Tortillas (wraps)

I hate the word 'wrap' for a wheat tortilla.  If I see wraps on sale in sandwich shops or delis I turn right off.  Nothing is appealing about a stale, stiff circle of flat bread filled with uninspiring ingredients.  However...

Unleavened flat breads like tortillas could not be simpler to make, and they taste much better than 'wraps' wrapped in plastic with anti-mould sachets which have sat on your supermarket shelves for months.  Tortillas take minute to make, and when fresh, are a revelation.  I won't be tempted to eat a wrap any time soon, but tonight I am going to have fresh tortillas with spiced lamb meatballs, dill and mint yoghurt sauce and some fresh tomatoes from the garden.

Ingredients:

225 g organic white flour
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking powder
40 lard, vegetable shortening or olive oil
150 ml warm water


Mix all the ingredients and knead for a couple of minutes until you have a light dough.  I needed to add some more flour to achieve this.  Cover and leave for about 15 minutes.  Divide into 12 equal portions, and roll out into 15cm rounds.  Cover to prevent them from drying out.  Cook for 1-2 minutes per side in a hot heavy based frying pan.  Wrap in a tea towel to keep warm and eat immediately.  You can also reheat them in a microwave.

Lemon Meringue Pie

Although I did go to New York recently, I did not make it to visit "Bubby's Pie Shop".  A couple of years ago I found a great booked called "Bubby's Homemade Pies" by Ron Silver and Jen Bervin.  It's full of those sorts of pies you imagine cooling on a window ledge in an American farmhouse.  So finally, I decided to try something spectacular from it.

There are three basic steps.  Make a short crust pie shell, put in the filling and bake it, then cover with Italian meringue.  I won't give the short crust recipe, you could even buy a pre-baked shell to make it easier, but the authors give wonderful tips on how to prepare and roll out short crust pastry, over several pages, and I think I've made my best attempt ever following their rules.

To fill the pastry shell:

6 large eggs
1.5 cups sugar
3/4 cup lemon juice
1 tbsp lemon zest

Whisk eggs and sugar until frothy.  Add the lemon juice and the cream, whisk in.  Strain through a sieve then add the lemon zest and mix.  Pour into the pastry shell and bake at 150 C for 1 hour.  Cool on a rack and then cover in fridge overnight.

Italian meringue topping

This was fun!

4 egg whites
3 tbsp water
1 cup light brown sugar tightly packed
2/3 cup castor sugar
1/8 tsp cream of tartar

Add the sugars to a heavy based saucepan and cook without stirring until it reaches 253 F on a sugar thermometer.

At this point, beat the egg whites on a medium speed until frothy and slightly increased in volume.  Add the cream of tartar.  Turn off mixer, and a little of the hot sugar, and mix on medium for a few seconds.  Repeat, adding more syrup with the machine off, and then beating again.  Turn to high speed and beat until it holds a peak when lifted with a spoon.

It frothed up into the most amazing meringue!

Spread the meringue full to the edges of the pie shell, apparently if you leave any gaps the meringue will weep fluid later.  Lift into peaks with a spoon or spatula while it is still warm.   I then browned the top with a kitchen blow torch, but you can put it in an oven at 230 C for 5 minutes as an alternative.

Here's the result - amazing!

Visit to the USA

Today I made a very nice seed bread.

I went on a holiday to the USA and Canada for 5 weeks, so have not had a chance to write anything or cook anything.  I get really sick of eating in restaurants on holiday.  Not only the expense, but the lack of good home cooked food.  I only had 2 home cooked meals during the entire time.

On the other hand, it was a great experience.  I had some very nice bread, and I think overall bread in the USA is better than bread here in Australia or the UK.  The cookware shops were amazing, the prices unbelievable.  One of the main things I learned was that we a ripped off left right and centre for prices in Australia.  The service in shops was amazingly good too, compared to the ignorant, uninterested or just plain rude service you get here.  People did find it hard to understand my accent though.

Anyway, I'm going to buy things from the USA where possible from now on.  Many shops have recently started selling produce to Australia:

http://www.fiftyone.com/clients

A really good cookery store, probably the best I have seen, is Williams-Sonoma - soon they will be able to take Australian orders.  The prices for electrical items were about one third of what we would pay here.

