Tag Archives: bread

May 2, 2014 · 2:01 pm

Holey-er than thou

A lot of my recent bread has been fairly dense, with a close crumb. I like bread like this, especially with wholegrain breads like the 100% wholegrain wheat and spelt I’ve been making recently. They’ve tasted great and when fresh aren’t bad for open sandwiches and when a bit old they’re perfect for toast. But the favoured style of “artisan” bread these days is all about the open crumb. A nice crisp crust and an open, irregular crumb with a variety of big holes.

I know I’ve made holey bread like that in the past, but, I dunno, through all my experiments the past few years with seriously rustic flours, bought from farmers’ markets in Rome and here in Sussex, I seem to have lost the knack slightly. Learning to bake is one of those life-long challenges, especially if you’re a home baker and aren’t churning out massive batches. But it’s funny to feel you’ve learned something then forgotten it again.

High extraction challenge
It does seem that holey breads are a particular challenge if you’re using flour with a high extraction rate. The extraction rate is the amount of the grain that remains in the milled flour. So a genuinely wholegrain flour in principle should be 100% extraction. Modern, industrial, nominally brown flours, however, may only be about 80-85% extraction, whereas white flours, which have been sieved or bolted¹ may be closer to 70% extraction – with the bran and germ (ie, the healthiest bits) removed and just the starches and proteins remaining.

I’m sure the masters of the contemporary bread scene, especially those who work with ancient and heritage grains (like Chad Robertson of Tartine and the bakers producing the great looking results of the Brockwell Bake) could get a nice open, irregular holey crumb from 100% extraction flours, but not me. The wholegrain flours I’ve been buying lately have been very branny, stoneground, and I suspect probably close to 100% extraction. They taste great, but I need to get at it to open that crumb out.

I did go back to a classic Dan Lepard 100% white sourdough recipe the other day, and did get a holey crumb. Bit it’s wholly too holey. Holey-er than though. With giant crazy giant holes. So I’ve gone from one extreme to the other.

I reckon the next few weeks, I’m going to try and make breads that are 50/50 white and wholegrain and try the so-called “no knead” method. This seems to be very popular among US bakers and does seem to give holey crumb loaves. It involves mixing up the dough, resting it, and giving it a few stretch-and-folds over time. This does seem very similar to Dan L’s method of mixing, doing a short knead, resting it, and doing another short knead, then repeating, as those kneads basically just involve folding over the dough. I generally use Dan L’s method, with a few stretch-and-folds anyway. And there’s arguably a fine line between “kneading” and “folding”.

In the meantime, here are some pics of my comically holey bread. The flour was nothing fancy², but the loaves still tasted pretty good. Even if they weren’t idea for making sarnies.

1 Etymology geek chums, bolting generally means sieving – or indeed sifting – through cloth. The word comes from 12th century Middle English bulten, from the old French bulter, which is probably from the Old High German būtil, meaning bag.)

2 Strong white from Waitrose supermarket. Although Waitrose/John Lewis does has its own farm, the Leckford Estate in Hampshire, my home county, and to the west of Sussex in the south of England, they don’t seem to grow wheat that produces a strong white bread flour. The Waitrose own brand strong white is “produce of more than one country” – they, and even the likes of Dove’s Farm and Shipton Mill, Britain’s two big organic flour brands, don’t seem to be forthcoming about which countries. Presumably Canada, Kazakhstan, India, etc. I’ve now ordered some strong white flour from Stoate & Sons now instead. I believe they do manage to locally source and mill a strong, high protein variety of wheat in Dorset, the next country along from Hampshire.)

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Filed under Baking, Breads, Discussion, Flour & grain

Tagged as artisan, bread, extraction rate, flour

April 30, 2014 · 3:41 pm

Hundred per cent local spelt loaf

The collection of different flours in my cupboard is getting a bit silly (again). I just can’t resist it when I see a new type I’ve not tried before. In this case, it was some spelt flour, grown and milled by Toos Jeuken, who I buy a lot of my veg from at the weekly Lewes market.

There’s a full profile of the Dutch-born Toos here on The Guardian site, from 2004, and a more recent profile on the market site here. They say she arrived in England on a bike in 1978 and has been farming in Sussex, specifically at Cuckfield, 16 miles from Lewes, since.

I hadn’t really registered that she sold grains as she always has such a wonderful selection of veg at her stall, even now, in the hungry gap. (Spring might be verdant, but traditionally March and April were the time of year when, as Paul Waddington puts it in Seasonal Food, “winter stores ran low and new produce had yet to mature.” Sure, there is still a selection of local produce – last week the farmers’ market had its first asparagus – but it’s a long way from late summer.)

Anyway, at her Laines Organic Farm, alongside all the veg, Toos grows several grains, including oats, barley and spelt. Last week I bought some of her rolled oats (hand-rolled!) and wholegrain spelt flour.

Too many chromasomes
Spelt (Triticum spelta) is an older variety of wheat, less manipulated¹ than modern strains of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum). Though they are closely related, with spelt alternatively classified as a subspecies: Triticum aestivum subsp. Spelta. Both are what is called hexaploid plant species – that is, they have six sets of chromasomes. By comparison, more ancient wheats have few sets of chromasomes: einkorn (Triticum monococcum) is diploid, with two sets. Emmer (Triticum diococcum) is tetrapolid, with four sets, as is Durum wheat (Triciticum durum, or Triticum turgidum subsp. Durum) – the wheat most commonly used for pasta, which was domesticated from emmer.

