then used them for this aubergine and halloumi burger. I tweaked Hermione’s marinade and left it much longer than she says, but the result was great, with a juiciness that’s often lacking from veggie burgers and the khobz dough making for a good, suitably savoury, bun.

The khobz recipe involves a very satisfying combination of flours, and has also proved itself suitable for large, tear-and-share breads. Rather than dividing the dough into six for small loaves, I divided it in two and made these for a meal with friends a few weeks ago:

* Just read up on concentrated animal feedlots (CAFOs), deeply messed-up arrangements involving cattle being crammed into fenced pens, with no grazing, and instead a diet of maize – something they’ve not evolved to eat. They stand around in their own excrement and get sick, necessitating intensive regimes of antibiotics. CAFOs, or at least similarly brutal intense operations, are creeping into Britain and, likely, will become increasingly common as countries like China become wealthier and more of the world’s seven billion start shifting to more heavily meat-based diets.

Although it’s a US-oriented book by California-based writer Michael Pollen, I’d recommend anyone, even in Britain, read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It not only looks at meat (and, by extension, cheese) production in the food supply chain, it even evaluates the virtues, or otherwise, or locavorism, something that’s close to my heart but also something I’m happy to question and be further educated about.

In the meantime, I prefer my bovine products to come from cattle like this. Except for the one beast that isn’t a cow, but instead seems to be a fallow deer that has adopted the herd!

* Except when it’s not. I’ve got a few recipes for savoury brioche, eg the cheesy brioche de gannat.

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Tagged as burger buns, flatbread, khobz, khoubz, semolina

May 29, 2015 · 11:38 am

Wholemeal honey cake

I love cakes made with ground almonds. And I love cakes with sweet syrups poured over them after baking. So this cake is a result – it has both.

It’s from a recipe by Gill Meller, now group head chef of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage operation. As with my last syrupy cake, revani, it’s a recipe I got from the paper several years ago. It’s one I strongly associate with my parents’ place in northwest Devon, as the original newspaper cutting lives in a file there, along with some notes about what’s not quite right with it. Notably, the version as it appeared in the Guardian had too much butter in it, which seriously leaked out on baking. The version on the River Cottage site reduces the butter and increases the oven temperatures. For our family version, we reduce the butter even more.

The original also uses self-raising wholemeal flour – something that’s not especially common, so you can replace it with plain wholemeal flour and a bit more raising agent. But watch it with the baking powder. See notes below. More specifically I use a low protein (less than 10%) wholemeal flour, as opposed to a higher-protein bread-making wholemeal flour (12% plus). It would work with bread flour, but might be slightly heftier. As it is, it’s surprisingly soft for something so brown and branny.

Not gluten free… but it could be
On the flour note, anyone who reads my blog will know I don’t generally have problems with modern common wheat (Triticum aestivum) and gluten. I prefer locally grown and/or stoneground where possible, and I find that as long as I don’t eat industrially made wheat products – specifically that paragon of bad modern food, white sliced – I’m fine. For those of you who like, or have to, avoid modern wheat, I suspect this cake could work pretty well with either older wheat such as spelt (Triticum spelta), which has less starchy endorsperm and less gluten.

It may even work with alternatives to grass/cereal flours (wheat, rye, barley, oats etc), such as pseudocereal buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum). I’ve put the latter on my shopping list as it’s a foodstuff I enjoy for its own merits and want to try for this cake. Half-buckwheat, half-ground almonds sounds pretty good to me.

250g unsalted butter, softened
250g caster sugar
4 eggs, lightly beaten
150g ground almonds
150g self-raising wholemeal flour*
2g baking powder [this is about a 1/3rd of tsp and has been a problematic aspect of this recipe, see below]
1 tsp powdered cinnamon
Pinch fine sea salt
40g flaked almonds
100g honey

1. Preheat the oven to 170C.
2. Grease a 23cm (9″) diameter springform cake tin and line the bottom with baking parchment.
3. Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
4. Beat in the egg, a little at a time.
5. Beat in the ground almonds.