Under cover bread baking attempt

This weekend I tried something a little different.  I used my standard loaf recipe and instead of cooking it in a hot oven or hot container, I put it in a cold oven and then turned the heat on.  It took longer to cook, but it  rose incredibly well and I ended up with a much lighter loaf than normal.

Ingredients:

Strong white flour 400g
Wholemeal flour 100g
Water 300ml
Olive oil 1 tbsp
Salt 1 dessertspoon
Dried yeast 1 dessertspoon

Knead it in the usual way and leaf to proof covered for 1-2 hours.  Knock back down and shape into a ball.  I let this rise in a floured banneton for 30 minutes, then tipped it gently onto the base of the cloche, upon which I had sprinkled some polenta.  If the receptacle is hot you don't need polenta, but for this method the dough would stick.  I put the dome on, let it sit for about 10 minutes, then put it in a cold oven.  Then turn the oven on at 230C for 45 minutes.  The dough rises further within its container, protected from the heat initially both due to the cover and the fact the oven starts off cold.  Take the dome off at 45 minutes, then leave for 20 minutes.

What I managed to produce was a loaf at least twice the size of previous efforts, and nice and light - very happy with this method.

Hot Cross Buns

Easter is almost here, and although I usually make hot cross buns during Easter, this year I will be travelling.  I'm making them this week instead, as they've become a bit of a ritual and they taste so nice I don't want to miss out.  Hot cross buns appear in Australian supermarkets straight after Christmas, which is ridiculous.  By the time Easter arrives I'm surprised people aren't sick of them.  The home made ones are much nicer than factory made ones.

Ingredients


500g flour
15g dried yeast
125g dried blackcurrants
1 tsp salt
60g brown sugar
60g butter
2 tsp mixed spice
2 eggs
280ml milk

Paste for the crosses


1/2 cup flour
1/3 cup water

Glaze

2 tbsp milk
2 tbsp castor sugar

Warm the milk slightly to room temperature.  Mix flour, salt, yeast and mixed spice together.  Make a well in the centre, add milk, eggs and softened butter and mix by hand.  Add the currants and mix them in.  Leave to rise for about 2 hours, covered, in a warm place.  Knock the dough down, knead briefly and shape into 12-16 round buns.  Place on a non-stick oven tray, or a greased tray, and leave covered for 45-10 minutes until they double in size.

For the crosses, mix water and flour into a smooth paste and pipe onto surface of buns when they have risen.

Bake in oven at 200 C for 15-20 minutes.

Just before they are ready to leave the oven, heat the sugar and milk in a small saucepan and boil until thick and syrupy.  Take the buns out of the oven and immediately brush the top of each bun with the syrup, and then brush them each again a second time.  Leave to cool.

Mixed spice


As I only seem to use a jar of this at Christmas and Easter, the spice will probably have gone stale if you have some hidden in the cupboard.  Buy a fresh jar, or you can make your own by mixing these together:

2 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground cassia
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp green cardamom seeds

Hot cross buns, and most other spiced fruit buns are an English tradition dating from Tudor times.  They were only allowed to be made and sold on special occasions, decreed by the crown.  This eventually lapsed and they became very popular, but now seem to have reverted to the special occasion of Easter.

Pumpkin scones

Pumpkin scones are are a Queensland tradition.  I don't think I thought of them as anything other than a joke before I came to live here.  I had certainly never seen any before.  I remember going to a morning tea at work and there they were - pumpkin scones.  They were much nicer than I thought they would be, and I'm making some for our Japan earthquake fundraiser tomorrow.

They are a bit different from normal scones.  My grandmother made superb scones, in fact both grandmothers did, except that the penny-pinching one served them with the cheapest possible margarine she could find.  Yuck!  My other grandmother made scones when she was near the end of a 300ml bottle of cream.  She would rinse it out with milk, and use that.  She barely mixed it with the flour until it just came together, and no more, otherwise they were overworked and wouldn't rise.  She also patted out the dough very lightly and didn't roll it.

This pumpkin scone recipe is from Stephanie Alexander.

Ingredients:

250g pumpkin in large chunks
300g self raising flour
pinch of salt
20g butter
1 beaten egg
Milk

Stephanie says to steam the pumpkin, but I've had better results baking the chunks in the oven at 180 C until they're soft, about 45 minutes.  I've tried steaming them but they make the scone mix too wet.  I suppose you could always microwave them too.  Let them cook, and then puree them.