In the issue 19 of ‘True Loaf’, the magazine of the Real Bread Campaign, Penny Williams of the Artisan Bakery School, highlights the importance of long fermentation of proper bread, but also looks at the issue of wheat varieties and how they may affect digestibility. She quotes a 2011 Indian study² and concern about a potential “impending epidemic” of coeliac and other wheat protein related issues as India transitions from older diploid and tetraploid wheats to hexaploid wheats, notably modern strains of Triticum aestivum. She goes on to quote a 2010 study³ that looks at a broad selection of wheat varieties, with an eye to their “antigenic gliadins” – that is, the gluten proteins that may be responsible for “triggering autoimmune response in people with coeliac disease.”

“The findings suggest,” she writes, “that modern wheat breeding practices may have led to an incresed exposure to these coeliac ‘trigger’ proteins. While they also identified a few modern wheat varieties that had relatively low levels of antigenic proteins… I question whether tinkering with modern wheat is really the right direction to be going in.”

Less tinkered with
I would have to agree with that. Although I can’t really entirely avoid using modern wheat as I like to made cakes and enriched breads that rely on white flours too much, and these are hard⁴ to replace with older wheats.

I do at least try to use older wheat varieties in my wholesome bread experiments. And while spelt may be hexaploid, it’s a lot less tinkered with than modern, industrially cultivated and processed bread wheat. Especially as I’ve been lucky enough to find an experienced organic grower so close to home in the form of Toos. Next time I see her I’ll have to ask if she’s growing any emmer or einkorn.

So anyway. This was my 100% (or 99.5%) spelt loaf.

500g wholegrain spelt flour, nice and branny
340g water
10g fresh yeast
10g salt
50g wheat leaven, 100% hydration

This wasn’t a proper recipe. I just made a sponge, or pre-ferment, with 250g of the spelt flour, the 340g of water and the 10g of yeast in the evening and left it overnight. I wasn’t planning to use any sourdough leaven, but was playing around with it in the morning, so just chucked a bit into the sponge. I then added the rest of the flour and the salt and formed a dough. Did the on-and-off easy knead thing, let it prove up, formed a ball, gave it a final prove, then baked it the hot Le Creuset (like this bread), spraying some water onto the top crust before putting the lid on, resulting in a shiny floury glaze.

It wasn’t my best loaf in terms of the crumb – it’s crumbly and a bit underbaked – but boy did it taste good. The 100% wholegrain spelt flour just had a nuttiness and depth of flavour that’s more pronounced than the breads I’ve been making recently with the Sussex Red wholegrain flour (from Barlow, a modern wheat variety). As I do long fermentations, and avoid foul industrial wheat-based products (white sliced “bread” etc), I don’t suffer from negative reactions to “antigenic gliadians” etc, but I suspect even if I did, this spelt bread would be perfectly digestible.

Footnotes
1. By which I mean selective cultivation, over many centuries, but especially accelerated since the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s when new strains of various crops with higher yields were developed. Higher yields but, we know now, potentially higher environmental repurcussions, due to their heavy reliance on chemical fertilisers, pesticides etc. So not really very “green” in the modern, sustainability sense.

1. ‘Celiac disease: can we avert the impending epidemic in India?’

2. ‘Presence of celiac disease epitopes in modern and old hexaploid wheat varieties: wheat breeding may have contributed to increased prevalence of celiac disease.’

3. Hard, but not necessarily impossible. It’ll just be a lifelong challenge to revise favourite recipes etc so they work with these more earnest, properly old-school wheat varieties.

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Filed under Baking, Breads, Discussion, Misc

Tagged as bread, Celiac, Coeliac, gluten, spelt, Triticum spelta, wheat

April 3, 2014 · 8:22 am

Le Creuset-baked sourdough

This is a technique I’ve been wanting to try for ages. Since last year, in fact, when still living in Rome. There, I encountered the blog of another ex-pat baking enthusiast, Krumkaker. She made several of her loaves in a casserole dish. It’s also a technique demonstrated by the ever-enthusiastic Vincent Talleu here.

I didn’t have my Le Creuset, or similar, with me while living in Rome, but now I’m home, I’ve found it. (Though we’ve lost a load of other baking kit in our double move. Particularly sad is the loss of an Eiffel Tower-shaped cake mould Fran bought in Paris with our dearly missed late friend Sara.)

Anyway. I’m not sure baking in a cast iron casserole, or Dutch oven, or Le Creuset, is a Scandinavian technique. It’s likely something that just evolved before Europeans had ovens, and would bake in pots, initially earthenware.

On the road
The only other time I baked in a Dutch oven was in New Zealand, 1989, when I was on the road with my old friend Stephen McGrath, his Clydesdale horses and an elaborate caravan of wagons and carts. I made an enormous, heavy-duty loaf in a massive Dutch oven, baking it in the embers of our campfire.

The logic of baking in a casserole dish is that the cast iron is not only nice and hot – you preheat it – it also traps the moisture of the dough, effectively steaming the bread as it bakes.