6. Sieve together the flour, baking powder and cinnamon, add a pinch of salt, then fold this in too. Sieving lightens and combines, but also removes the bran. The bran is good, rich in dietary fibre, protein, B vitamins and various minerals (including iron) – so chuck it into the mix too!
7. Put the mixture in the tin, scatter the 40g flaked almonds over the top. Place on a baking sheet (it may still leak some butter) then bake for about 1 hour, until a knife or skewer comes out clean. As long as the top’s not charring, it’s better to overbake this cake than underbake it. It’ll be more stable and the almonds and honey will keep it moist.
8. Warm the honey in a saucepan. I weigh mine straight into a pan, to avoid any sticky complications. Plus, if you only have set honey, heating it will make it runny, and if you’re using runny honey, it’ll make it runnier, so it’ll seep through the sponge better. While the cake’s hot, drizzle over the honey.
9. Place the tin on a wire rack to cool. Serve warm with cream, ideally clotted, for a pudding or at room temperature at teatime.

Excuses excuses
I’m not going to deny I got some sinkage in the middle on the cake photographed here. It doesn’t affect the taste of course, but in terms of aesthetics, and perfectionism, it’s annoying. That said, if you look at F-W’s version on that Guardian page, it’s sunk in the middle too, so I’m in good company.

Potential causes of cakes sinking in the middle are:
1. Too much raising agent. It can cause cakes to over-rise then collapse.
2. Not baked quite long enough. However, if the cakes is pulling away from the edges of the tin and a skewer comes out clean, it generally means it’s done.
3. Overbeating the mixture.
4. Wholemeal flour is trickier than white flour. With all that (lovely, nutritious) bran and whatnot, it doesn’t lend itself to retaining a nice delicate structure.

I’m going with option 4, with a bit of option 1 on the side, for today’s excuses. I’ve made this cake again since this entry, and reduced the baking powder again and had much better results.

* Or 145g wholemeal flour with, total, 5g 0r 1 tsp baking powder.

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Filed under Baking, Cakes, Recipes

Tagged as almonds, cake, ground almonds, honey, River Cottage, wholemeal flour

May 22, 2015 · 6:24 pm

Delicate shortbread fingers

Every family has its funny little games. One I play with my mother is “What’s the most past its best-before-date ingredient in the back of the cupboard?” These tend to be spices, but in this case, at my folks’ place I found a box of cornflour¹ that was… well, let’s say that at least it was from this century.

Now, one of the many wasteful habits we have in the modern world, especially in the West, is throwing away perfectly good food. Love Food Hate Waste says that in the UK alone “We throw away 7 million tonnes² of food and drink from our homes every year, the majority of which could have been eaten.” This may be a massive underestimate though. Other stats³ have it at 15 million tonnes. Think of that. That’s a mountain of food. A mountain of food that was produced with vast amounts of energy, that goes into landfills, when elsewhere people are starving – or indeed, relying on food banks here in the UK, the sixth biggest economy in the world.

So rather than giving it to the birds or the bin, I thought, why not try and use up the cornflour. Certainly, in its long career at the gloomy back of the cupboard, it’s not improved, but nor has it become inedible – it’s probably lost some of its power-to-thicken, but it hadn’t rotted or become toxic or bad for you. It just got stale.

Shortbread/shortcake
I’d been browsing Jane Grigson’s English Food and naturally, given my inclinations, I was in the Teatime chapter. Among the entries is one for Shortcakes. Though these are actually shortbreads, or shortbread biscuits. Grigson, writing in 1974, before the internet made everyone a expert and/or pedant, simply says, “Scottish shortbread is one of the many international variations on the shortcake theme”.

Shortbread is one of those recipes that utilises memorable proportions: 3 parts flour, 2 parts butter, 1 part sugar. For the flour, the Grigson recipe gave an option for either using ground rice or cornflour mixed with flour, so this seemed like a great way to use up the museum piece.