Sift the flour and salt, rub in the butter and then the pumpkin puree.  Be warned, it's a sticky mess!  Don't rub or compress too violently, just try to amalgamate as gently as possible.  Add the beaten egg and mix to a soft dough.  It will be very soft and sticky.  If for some reason it's too dry, add up to 1/4 cup of milk, but I have never had to use any milk at all.  Tip onto a floured surface, sprinkle with more flour and pat into a square shape.  Cut into scone sized portions and brush the tops with milk.  Cook in oven for 15-20 minutes at 200 C until golden.  I had to turn the trays around in the last 5 minutes because the ones at the back cooked more quickly.

Serve with BUTTER!

Chocolate cupcakes for Max's 16th birthday

I had a lot of positive comments about my recent cupcake effort, so I thought I would try another version.  This time, chocolate cupcakes - just to be healthy.  I'll take most of them into work, but the main reason I am cooking them is because Max, our dog, turns 16 today and one of these will be his birthday cake.

Ingredients


100g dark chocolate
250ml water
125g Danish unsalted butter
255g brown sugar
3 eggs
225g self raising flour
75g white flour (cake flour)
30g cocoa

300g dark chocolate
300g creme fraiche or sour cream

This makes 18 cakes.

Preheat oven to 160 C.  Use 2 paper cupcake cases per cake.

Melt chocolate and water in a saucepan over low heat, stirring for 5 minutes until smooth.  Leave to cool.
Beat the butter and sugar in a mixer until fluffy.  Add the eggs one at a time, until just incorporated.  Add the sifted flours and cocoa and stir until just combined.  Add the cooled chocolate and mix until combined.  Spoon the mixture evenly between 18 cupcake cases.  Bake for 20 minutes then set on a wire rack to cool.

For the frosting, place the creme fraiche and chocolate in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water.  Melt and stir for 5 minutes until smooth and shiny.  Let it cool and thicken then spread over each cooled cake.

Here is a video of Max eating it.  Somehow I don't think these will be light and fluffy, as he nearly choked halfway through it.

Pumpkin bread

It's been a while since I've made anything new.  I had to work last weekend, so no time for experiments.  Today I'm attempting to make pumpkin bread, which is completely my own recipe, so if it fails I have no-one to blame but myself.

I am interested in additions to bread, such as rice, potato - and today, pumpkin.  Pumpkin scones are a traditional Queensland snack, and although I have seen some recipes for pumpkin bread, they are for sweeter and more cake-like products.  Pumpkin used to make me dry-retch when I was a child (along with peas), and I still find it hard to deal with a large amount of steamed, boiled or mashed pumpkin on a plate.  Yuk.  The flavour and colour is very pleasant when used sparingly, but too intense for me in large amounts.  I quite like roasted pumpkin, but on the whole I think I'd rather eat sweet potato as a vegetable.  Only a small amount of pumpkin is needed for this recipe so I'm using the rest to put in a lamb tagine.

Ingredients


450g strong white flour
100g wholemeal flour
120g steamed or boiled pumpkin, mashed and cooled
150ml water
150ml milk
1 dessertspoon dried yeast
1 dessertspoon salt
Pumpkin seeds for the top

Mix everything except the seeds together and knead for 10 minutes.  Let rise until doubled in size, an hour or more if needed.  Knock down and shape into a round loaf.  Let this rise on a tray scattered with polenta, cover and leave for 30-45 minutes.  Scatter the top with pumpkin seeds.  Pre-heat oven to 230 C and cook for 30-40 minutes, or until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the base.

I'm going to cook mine under cover, 30 minutes with the lid on and then 20 with the lid off.

It spread out more than I expected, but it looks good and hopefully will taste good too.  Perhaps I would have been better cooking it in a bread tin.

Cupcakes with lemon and orange-passionfruit icing

Tomorrow we are having a fundraising morning tea, to raise money for the Christchurch earthquake victims.  Everyone is bringing something to eat, and donating $5.