Steam is how you get a crisp crust on bread, and can be difficult to create in a domestic oven. Professional baking ovens have steam injectors, but domestic techniques using misting sprays or trays of water are never quite as good. I can’t remember the qualities of my campfire loaf all those years ago (25!!!), but certainly this loaf has a lovely crust – though it wasn’t the crispest I’ve managed over the years in a domestic oven.

It also has a very satisfying shape, and the dish constrains any dough flow if I hadn’t moulded the ball well enough. (I hate it when I make a round free-form loaf, forming the dough into a ball, then it flows out into a discuss shape when it take it out of the proving basket; shaping nice tight balls can be surprisingly tricky.)

Rude health
This loaf is also my first sourdough for a while. Although I’ve been making most of my own bread since we got back to England at Christmas, I’ve been neglecting my leaven somewhat.

Now about five years old, my leaven is well-travelled and much changed. It was born in London, then moved to Sussex, then it moved to Italy with us. There, it was fed on many and varied Italian flours – wheat, rye and various things referred to by the much misunderstood term farro.

Then it moved back to Britain. And I abandoned it for a few months. While we visited friends and family in the US and NZ, the sourdough lodged with my mother. Who’s a great cook, but not a bread-maker – she’s doesn’t make bread with easy yeast, let alone have any experience with sourdough.

So the past few months I’ve been nursing it back to health. I fed it rye, and local stoneground wheat flour, and filtered water. Finally I introduced some other leaven, from third generation baker Michael Hanson of The Hearth in Lewes. This could be seen as cheating, but I see it more like a kind of marriage. The yeasts and bacteria in my (puny) leaven mixing with those in Michael’s leaven. And after weeks of TLC, it’s finally back in rude health.

Mad science
As with much of my bread-making, this is kinda experimental, not a recipe as such.

I made a sponge with:
300g water
80g wholewheat leaven (at 100% hydration)
200g strong white bread flour
All mixed together, and left, covered with a shower cap – another technique I learned from Krumkaker.

I left it all day, for about seven hours, while I went off and worked in The Hearth.

In the evening, I made up a dough, with a further:
100g white bread flour
150g wholemeal wheat flour
10g salt.

I gave it a short knead, formed a ball, then let it rest for about 10 minutes. I then gave it another short knead, another 10 minute rest, and repeated this a few more times. I then left it an hour, at room temp (about 18C). I then gave it a fold then put it back in the bowl, covered it, and left it in the fridge overnight (4C).

Dough

In the morning, I gave it another fold, resting it at room temp for another hour, then formed a ball, rested it 10 minutes, tightened up the ball, then put it in a basked and gave it a final prove in the airing cupboard (about 24C).

I then preheated the oven to 250C, with the Le Creuset inside. After about 20 minutes, with the oven at heat, I turned the well-floured dough out of the proving basket and dropped it into the hot dish – taking care not to roast my knuckles. I didn’t slash the top – because I wanted to see how it cracked. Or because I forgot.

The lid went back on and I baked it for about 25 minutes at 220C. I then took off the lid, dropped the temperature again to 200C, and baked for another 20 minutes or so.

The results were good. The crust is more chewy than crisp, the crumb soft and moist. We had some for dinner, when I did wood pigeon breasts with a pancetta, thyme and juniper berry red wine sauce. We didn’t eat all the meat, so Fran used the leftovers for a sandwich for work, with a smear of wild garlic sauce. I bet no one else had that posh flavour combo sarnie* for their work lunch today.

* Any US readers, “sarnie” is British English – possibly even English English – slang for sandwich.

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Filed under Baking, Breads, Flour & grain, Recipes

Tagged as bread, Dutch oven, Le Creuset, sourdough

February 12, 2014 · 3:40 pm

Wholesome, wholegrain Magister and einkorn bread

One of the things I enjoyed in my bread-making experiments in Italy was trying different flours, many of them traditional or what’s called “heritage grains”. This is a slightly vague term, muddled up with food fads, but basically it just means grains that are older strains. In the case of wheat*, they can either be alternative varieties to common/bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), or local variables, cultivated over generations to suit a particular terroir.

When I was trying to get my head around the Italian names for grains and flours – particularly the vexed question of what’s meant by “farro” – I wrote a few posts (here and here), where I started learning about some of the different strains and varieties of wheat.

Key heritage wheats that have survived the 20th century’s industrialisation and intensification of agriculture are einkorn, emmer and spelt, or to use their scientific names: Triticum monococcum, Triticum dicoccum and Triticum spelta. As with a lot of taxonomy, things are constantly being revised or bickered about; spelt is interesting, as it’s either Triticum spelta, or classified as Triticum aestivum var spelta, ie a variety of common wheat.

Olde English
Since coming home to England at Christmas, after our two years in Italy and two months travelling in the US and NZ, it’s taken me a while to get back into the bread-making.

This is partly as we have a rubbish oven, partly as I forgot to pick up my leaven from my mother, who had been looking after it, and partly because Lewes now has a couple of great places to buy real bread these days: Flint Owl and The Hearth, which also has the town’s only proper pizza, made by master baker Michael Hanson and pizzaiolo and in his wood-fired oven.