I’ve made shortbreads with ground rice and semolina before, which gives them a bit of crunch, but using cornflour takes them the other way – into a softer biscuit that almost dissolves in the mouth. The delicate texture can be further enhanced by using icing (powdered) sugar wholly or partially for that 1 part sugar.

A note on techniques
Shortbread can be made by either creaming the sugar and butter, then adding the flour, or by rubbing the butter into the flour, then adding the sugar. Grigson’s recipe did the latter, and gave the delightfully in-depth instructions of “Mix to a dough”.

Shortbread isn’t a million miles away from a shortcrust pastry, so the rubbing-in method seemed like a logical choice. As with a shortcrust pastry, try to avoid overworking the flour.

Now, I’ve made these twice in the past week: once with the, er, vintage cornflour, and once with some fresh stuff now I’m back home. Both worked well: the, er, well-aged cornflour resulted in a slightly softer, more powdery biscuit that was perfectly edible and palatable. Stale flour isn’t ideal, but it won’t kill you. So don’t bin it the moment it goes over its best-before date. Think of those 7 – or 15 – million tonnes.

200g plain (all purpose) flour
100g cornflour (corn starch)
200g unsalted butter
50g caster sugar
50g icing sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 180C.
2. Line a couple of baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats.
3. Weigh out the flours and sieve them together into a large bowl. Or just combine and whisk a bit with a fork if you can’t be bothered with the sieve.
3. Cut the butter into small cubes, add it to the flour and rub it in until the mixture is crumb-like.
4. Add the sugars to the mixture and squeeze to all together to form a dough. It will be crumbly. You want it crumbly – crumbly = short.

5. Roll out the paste on a lightly floured worktop, to a thickness of about 12mm. I made mine into fingers, cutting pieces about 70 x 25mm.

6. Put the piece on the baking sheets and prick them with a fork.
7. Put them in the oven and bake for about 15 minutes. The classic shortbread is baked to the point where it’s still pale, but I like mine just starting to colour. Your choice – add or subtract a few minutes from the baking time to suit your tastes.

1. What Americans call corn starch and Italians amido di mais. Whatever you call it, it’s a starch extracted from the endosperm – the carby bit – of kernels of Zea mais, maize, or corn in US English.
2. 7 million metric tonnes is 7.72 million short/US tons or 6.9 long/imperial tons. By any measure, a lot.
3. This article in The Guardian is about a new law in France to stop supermarkets wasting so much food. It has stats from Eurostat, with the UK at the top of an EU league table of food wasters.

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Filed under Baking, Biscuits, cookies, Recipes

May 1, 2015 · 2:08 pm

Tippaleivät – Finnish May Day fritters

In England, for May Day we all – of course – morris dance around poles bestrewn with ribbons and get drunk on ale*. I’m not sure we have any particular traditional celebration foods. So I was looking around for treats from other nations. I came across tippaleivät (plural) or tippaleipä (singular).

Tippaleivät are eaten in Finland as part of celebrations on Vappu, the Finnish May Day, Walpurgis day. Love that word, Walpurgis. Walpurgisnacht. That’s German of course, though Germany has a relative of tippaleivät, cruller, the US has its funnel cake, while they’re all also arguably a distant relative of the South Asian jalebi. Mmm. Jelabi.

Basically they’re just swirly fritters, which can be flavoured with lemon zest and vanilla, though the latter can come via a dusting of vanilla-flavoured icing (powdered) sugar. I’ve seen recipes for yeasted versions, versions with baking powder, and versions with no raising agent at all. I’ve taken the middle path.

My Finnish friend Tomps tells me that tippaleipä means “drop bread” – as in, you’re dropping the batter. I’ve read lots of tips on how to shape the fritters as you fry them as you just pipe a worm of thick-ish batter straight into the oil. Some people say use a ladle, others a metal ring of some persuasion, or even a tin can with both ends removed.

But using a ladle and a piping bag simultaneously over hot oil seems a tad fiddly to me, whilst most tin cans these days have a plastic lining – not ideal in oil at 180C (360F, for those of you in the 19th century). So I just did mine free-form. They’re perhaps not the neatest, but they hit the spot.