I know it's not bread, but making cupcakes is baking, so I thought I'd write about it.  I have a vague memory of making cupcakes with my grandmother, who was an amazingly good baker.  I don't think I've made them since because I seem to associate them with muffins.  I hate muffins, they're thick, pasty, and sit in your stomach like concrete, and it annoys me people eat them because they think they're healthy.  They have fat and sugar in them, like cupcakes, but at least cupcakes are honest and don't pretend to be anything they're not.

This recipe is from Nigella Lawson.

Ingredients:


125 self raising flour
125 castor sugar
125 unsalted butter
2 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
2 tbsp milk

Put everything except the milk in the food processor and whizz until smooth.  Add the milk a little at a time, with the motor running, until you get a soft, dropping consistency.  Scrape the mixture evenly between 12 cupcake paper pans and smooth out.  Bake at 200 C until golden.

Just a little word about butter.  Australian butter is no good for baking.  If you live here, your best bet is Lurpak Danish butter.  The consistency of Australian and European unsalted butter is completely different for some reason.  I'm not being a butter snob but for cooking purposes go European.

Icing


I've included two icing recipes, both inspired by Maggie Beer.

Lemon butter icing

50g soft unsalted butter
Zest of 1 lemon
30ml lemon juice or a little more to taste
215g icing sugar, sifted

Orange-passionfruit icing


50g soft unsalted butter
Zest of 1 orange
1 tbsp orange juice
1 tbsp passionfruit pulp, with or without seeds
215g icing sugar, sifted

The method for both icing recipes is the same, mix everything together and stir until smooth.  Spread on the cupcakes when they are cool.

I've heard it said one easy way to tell apart an English person and an Australian is that the English won't eat passionfruit seeds.  I'm not sure if this is true but I'm going to use them in my version.

Lemon on the left, passionfruit-orange on the right

Wholemeal no-knead bread

I try to use organic flour for the bread I make, and ever since I bought the Thermomix I have been milling wheat grain into flour.  I find the terms wholemeal, wholewheat etc very confusing, and so it seems do the manufacturers of commercial bread.  A lot of this product has a varying amount of white flour added, to make the bread rise more and give a lighter final product.  There are no standard definitions in different countries either, so what you buy may not be what you thought you were buying.  Some breads even have artificial colouring or molasses added to make them look brown, when they are in fact highly processed.

Whole wheat or wholemeal flour is made of the entire grain, with nothing added or subtracted.  It contains volatile oils, so it won't keep as well as white flour.  This is why I prefer to mill it myself, because the grain keeps better than the flour.  Using 100% wholemeal flour will result in a denser bread, which is not to everyone's taste.  I love the smell and taste of wholemeal bread, and I think it makes nice toast too.  There is less gluten in wholemeal flour, and also the bran prevents air pocket formation so the final result is not surprising.  However, you can counteract this to a certain extent by adding more water and leaving the bread to rise longer, or let it rise twice.

With wholemeal flour you get nothing added and nothing taken away.  A lot of white flour has various things added back, in some countries by law eg folate, so if you want to know exactly what goes into your loaf use wholemeal flour.

I wanted to try the no knead method with wholemeal flour.  This weekend I'm also going to make some cupcakes for a morning tea at work on Monday to raise money for the Christchurch earthquakes.  Although Australia has had its fair share of natural disasters in the last month, what has happened in New Zealand is beyond words.  New Zealanders and Australians are family.  I might put the recipe for the cakes in here later in the week.

Ingredients for wholemeal no-knead bread


3 cups wholemeal flour
Roughly 2 cups water
1/4 tsp dried yeast
1 and 1/4 tsp salt

There is more water in this recipe than the standard recipe, but different flours will take different amounts of water, particularly wholemeal flours.  Mix everything together, starting with 1.5 cups water and slowly add the rest until you get a soft mushy consistency but not too wet.  Place in a bowl, cover tightly with cling wrap and leave for 12-18 hours at room temperature.  Tip out the dough onto a floured surface and fold over once or twice.  Cover with a tea towel for 15 minutes, then shape into a ball.  Place onto a heavily floured tea towel, cover and leave to rise for 2-3 hours.  Preheat oven to 230 C, with your cast iron or ceramic pot inside, for at least 30 minutes, then upend the dough into the pot.  Replace lid and leave in oven for 30 minutes, then remove lid and cook for another 30 minutes.