Yesterday, however, I dived back in to the bread-making. I’ve been buying flours, and some of it needed using – particularly the Dove’s Farm wholegrain einkorn I bought that had a “Best before” date of July 2013. Ooops. Best before dates are, as sane people know, just a guideline, but flour does get a bit stale and loses its verve.

Still, at least it’s flour with form. The packet says Dove’s, one of Britain’s bigger organic flour brands, has been growing it on their farm on the Wiltshire/Berkshire border since 2008, and that the einkorn itself “was the original wheat, developed over 20,000 years ago”, and that it’s “the earliest type of wheat grown & eaten by mankind.” As such it can be seen as the crop that symbolises the human transition from wandering hunter-gatherers to settled farmers. You could say it’s the foodstuff that represents the founding of human civilisation, in Eurasia at least.

So that had to go in. As did some lovely Sussex Bread Flour from Inbhams Farm Granary. These guys are a small operation, based in Surrey, the county to the north of Sussex. They sell a range of British grains and flours, as well as home milling equipment. Their emphasise the importance of freshness in grain products. Ironic considering the potentially state of the einkorn flour I had.

Still, the Sussex Bread Flour is not only relatively fresh, and thoroughly local, it was also a nice variety – Magister wheat, which Imbhams describe as “an older two row** variety” that “is a strong (high protein) grain”. It’s a winter wheat, and a variety of Triticum aestivum. I asked about the flour, and James Halfhide of Inbham’s explained that “Magister is a modern 21st century grain introduced from Germany and a ‘2 row’ variety – so an ‘older style’ of grain not unlike spelt or naked barley. So you could say it will carry some older characteristics – one we liked was the flavour. More modern breeding has lead to the ‘4 row’ varieties so they look ‘square’ and usually shorter straw stems.”

Between the two flours, both wholemeal, it made for a seriously wholesome dough, with only minimal elasticity. The einkorn has a protein level of 10.6% and while the Magister might be higher protein (around 12.5%), it’s stoneground and very branny. The resulting loaf has a close, slightly crumbly crumb. Very tasty though. And great with my favourite peanut butter brand.

Being back home in southern England, with its ongoing wind-wracked soggy apocalypse, might be miserable in some senses compared to poncing around the NZ summer or living in Roma, but at least I can get my Whole Earth Crunchy Original – a delicious type of peanut butter made with the peanut skin left on and one of the few foodstuffs I was transporting back to Italy after trips to England.

Sorry, it’s just better than any of those US Peanut Butter & Co varieties I’ve tried, despite that brand’s success (and hip excursions into film and TV; I first spotted it on screen a year or so ago in Girls) and even better than Pic’s Really Good, which I enjoyed a lot in NZ, as it’s from Nelson, a town I’ve got a lot of affection for. Those skins in tandem with butter – yes, butter, I like animal fat with my peanut fat – and this wholesome bread made for a cracking elevenses snack on this filthy morning.

Not really a recipe

For one medium loaf I used:
500g wholegrain einkorn flour
250g Sussex Bread Flour
525g water
12g fine salt
10g fresh yeast

I’m using these same flours to feed up my leaven, but that’s not really ready for baking yet, so fresh yeast it was.

I also used water from our Brita filter. The tap water here in Lewes is pretty hard, and full of god knows what chemicals. I’m not sure the Brita existing makes it as pleasing as water bubbling from the ground in a mountain meadow in spring time, but hey, it’s got to be slightly better.

I just crumbed the yeast into half flour, then added the water and made a sponge. Then I added the salt and the rest of the flour.

I gave the dough a few short kneads over about an hour, then formed a ball.

Then I left in a cold place (about 10C; cold crappy 1950s construction house, basically) for about eight hours.

I gave it a quick shape into a ball, then a final prove in a warm place (about 20C; old-school airing cupboard) for a couple of hours, until it had doubled in size.

Baked at 230C for 20 minutes, then another half an hour at 200C.

Wholesome, historic and local.

* “Wheat” isn’t just one member of the grass family (Poaceae or Gramineae), it’s several, including many strains that have had ooh, ten-plus millennia of crossing and selective breeding.
** As I understand it, when talking about grains as 2-row, 4-row, 6-row, it’s a reference to the number of rows of kernels on the ear.

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Filed under Baking, Breads, Recipes

Tagged as bread, Dove's Farm, Einkorn, English, heritage grains, Imbham's Farm Granary, Magister, Magister wheat

October 26, 2013 · 10:36 pm

Gem Lake, with sandwich

My second loaf of bread in the US. Stood us in good stead for a picnic lunch at Gem Lake, near Estes Park in Rocky Mountain National Park.

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Filed under Breads, Travelling

Tagged as bread, Estes Park, Gem Lake, Rocky Mountains

September 27, 2013 · 12:37 pm

Black beer bread

Readers of this blog may have already spotted that we’re ‘Game of Thrones’ fans. ‘Game of Thrones’ is not only the name of HBO’s excellent TV series, it’s also the title of the first book in George RR Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice cycle of books and it made a cameo appearance in this post, where we were lolling around in the park drinking Birra del Borgo’s Rubus, reading and enjoying the sun.