Happy May Day! Happy Vappu! And indeed happy Beltane!

2 medium eggs (about 100g beaten egg)
25g caster sugar
200g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp fine salt
100g milk
1/2 tsp vanilla essence [optional]
zest of half a lemon [optional]
Sunflower or rapeseed (canola) oil, for deep-frying
Icing sugar, for serving

1. In a large-ish bowl, combine the egg and sugar, and vanilla (if using), and beat slightly.
2. Sieve together the flour and baking powder, add the salt and zest (if using).
3. Alternately add flour mix and milk to the egg, beating to create a thick batter.
4. Put the batter in a piping bag fitted with a smallish nozzle, max about 5mm. Alternatively you could use a plastic freezer bag and snip off the corner. Just keep it away from the hot oil!
5. Heat the oil to 180C.
6. Drizzle a thread of batter into the oil, forming a nest shape.

7. Cook until golden, about 4 minutes, then take out and drain on paper towels.

8. Serve dusted with icing sugar.

In Finland, they’re eaten with a lemony mead drink, sima. We’re just having ours with coffee and hot chocolate.

* Or not. Due to the convention of Bank Holiday Mondays, today isn’t a national holiday – that comes on Monday. Which isn’t actually May Day.

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Filed under Cakes, Pastry, Recipes

Tagged as deep-fried, fritter, fritters, vappu

April 30, 2015 · 10:06 am

A version of khobz, khubz, khoubz Arabic bread

Recently, I’ve been making various Middle Eastern, Asian and Mediterranean flatbreads, or at least flattish-breads that are leavened but formed into low profile shapes. These include types of Armenian bread (peda and matnakash), naan/nan (which I’ve been experimenting with, but haven’t quite cracked; watch this space) and of course pizza bianca and pizza. So I also fancied having a go at khobz, aka khoubz, aka khubz, aka khobez (all transliterations of خبز).

Now, before anyone says “Those aren’t khobz!” or “Those don’t look like the khobz I buy from my local Arabic deli”, bear in mind that the word simply means bread in standard Arabic, it’s not one particular type of bread.

Wikipedia says it’s a synonym for pita, but that’s not quite right. Whereas pita is, generally and most commonly here in the UK, a white wheat flour flatbread with a pocket, I’ve had khobz in various forms. For our wedding, where we had a Middle Eastern-inspired feast, a Yemeni-British friend sourced a load from an Arabic bakery in west London: they were foot-wide, thin and floppy. But I’ve also had khobz that are smaller, discus-shaped, not flat breads, but in this flattish category I enjoy. This latter, I believe, may be more typical to Morocco, but having never been there I’m not sure. Rather than being made with just white wheat flour, these can contain wholemeal wheat flour and semolina.

When I was a kid, semolina was simply a slightly off-putting gruelly pudding we had for school lunches, but it more specifically refers to a coarse flour or meal made from durum wheat.

Durum wheat is Triticum durum aka Triticum turgidum subsp. durum, a cousin to common bread wheat, Triticum aestivum. It’s principally used for making pasta – and not so common in England as a sludgy pudding any more, though I’m sure it’s due for a fancy revival.

Whatever the form the khobz takes, it’s designed for eating torn and smeared with stews and dips.

Oh, and I don’t have a tannuur, or tandoor, so they’re just baked in a normal domestic oven.

12g fresh yeast
320g water, tepid
200g strong white flour
100g wholemeal wheat flour
150g semolina
5g salt

1. Crumble the yeast into the water and whisk.

2. Combine the flours, semolina and salt in a large bowl.
3. Pour in the yeasty water and bring the mixture together to form a shaggy dough.

4. Turn out and knead to a smooth dough, or put in a mixer to achieve the same result with less elbow grease.
5. Put the ball of dough back into the large bowl, cleaned and slightly oiled. Cover with a damp cloth then leave for half an hour.
6. Take out the dough, stretch it into a rough rectangle then fold it in thirds. This is called stretch and fold, a useful technique for developing doughs. (See my pizza bianca recipe for more on the process, including photos.)
7. Put the dough back in the bowl, cover and leave for another half hour. Do one more stretch and fold, then put it back, cover and leave until doubled in size.