The final product was very dense. although when I cut it there are pockets of air inside.  I sliced off a bit while it was still warm, and it tastes delicious.  Overall though, I'm a bit disappointed.  It's too heavy and crumbly for sandwiches, so it will probably end up as toast for the next few days.

French country style bread from Paula Wolfert

I don't know if anyone has ever tasted Poilane bread from Paris.  Their website is here: http://www.poilane.fr/

They make huge, dense round loaves of bread that have the reputation of being the best bread in the world.  Probably the most expensive too.  I've never bought a whole loaf, but you can buy small packets of the slices in some shops in the UK.  I've bought one of these, and although the bread was probably a bit stale it tasted incredible. I saw some for sale in Sydney once too, I wonder how fresh that would have been? People line up to buy this bread for hours (so the rumour goes) but honestly, I can't be bothered doing that and anyway the last time I went to Paris all the shops were closed because it was a Sunday.  And a gypsy cursed me.  So I am going to try and make a vague approximation of it at home.

Paul Wolfert is an American cook and food writer.  I think her books are astonishing for the amount of research, history and clarity of the writing that goes into them.  She's known for her interest in slow cooking, Mediterranean food, North African cooking and probably most famously the cooking of South-West France.  Her latest book is all about cooking in clay pots, which sparked my interest in using these for  bread.  This recipe comes from "The Cooking of South-West France" and is a refreshing book for its celebration of things like bread, lard, goose fat, cream and the remainder of the 5 food groups.

Ingredients:


1.5 tsp dried yeast
3/4 cup water at room temperature
1 cup strong white flour

1.5 cups lukewarm water
4.5 tsp salt
1 cup wholemeal flour
5.5 cups strong white flour

This is a time consuming recipe with multiple rises and is not for those who are time challenged.

First, make a starter with the first 3 ingredients, the 1.5 tsp yeast, 3/4 cup of water and the 1 cup of white flour.  Mix it and cover with cling film.  Leave it at room temperature for 1-2 days.  The longer you leave it the more of a sour dough character it will develop.  If you live in a warm climate like me it would be best to leave  it in an air-conditioned room, or even the fridge.  If there's any liquid on top of the starter stir it in before the next step.  It does smell very sharp but that's ok.

The next day, add the 1.5 cups water and the salt to the starter, and mix it in.  Add the cup of wholemeal flour, and mix it in.  Add the remaining 5.5 cups of white flour 1 cup at a time.  If the dough is too wet, add another 1 or 2 tablespoons flour.  The texture should be quite soft, but not wet, and also not too tough.... sort of a Goldilocks dough, I suppose.

Anyway, knead it for about 10 minutes.  Be careful if you use a dough hook.  It's such a large amount you could burn out the motor.  Best to knead it by hand.  Put it in an oiled bowl, cover with cling-wrap and leave somewhere warm for 1-2 hours.  Mine took 2 hours to double in size at an outside temperature of 33C, so it seems the yeast has to recover a bit from the starter.  At first I thought it wouldn't rise at all, but the second hour did the trick.

After the 2 hours, knock down the dough and knead for a couple of minutes, place back in the bowl, cover and leave somewhere warm again for another 2 hours.

After this, knock down, knead for a couple of minutes and shape into a ball.  At this point you can cook it in 2 ways, one which I used and one which I didn't.  The first, and to my mind the easiest way, is using the cloche system.

Preheat oven to 230 C
Put the dough ball onto the base of a cloche which was had some polenta scattered on it
Leave dough to rise for about 45 minutes covered in the cloche
With a razor blade, make some deep slashes in top of the loaf, any pattern you like.
Leave it for another 10 minutes to recover
Cook in cloche at 230 C for 50 minutes
Take off lid, and leave for another 10 minutes or so until brown and the crust has developed.
Place on a rack to cool.

For those who do not have a cloche, Paula Wolfert gives the following advice:

Flour a bread-rising banneton or put a tea towel in a 20-15cm bowl and flour the tea towel heavily.  Put the dough in the bowl, cover with another cloth and leave for 1-2 hours.  Preheat the oven to 230 C and tip the dough gently upside down onto a baking tray covered with polenta to prevent sticking.  Just before putting the bread in the oven, spray the oven with a few mists of water in a squirter, which will help the crust develop.  Cook for 50 minutes, but keep an eye that it does not burn, you may need to reduce the oven temperature.