I can’t remember what hyperlinked amble took me there, but Inn At The Crossroads is the officially recognised blog for recipes based on foods found in A Song of Fire and Ice. Being a baker, my attention was immediately grabbed by their bread recipes. Specifically black bread – something that’s mentioned in the books as common fare of the people of Winterfell and the North.

Here is Inn At The Crossroads’ first Black bread, and here is their Black bread redux, aka Black beer bread. I wanted to try something similar, but not using commercial yeast – as this didn’t seem to fit into the whole quasi-Medieval vibe of Martin’s world. Instead, I wanted to use beer barm, a byproduct of fermentation.

My first experiment with a real barm bread was pretty successful, though I didn’t use any actual beer or dark flours to make it, so it wasn’t really a black bread or a black beer bread. This, however, is.

Again, I used Mulino Marino Pan di Sempre, a stoneground organic white flour that is made with a blend of Triticum aestivum (that is, common bread wheat), Triticum spelta (spelt wheat) and Triticum monococcum (einkorn wheat), but I also added some wholewheat flour.

I made a leaven with the same barm as before, feeding it up with flour over a few days, then I made up a dough, using beer as the only other liquid, not water.

Now, I mentioned that Dan Lepard’s ‘The Handmade Loaf’ has a recipe he calls “Barm bread”, though he makes it without actual barm, just beer and a leaven. He also heats the beer, killing the yeasts, but retaining the flavour. I wanted to retain the live yeasts from a bottle-conditioned beer, so didn’t heat it.

The beer I used was Birrificio Math’s La 27, a 4.8% dark beer from the brewery near Florence. They call it a stout, but stout, traditionally, meant strong, and more recently has come to be associated with more full-bodied creamy porters. It’s neither.

The La 27 has a solid fruity smell: specifically black berries like blackberries (!), elderberries and blackcurrants, with a touch of smokiness and a little chocolate, but taste-wise it’s dull, a little charcoal, but not much more depth of flavour. The body was thin and watery, and over-carbonated. The aftertaste was oddly bitter. It was black though, or black enough for a black beer bread.

So anyway, here’s the recipe. If you try it, don’t be afraid to adjust the quantities, as I was very much experimenting when I made it.

I made my beer barm leaven with barm, flour and some cooking water from farro grain; I’d say it was about 80% hydration, effectively. If you can’t get hold of a beer barm, a normal leaven/sourdough starter will suffice, though it won’t be quite as fun.

For the beer, use a non-pasteurised, non-filtered, bottle-conditioned dark ale, stout or porter (not Guinness).

280g beer barm leaven
400g flour (a mixture of white and wholegrain)
10g salt
250g dark ale, stout or porter

1. Combine the salt and flours.
2. Combine the leaven and beer, stirring well.

3. Pour the liquidy gloop into the flour.
4. Bring together the dough. It’ll be pretty sticky. Which is good, albeit tricky to handle. Don’t agonise.

5. Form a ball with the dough, put it in a bowl or plastic container, cover with plastic or a lid, then put in the fridge.
6. Leave in the fridge for around 14 hours.

7. Take the dough out of the fridge and allow to come to room temperature (around 20C ideally).

8. Form a ball, then put it – smooth-side down – in a bowl or proving basket lined with a floured cloth.

9. Prove again for about 5-8 hours more. This will depend on the temperature of your room, the liveliness of the yeasts, etc. You want to leave it until it’s doubled in size and is soft to the touch, nicely aerated.

10. Preheat your oven to 240C.
11. Upturn the ball onto a baking sheet (so the smooth-side is up), slash, then bake for 20 minutes.

12. Turn down the oven to 200C and bake for a further 20 minutes, or until the bread is done. This can be tricky to judge, but you want it to feel lighter, and sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.
13. Cool on a wire rack.

Now, the finished loaf looked rather pleasing, and had a lovely smell of chocolate, a scent that you get with certain stouts. Oddly, this smell wasn’t strong with the beer itself, but it’s come through with the baking.

Taste-wise, it’s certainly pretty rustic but is oddly bitter-sweet. I’m not a chemist, but I wonder if the bitterness is related to the alcohod.

I’m sure it would have served very nicely for the hungry Brothers of the Night’s Watch, freezing their behinds off on the Wall. We, on the other hand, enjoyed it for breakfast on a mild late-summer Roman morning slathered with honey. Then for lunch with a lovely crunchy, sharp medium aged pecorino.

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Filed under Ale, beer, Breads

Tagged as ale, baking, barm, beer, beer bread, black bread, bread, brewing, George RR Martin, Inn At The Crossroads, leaven, Math brewery, sourdough, stout, westeros, Winterfell

September 23, 2013 · 2:47 pm

Garbatella Farmers’ Market and the new Ponte della Scienza

Rome hosts two large-scale weekend farmers’ markets: one near Circo Massimo (Via di San Teodoro 74) and one that used to be in the Ex-Mattatoio (former slaughterhouse) in Testaccio. In April 2013, however, the latter was relocated further south, away from the centre, to Via Francesco Passino in Garbatella.

We were kinda gutted when this happened, as going to the Ex-Mattatoio market had become a weekend routine. Garbatella, however, is just too far away to be practical when we do everything on foot or by bike. There is still a market and organic shop at the Ex-Mattatoio, with its Città dell’Altra Economia (“Alternative economy city”) so we continued going there, as it’s a great spot. Though it lacks the range now.