8. Take out the dough and weigh it. It should weight about 790g. For six small loaves, divide it into six pieces, each weighing about 130g.

9. Form the pieces into balls, cover and rest for about 10 minutes.

10. Sprinkle the worktop with more flour, then, using the heel of your hand, squash down the balls into discs, about 15cm in diameter. Place these on baking sheets dusted with semolina, and cover.

11. Leave to prove again, until doubled in size.
12. Preheat your oven to 220C.
13. Bake the loaves until slightly browned. Time will vary depending on how fierce your oven is, but at least 10 minutes and less than 20.
14. Wrap in a clean tea towel or cloth then serve, warm-ish.

I made this batch to have with ful medames, the broad bean/fava dish that is arguably from Egypt but is found throughout much of the Levant and Arabic East Africa in various localised forms, and a lemony tahini sauce. I love beans, legumes, pulses, and I prefer to buy locally grown, or at least British produce. Sadly, a lot of the pulses we could get in Italy, just don’t grow in Britain, or the ones available in the shops are all from China. Too far, too dubious. At the moment, I’m favouring fava etc from British producer Hodmedods, and they include a regime for ful medames in one of the leaflets that comes with their pulses.

Apparently broad beans/fava – Vicia faba – have been grown in Britain since the Iron Age, that is the period of about a millennium prior to the comprehensive Roman invasion of 43AD. I love the idea of making an Arabic bread, to eat with an Egyptian stew, made with British grown broad beans, known by their Italian name.

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Filed under Baking, Breads, Recipes

Tagged as Arabic bread, flatbread, khobz, khubz, semolina

April 24, 2015 · 3:10 pm

Cocoa nib and crystallized ginger cookies

The past few years, my favourite chocolate bars have been those that contain both a high percentage of cocoa solids and cocoa nibs. I had a few brands I favoured in Italy, but back here in England I mostly eat Lordy Lord, from local Sussex chocolate company Montezuma’s. It’s “min cocoa solids 79%” and it contains nibs. I love the nutty crunch the nibs provide. Yet it’s taken me ages to get round to trying using nibs as a baking ingredient.

What are nibs?
Before I go any further, let’s clarify what cocoa nibs are. Chocolate is produced from the cocoa beans, the seeds of the tree Theobroma cacao, the first bit of which suitably means “food of the gods”. The pods containing the seeds are harvested then cracked open. The pulp and beans are piled up and left to ferment, to reduce the innate bitterness of the beans. They’re then dried, before being roasted and cracked – the resulting fragments are the nibs.

Cocoa vs cacao
Now reading about this online, I’m coming across the usual internet disagreement and misinformation about the difference between cocoa nibs and cacao nibs. Some sites insist the latter are the version where the beans bypass the roasting process; some health food sites say this results in a product that’s higher in antioxidants. This may well be true, but I can’t find any scientific reports. Plus, the words cocoa and cacao are often used as synonyms. Both words are translations, transliterations or fluid (mis)spellings of the word in the languages of the Mesoamericans (Mayans etc) who first cultivated the tree and added the term to European languages via the Spanish.

Indeed, in most Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French etc), the English “cocoa” is simply translated as cacao.

I’m using Organic cocoa nibs from Naturya, and they describe the product as “simply unprocessed cocoa beans, broken into little bits. Nothing more, nothing less.” With no mention of roasting. Or cacao.

Sprinkles and chips
So I’ve been using the nibs as sprinkles for chocolate cake (above), or as an ingredient for biscotti and cookies. Cocoa nibs are funny as, strangely, they’re reminiscent like carob, which, for those of us who remember the 1980s, was another fad food that health foodie types tried to promote as an alternative to chocolate. I like carob, as carob, but as an alternative to chocolate, it just doesn’t cut it.