I'll let you know how it tastes tomorrow, but I'm impressed with how much it rose in the oven.  As it cooled the crust cracked like a mosaic.

A couple of years ago I stayed in Paris, and in the ground floor of the apartment building was a bakery/cafe called Le Pain Quotidien.  I learned French at school for 5 years (not that anyone going to Doncaster High School in the 70s was likely to be in a French speaking environment for some time, but that's another story).   I can read French, sort of, and speak food related French very badly.  They had wonderful loaves of bread, and it was a lovely spot for breakfast and lunch.  After a very nice lunch, with lots of gesticulating to make myself understood, I asked if it were possible to buy one of the hessian lined straw bannetons that festooned the shelves along with bottles of olive oil, tapenade and other things ostensibly on sale.  The very nice waitress (in English) assured me that this was fine, so I waited at the checkout to pay my bill and get my basket.  After a long wait, a man I assume to be the manager appeared, and proceeded to lecture me in French, extremely rudely and loudly, that this was impossible, out of the questions, insupportable etc.  Despite the fact the baskets had price tags on them.  This ruined what had been a very pleasant lunch, and I did not go back into the shop again as a result.  I managed to find another one somewhere else, luckily, but that was an unpleasant taste of how awful the French can be.  The other example was the appalling desk bitch in a hotel in the Marais who refused to order  us a taxi, but that's another story as well.  Bon appetit.

Italian savoury bread

I felt like a change from the type of bread I've been making recently, so I thought I'd give this a go.  Italians love stuffing bread dough with all types of goodies, including olives, cheese, vegetables herbs and meat, particularly southern Italians.   They make a great snack as you everything has been added to the bread already.  Good for serving with pre dinner drinks, or as a snack or part of an antipasto.  You can add anything you like really, but this one is just a guide.

Ingredients:

500g strong white flour
1 tsp salt
3 tbsp good olive oil
10g dried yeast
250ml water
100g pitted and chopped black olives
100g salami chopped
100g chopped provolone cheese
Chopped sprig rosemary leaves

Mix all the ingredients together and knead for about 10 minutes.  If it's too wet add some more flour, a tablespoon at a time.  Place in an oiled bowl and cover for 1-2 hours until doubled in size.  Knock it down and knead into a round loaf.  Place on a baking tray with some polenta spread on it, to prevent sticking.  Leave to rise again for about 45 minutes or until doubled in size.  Bake at 200 C for 45 minutes.

This is a good dough to experiment with.  You could also add sundried tomatoes, chopped roasted capsicum, prosciutto, basil.  I've seen one recipe that involved braiding whole raw eggs in their shells into the dough, mainly for decoration but apparently you can eat the egg too (don't think I'll try that one).  Stephanie Alexander has a similar recipe, with just olives in it.  You can flatten that one out and make focaccia as well,  and she also has an amazing recipe in "Feasts and Stories" for a bread pie.  The casing of the pie is the olive dough, and it's filled with cooked chicken, potato and garlic before it is baked.  I made it years ago for a picnic, and it's like a ready made sandwich when cut into slices.

Anyway,  I'm going to take this one into work for afternoon tea and see what people think.

Barley Bread

I'm returning to a tin loaf today, made for a friend who finds my free form loaves scary.  She's been completely socialised into accepting the supermarket factory loaf of bread as the norm.  So much so that my lovely, brown, crunchy free form loaves make her sick!  So my challenge is to make her a loaf of bread that looks boringly 'normal', but tastes great.  Once again I turn to Elizabeth David.

Ingredients


450g strong white flour
120g barley meal (milled barley)
10g dried yeast
10g salt
340ml water
2 tbsp of buttermilk, cream or full cream milk

Mix all the dry ingredients thoroughly, then add the liquids and knead for 10 minutes.  Let it proof in warm place in an oiled bowl covered with cling wrap for 1-1.5 hours.  Punch the dough down, shape into a sausage and place into a 2 litre bread tin.  Preheat oven to 230 C and let the bread rise for 45 minutes until doubled in size.

Bake for 15 minutes at 230C
15 minutes at 200 C
Tip out of tin onto its side and bake for 15-20 minutes at 180 C.