This weekend, however, we decided to venture down to Garbatella, to check out the new market and see what baked goods, etc, are available. En route, we wanted to check out the Ponte della Scienza, a new pedestrian and bike bridge that’s been built across the Tiber here. Last time we tried to check it out, it looked finished, but wasn’t open. Now it’s finally open: but it doesn’t really go anywhere or connect to anything.

It took them five years to built it, but, in classic Roman fashion where bickering extremist politicians, corruption, and piss-poor-to-non-existent communication between departments seem to be the norm, there just isn’t any infrastructure on the east side, and there’s very little on the west. There’s no promotion, no information, no signage, and just the usual Roman garbage building up-on the new stairways. Great job, Comune di Roma!

Yet, the bridge is still a great opportunity. You can access it from the foot and bike track along the west bank of the river, and it takes you across to the wonderful old industrial area that includes gasometers, hoppers, water towers and, best of all, Rome’s finest museum. This is the Centrale Montemartini, an annex to the Capitoline museums where ancient statuary is sited among turn of the 19th century turbines and generators in a very handsome art nouveau power station.

We were very bemused when we crossed the bridge, turned right (south) down a promising new stretch of asphalt, thinking it would take us towards the museum, but instead met another cyclist who said “It’s blocked”. So we turned around, went north, and found ourselves leaving the small stretch of new road, cycling through a building site, and emerging onto Via del Porto Fluviale. This is the location of the kinda-cool, kinda hit-and-miss Porto Fluviale, a beer bar and pizzeria that exemplifies the redevelopment going on in this area of Ostiense.

It looks like the Ponte della Scienza work isn’t quite finished yet, but I’m not holding my breath for any rapid progress.

Still, we crossed Via Ostiense, passed Eataly, and headed on into the charismatic Garbatella. This is a very distinctive quartiere, developed in the 1920s and in part inspired the garden city movement: the late 19th century urban planning philosophy based on creating environments that nurtured community through open spaces, greenery and self-sufficiency.

The farmers’ market is now located in the building previously occupied by the daily market. As well as spending a load on a new bridge that doesn’t go anywhere, Rome’s planners seem to enjoy moving markets around too (cf Testaccio; Piazza Vittorio/Esquilino). It’s a handsome building, though I can’t find any historical info about it. I’d guess it was either 1930s or 1950s, but the interior’s been renovated.

Anyway, it’s not a bad site, with each stall having more space. And compared to the Ex-Mattatoio, there are no low-level metal beams or hooks for us tall types to brain ourselves on.

Most importantly, however, it’s packed with good quality, locally produced food. If you’re at all interested in, you know, a viable future for human civilisation, find your local farmers’ market! There you can buy food with a smaller carbon footprint than the contents of your local supermarket, which will mostly have been driven, shipped or flown hundreds or thousands of miles, so every mouthful comes with a climate-change puff of burned hydrocarbons.

Some food then

Pictures of mostly bread, cakes, biscuits. They do sell veg, fruit, dairy products and meat here too, but hey, this is Bread, Cakes and Ale.

A ciambella is a ring-shaped cake or bun. Ciociara is a region of central Italy. No idea what’s entertaining the geezer though.

Not such a jolly guy. Selling, among other things, ciambelline – ring-shaped cookies. Bigger than those in my previous recipe.

Some great looking bread. Love the giant loaf to the right of the insanely cheery looking cartoon chap.

Giant maritozzi at Garbatella Farmers' Market

The biggest maritozzi con la panna I’ve ever seen. These bad boys are least twice the size of the ones you normally see.

Our transportation

Our transportation: the Brompton folding bike, which exerts a fair amount of fascinating in Rome, despite them not being uncommon here.

Info
Garbatella Farmers’ Market, Via Francesco Passino, 00154 Rome
Metro: line B, Garbatella; bus: 673 (Rho)

4 Comments

Filed under Breads, Misc, Other food

Tagged as baked goods, bread, Garbatella Famers' Market, Ponte della Scienza, Roma, rome

September 17, 2013 · 2:54 pm

Real beer barm bread

Once Upon A Time
Once upon a time, breweries and bakeries lived side-by-side harmoniously. Brewers merrily went about their noble work, mashing, sparging, fermenting. One blessed by-product of the process was a foam that frothily formed on top of the fermenting liquor. The dusty baker from next door would welcome consignments of this malty foam – barm – and use its natural yeastiness to leaven his dough.

And so it went for long ages.

Until some learned men in the late 18th and 19th centuries improved humankind’s understanding of bacteria and yeasts. By the late 19th century, yeast specifically cultivated for bread-making had become commercially available in block, then in dry, granulated form. And slowly, sadly, the close bond between breweries and bakeries faded away.

This idea of bread being made with brewery by-products has intrigued me for ages, but not having had a ready supply of barm, I’ve never actually tried it before.

Beer breads
Dan Lepard in ‘The Handmade Loafʼ does a loaf he calls “Barm bread”, but it’s made using a bottle conditioned beer, that is then heated. This seems counter-intuitive, as it kills the yeasts in the beer, but apparently it’s to cook off some of the alcohol, which retards the action of any yeast in the mix. Lepard was effectively using the beer as a flavouring, and then re-introducing yeasts, I believe; so however lovely the results were, it wasn’t a genuine barm bread. (One of my attempts using his method a few years ago is picture above.)