So if I want a chocolate chip cookie, I have to use chocolate. But my cocoa nib cookies are great – as something distinct. I’m enjoying playing around with a recipe for cookies that uses the technique where you form a cylinder of dough then cut it. This can be called “slice cookies”, or “icebox cookie” (from keeping the dough in the freezer, or fridge). I first encountered it years ago via the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, but the ever-informative Alan Davidson, in the Oxford Companion to Food, writes, “The American habit of making rolls of cookie dough and keeping them in the refrigerator or freezer may have come from Germany; the doughs for some German biscuits such as Heidesand are made into rolls and chilled before slicing.”

Crystallised ginger
Adding crystallised ginger was just a hunch I fancied playing with, and I’m pleased with the results. Ideas are rarely new in this day and age – seven billion plus humans, the internet – and I’ve definitely enjoyed ginger and dark chocolate combined before, so that led me to nibs and crystallised ginger, an ingredient I enjoy in steamed puddings and pear cakes.

Ginger is the root of Zingiber officinale, but rather than being dried and powdered, it’s boiled in syrup, rolled in sugar – another name for crystallised ginger is candied ginger. As such, it’s a cousin of things like candied peel or candied angelica (the stems of Angelica archangelica, a somewhat out-of-fashion ingredient).

Recipe

140g plain flour
100g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp powdered ginger (optional)
1/2 tsp fine sea salt
150g unsalted butter, softened
100g light brown sugar
100g granulated sugar [test with caster also]
1 egg, beaten (at room temperature*)
100g cocoa or cacao nibs
120g crystallized ginger, roughly cut up

1. Sieve together the flours, baking powder and powered ginger – only use the latter if you like the cookies a little bit more gingery. Stir in the salt.
2. In another bowl, cream together in the sugars and butter. Cream until light and fluffy.
3. Add the beaten egg, a little at a time.
4. Add the flour mix to the creamed mix and bring together, adding the nibs and chopped ginger.

5. Bring the whole mixture to a dough. It should be a little sticky, not too much.

6. Form the dough into two cylinders, using slightly floured hands if you find it too sticky.
7. Wrap each cylinder in plastic and put in the fridge, for at least an hour. The cylinders will be fine in your fridge for a day or two, though the dough will dry and become slightly crumblier the longer you leave it. Some say this deepens the flavour, but that’s another discussion.
8. When you’re reading to make the cookies, preheat the oven to 180C.
9. Line a couple of baking sheets with parchment.

10. Cut the cylinders into rounds, about 8mm thick. The mixture may crumble a bit, if it does, just gently squeeze back together. You won’t achieve perfect rounds, due to the nibs and chunks of ginger.
11. Place the rounds on the sheets, leaving some space for expansion between then, about 4-5cm.
12. Bake for about 15-20 minutes, until nicely coloured.
13. Transfer to wire racks to cool.

* Always bake with your eggs at room temperature. I doubt it makes any difference to taste but it does help when beating eggs into a creamed sugar and fat mixture, reducing the chance of curdling. It’s also better when making things that require the egg, or the white, to be whisked, as the warmer egg incorpates air more effectively. Personally, I don’t generally store eggs in the fridge. Eggs have a great storage system already – it’s called a shell. If the egg is off, having it cold won’t make any difference. And, frankly, when was the last time you had an off egg? I’ve encountered them once or twice in my life. Plus, as I bake so much, and like omelettes and whatnot, eggs never last long in my house, so are are generally fresh, usually from these guys.

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Filed under Biscuits, cookies, Recipes

Tagged as biscuits, cacao, candied ginger, cocoa, cookies, crystallised ginger, ginger, nibs

Category Archives: Recipes

Kubaneh – Yemeni Jewish breakfast bread

Acciuleddi – Sardinian deep-fried sweet pasta

Galettes aux vin blanc with Tom Hunt’s strawberry ice cream

Reminiscences and butter biscuits

Burger buns and khobz variations

Wholemeal honey cake

Delicate shortbread fingers

Tippaleivät – Finnish May Day fritters

A version of khobz, khubz, khoubz Arabic bread

Cocoa nib and crystallized ginger cookies

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