Here is the result:

The dough rose amazingly well, better than any other mix I have tried.  I'll report back on the taste.  I've read that barley has a low glycaemic index and can also actually reduce blood sugar - who knows?  As I've made chocolate ice cream for dessert maybe that's a good thing.

No knead bread and clay pots

Well, the postal service seems very efficient post cyclone, as my second clay pot has arrived from the USA.  This is a hand made pot specifically made for the no knead bread recipe.  The recipe was developed by trial and error, in an attempt to get a European-style crust in a conventional oven.  Some have hailed it as the greatest breakthrough in bread technology in hundreds of years.  From the first attempt I made, I would have to agree.

Here are some photos of the pot.

The second picture is the bread proverb written inside the lid, which differs for each pot.  It's a really nice touch.  The pots are made by a lady called Judy Motzkin.  You can read about them and order them here:  Judy Motzkin's no knead bread pots

The recipe is simple.  There are lots of links to this style of breadmaking, the first I found was in the New York Times: Jim Lahey's no knead bread

Ingredients


3 cups strong white flour
1 and 1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp yeast
1 and 5/8 cups water

Mix everything together in a glass bowl for about a minute.  You can use a knife, I have found the best thing is a rigid silicon spatula because it's easy to clean.  The dough will look rough and sticky and  pretty ragged.  If you don't mix it well though, you can get hard lumps of flour in the final result.  It should come together pretty quickly.  As I live in the tropics I use iced water, as I want the yeast to act slowly.

Cover tightly with cling film and leave for 12-18 hours at room temperature, about 20 C is ideal.  It should look very bubbly.  Scrape it out onto a lightly floured surface, sprinkle lightly with flour, and with floured hands (because the dough is sticky) fold it over once or twice.  Leave covered with the cling film for 15 minutes, and then shape it into a ball, tucking all the edges underneath.  Place it on a heavily floured tea towel (a linen one, not a towelling one), with the folded edges underneath.  Flour the top of the dough, and cover with cling film or a tea towel and leave for 2-3 hours to rise again.

Pre-heat the oven to 230 C.  You will need a cast iron casserole eg Le Creuset, or an ovenproof ceramic bowl with a lid eg Romertopf.  You could even use a corning ware glass mixing bowl.  Cast iron pots are easier, because you can put them into a hot oven.  If you use glass or ceramic, you need to put them in a cold oven and heat it up, otherwise they will crack.  If handling glass or ceramic, avoid sudden changes in temperature.  Put them into a folded tea towel or wooden chopping board if they're straight from the oven, don't put them on a cold surface.  The pot should be at 230C for at least 30 minutes before it's ready to start baking.

Take the hot out out of the oven.  Pick up the dough by placing your hand under the tea towel, and upend it, upside down, into the hot pot.  Don't burn yourself.  Don't worry if it looks collapsed and awful, all will be well.  If it's not central, give the pot a shake to centralise it.  Put the lid on top, place it back in the oven for 30 minutes.  Then take the lid off, and leave for another 20-30 minutes until brown and crunchy.  Magically, the dough does not stick to the hot surface and it comes out easily.

Even if it's a bit lopsided, looks uneven, does not rise as much as expected, your worst effort will taste better then any other bread you have eaten.  I love this recipe and it's fun to cook it in different containers, or use different flours, to get great results.

The long proofing time makes the bread taste exceptional, with sourdough overtones and a delicious crust.

The Cloche - honey wheat bread

Okay, well Cairns has survived and narrowly missed being destroyed by cyclone Yasi.  The towns of Tully, Cardwell and Mission Beach south of us have not been so lucky.  I'm lucky to have power and internet access.  There's not much to eat, so I'm going to make some bread.

The first of my baking pots from the US have arrived.  The other one  - who knows where that is, now that the highway has been cut off to the south!  The one that has arrived is called a cloche, made of stoneware ceramic.

The whole idea of under cover baking is to preserve the moisture in a closed system within the oven.  This will do two things.  Firstly, the steam rises to the top of the enclosed container, and this encourages the bread to rise upwards instead of outwards.  The dough continues to rise within the container when it's first put into the hot oven, because it is initially protected from the intense heat of the oven.  The second thing is that the crust will be far crunchier due to the steam that is confined within the container.  There's also the combined outcome of the crust not hardening before the bread has cooked internally, so you end up with a well risen loaf with a good texture, rather than a sadly disappointing sized loaf with a dense texture.