My recent enjoyment of Game of Thrones and the Song of Fire and Ice novels, the source for his great HBO TV series, lead me to the Inn At The Crossroads. This inspired blog features involves real-world interpretations of the fantasy world foods mentioned by George RR Martin in his books, and it got me thinking again about pre-industrial yeast bread-making.

Westeros’ finest
Specifically, I was checking out The Inn At The Crossroads’ bread recipes. They have a few for Martin’s black bread, with the second version made using dark ale, stout or porter. Okay, thought I, that looks fun. But I had one criticism. Surely in Martin’s quasi-Medieval world, they wouldn’t have had “1 packet yeast”; bread would surely have been made with the barm method.

I made a comment along these lines, and one of the site’s creators, Chelsea Monroe-Cassel replied, saying “I agree that this would be the very best way to make this bread!” She also said, “I’ve made several trub breads, with great success.” I’d not heard of trub bread too, but this one is made using the sediment from the fermenter.

My project slightly moved away from the black bread theme, though, as initially I just wanted to make a bread with barm, and with flour with older grain – ie arguably more medieval – varieties.

I bought some Mulino Marino Pan di Sempre, a stoneground organic flour that is made with a blend of Triticum aestivum (that is, common bread wheat), Triticum spelta (spelt wheat) and Triticum monococcum (einkorn wheat).

My friend Michele Sensidoni, a brewer, kindly furnished me with a bottle of barm. It wasn’t very prepossessing stuff: gloopy, brown and malty, separating slightly, but it was exciting to finally get my hands on the stuff.

So:
100g barm
100g flour
Mixed and left overnight. My kitchen was at around 23C. The next day this was clearly alive, and reasonably vigorous. Here’s the before and after shots:

I formed a dough with:
200g barm leaven (ie, all of the above)
500g flour
10g salt
300g water

Adjust the water if necessary; you want a nice moist dough.

I then put all this in a container and left it in the fridge for 24 hours.

I then took it out of the fridge, and let it come back to RT (again, around 23C).

After a few hours, I formed a ball, and put it in a proving basket lined with a floured cloth.

I let it prove again at RT for around 9 hours.

I preheated the oven to 230C.

When the dough was nice and swollen and soft, I baked it for 20 minutes, then turned down the oven to 210C and baked for another 20 minutes.

The results are very pleasing. It’s got a chewy crust, a reasonably open crumb and a taste that’s subtly sour. Yay.

Oh, and for etymology geeks (like me), the British English word barmy, meaning a bit bonkers, crazy, comes from barm. As a barm is the foamy scum that results from fermentation, someone who is barmy is a bit bubbly, excitable, unpredictable and possibly even frothing at the mouth. Don’t worry though, making and eating this bread won’t have that effect on you. [insert suitable smiley here to compensate for lame attempt at humour]

29 Comments

Filed under Ale, beer, Breads, Recipes

Tagged as ale, baking, barm, beer, beer bread, black bread, bread, brewing, George RR Martin, Inn At The Crossroads, leaven, sourdough, westeros

September 14, 2013 · 2:06 pm

The Baule: an Italian loaf shape, apparently

Much of the time I’ve been in Italy, I’ve been looking for the definitive book on Italian bread and baking. Every time I visit Eataly or larger book shops, I pick up and put back down sundry tomes. It’s baffling though: many are rudimentary and some of them are even written and published in English and translated into Italian. The book I’m looking for may exist, but I haven’t found it yet.

I’ve not seen the revised edition of (American) Carol Field’s ‘The Italian Baker’ yet, though from my memories of the original, that’s not the definitive book either*.

If I lived in Italy for 20 more years, and worked in Italian bakeries, maybe I could write it… but that ain’t looking likely at the moment.

So in the meantime, I pick up the occasional book to tide me over. The latest one I bought is the Slow Food Editore (the movement’s own imprint) ‘Pane, pizze e focacce’ – “Breads, pizzas and flatbreads” if you want a semi-bodged, largely gratuitous translation.

This isn’t a classic book by any means, but it does have some good stuff about types of lievito madre (“mother leaven”, ie natural leaven or sourdough starter), about grains and ingredients, and about various forms and shapes of breads. Some of the latter – with names like montasù and mafalda – struck my eye.

So that’s been my starting point with this book: trying some new shapes.

This is about something the book calls a baule. The word means “chest”, “trunk” or “boot” (as in storage area of a car) but I can’t find other evidence on t’interweb for this style of loaf, with this name. I’ve said before, though, much of Italy’s food tradition probably doesn’t exist in digital form yet.

Confusingly, a bauletto (“little chest”) is a term that does seem to be used for this shape of loaf, from Ferrara in Emilia-Romagna, but name is also more commonly used to refer to a white tin loaf, often sliced.

I’ll just have to give ‘Pane, pizze e foccacce’ authors Davide Longoni and Marcella Cigognetti the benefit of the dough…t (hm, that doesn’t quite work does it?) about baule.

This isn’t a recipe, it’s just a record of trying a new shape. For the dough I just used the classic 10g fresh yeast, 10g salt, 350g water, 500g flour, with a mix of strong white and wholegrain.

So basically, you make your dough, and give it a first prove.

Then you deflate it slightly, form a ball and give it a rest.

Then you stretch out that ball to form a rectangle, which you roll up tightly to form a cylinder or sausage shape.

Roll and stretch this sausage to elongate it.

Once you have a nice long sausage, flatten it with a rolling pin.

Once you have a nice long flat rectangle, roll this up, keeping it as tight as possible.

You’ll get a nice sort of baton shape.

I love the spiral ends.

You then get a knife. The book says use the blunt edge, so you could also use a pastry scraper. Make a deep cut into – but not all the way through – the baton.

Move this to a baking sheet.

Cover with a cloth, then leave to prove again, until it’s doubled in size.

Bake. I did my usual time and temp for a loaf this size – 20 minutes at 220C, 20 minutes at 200C.

When baked, remove and cool on a wire rack.

It looks rather nice, and you can tear it down the centre to share during a meal.

But I’d still love to see one of these things in a real Italian bakery. If anyone has every encountered this shape of loaf in Italy, please do let me know! I’m intrigued.

* I did originally include links to Amazon here, but this excellent piece by Russell Brand reminded me they’re still corporate tax-dodgers with questionably “cosy relationships with members of our government”.

3 Comments

Filed under Breads

Tagged as baule, bread, Italy, loaf, shape, slow food

August 9, 2013 · 1:03 pm

Malted wheat bread

After my recent problems with bread-making at home in Rome, I was keen to try and make some bread during my visit to England last week. Although everyone kept telling me they’d just had three weeks of sun and 30C+ temperatures, when I arrived the British weather returned to form. I left the heat of Rome and was met by rain and grey at Gatwick. (There was one day when it was hot and sunny again, but I spent most of it in transit: on a train, then waiting for a very late-running bus, then waiting on the roadside in a village in the middle of nowhere in Devon when said very late bus broke down. Overheated.)

Eventually I made it to my folks’ place in the middle of nowhere in another part of the Devon countryside. I visited the local town, Holsworthy, bought some flour and yeast, then made some bread. That day, the weather was mixed and barely more than 20C. So nice and familiar and manageable, unlike the 40C ish Roman inferno.

The flour I bought was Wessex Cobber Bread Flour from Wessex Mill. Now, for those without even a passing knowledge of English history (or the literature of Thomas Hardy), Wessex is an ancient English kingdom, where the West Saxons (Wes-sax – geddit?) not only conquered neighbouring Anglo-Saxon tribes, but also fought the Vikings to a standstill under Alfred the Great, effectively creating the first version of an English nation in the 9th century. Or at least that’s my précis. Proper historians who would probably tell it differently, but I have Wessex campanilismo. Either way, Wessex, unlike Essex and two Sussexes, no longer exists as a county. Though at its height, it did dominate much of Devon, a region then mostly still inhabited by Britain’s older, “Celtic” inhabitants. Anyway, the point I’m making is that although it wasn’t a local flour brand, it wasn’t that far away from being local.

Except that when I read the packet more closely it said that because of Britain’s poor cereal yields in 2012 (ruined by the non-summer), the flour was instead milled from Canadian grain. D’oh. Seriously, when I leave Italy and return to tediously supermarket dominated and tragically climate-change-ravaged England locavorism is going to be an interesting challenge. Here in Rome I can buy numerous flours ground from grains grown in neighbouring regions.

*Sigh*

I went ahead and made some bread anyway. Wessex Cobber Bread Flour is a roller-milled wheat flour, containing some barley malt flour and malted wheat grains. The type of bread it makes is more commonly known in the UK as “Granary”, but Granary is in fact a trademarked malted flour owned by Premier Foods, owner of the Hovis brand. So much like you can’t call a Kölsch-style beer “Kölsch” unless it’s made in Cologne the right way, you can’t technically call a Granary loaf “Granary” unless it’s actually made with Rank Hovis flour.

For this bread I used the reliable proportions of 1000g flour / 700g water / 20g fresh yeast / 20g fine salt, ie 70% hydration, though I tend to halve that for a smaller loaf. And I just did a basic bulk fermentation, proving twice until doubled in size. No flies were included in the mix.

The results were a bit dense, but it was moist and chewy, and after a few days I didn’t get any of the problems I’ve had recently in Rome with the centre of the loaf damply disintegrating. Although that still doesn’t help me diagnose said problems.

Hi ho.

Oh and I’m not entirely sure what a cobber is. I’m guessing it’s a dialect variation on cob, the more common British English name for a round loaf, equivalent to the French boule. It rings a bell. Though the main usage of cobber that springs to mind is the Australian English for “mate, buddy, chum”.

3 Comments

Filed under Breads

Tagged as bread, Granary, loaf, malt, malted grains, malted wheat loaf, Wessex, Wessex Mills

Tag Archives: bread

Holey-er than thou

Hundred per cent local spelt loaf

Le Creuset-baked sourdough

Wholesome, wholegrain Magister and einkorn bread

Gem Lake, with sandwich

Black beer bread

Garbatella Farmers’ Market and the new Ponte della Scienza

Real beer barm bread

The Baule: an Italian loaf shape, apparently

Malted wheat bread

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