Here's a picture of the cloche:

I think I will use this one for the usual type free-form loaves that don't need a tin, and use the pot that's still to arrive for the no-knead dough.  I'm trying a recipe in the brochure that came with the cloche.  Sadly, my Kitchenaid mixer blew its motor on this recipe so I have to buy another one.  I thought they were supposed to last forever?  I blame the cyclone.

Honey wheat bread


Ingredients


1 tbsp dried yeast
2 cups milk at room temperature
1/4 cup honey
3 to 4 cups strong white flour
2 cups wholemeal flour
1 tbsp salt
2 tbsp vegetable oil


Mix together yeast, honey, milk, oil, salt, wholemeal flour and 1 cup of the plain flour.  Add 1 more cup of plain flour at a time, until the dough is not too wet or too firm.  Err on the side of leaving it a little moist as you can always add more flour while you knead it.  I only needed to use 3 cups of plain flour.  Different types and brands of flour will absorb different amounts of liquid, wholemeal flour in particular, so you must be prepared to judge the amount required.  Knead the dough for 10 minutes, then place in a oiled bowl, cover with cling film and leave somewhere warm for 1.5 hours.  Knock the dough down, shape it into a round loaf and place in the centre of the cloche dish.  I use some polenta to cover the base in case the dough sticks.  Cover with the lid and leave to rise for an hour.  Preheat the oven to 190 C.    The take the lid off for 5-10 minutes until it looks cooked.

Cottage Loaf

I watched an interesting English TV show the other day, a woman called Mary Portas who is trying to get English shops to provide better service and products.  In this episode, she was trying to convince the owner of an independent bakery to start making artisan bread.  She failed, but they visited other bakeries who did make great bread, and I was reminded of cottage loaves.  We don't see these much in Australia, but they are a traditional English loaf, and I thought I would give it a try.  They look like a little collapsed snowman, with a smaller topknot sitting on a larger base.  I've nearly eaten all the rice bread so this will keep us in toast for a few days, if it works.  It promises to be a challenge.

Again, this is from Elizabeth David, simplified a bit.  She is turn derived it from a book called "Manna" by Walter Banfield, written in the 1930s.  I have a copy of that book, and it's very technical as it is more designed for commercial bread baking, using 1903s commercial ovens and technologies.  It's interesting to read though, and as it was written before all the modern rapid rise techniques, the quality of the bread he talks about is top notch.  It's really sad that Anglo-Saxon bread making has largely lost its heritage.

Ingredients


675g strong white flour
225g wholemeal flour
7g dried yeast
10g salt
500ml water

This is a basic recipe, I'm going to add a mix of seeds to mine, including poppy, sunflower, linseed and sesame.

Mix the dough and knead for the usual 8-10 minutes.  Leave to rise for an hour in a warm place, knock down.  Roll it into 2 balls, one a third of the total, so that the larger weighs twice as much.  Weigh the pieces if you're not sure.  The smaller piece will form the topknot.

Keep them separate, cover and let rise for about 45 minutes.  Now you have to join them together.  Flatten the top surface of the larger ball gently, and do the same for the base of the smaller one.  Cut a small cross with a very sharp knife into the top of the larger piece, about 3 cm across.  Now you have to push the smaller topknot onto the larger bottom (the 2 flattened surfaces together).  Make a cone shape with your thumb and first 2 fingers, make an indentation into the smaller piece, then push it down firmly onto the base.  It's a short controlled push, not too hard though as everything will collapse.

Now cover the joined loaf, if you have a plastic bucket this would be ideal.  Let it recover for about 10 minutes, and then put it into the oven.  The oven is not pre-heated for this recipe, it starts off cold.  Turn the oven on to 230 C, best not to use convection as you want the gradual increase in heat to let the dough rise again.  A convection setting would have the heat rise too quickly.  It should take about 45 minutes, watch closely from the 30 minute mark in case its getting too dark.  If it is, cover it with some aluminium foil.  I put some slashes in mine with a sharp knife for decoration.

The result:

I'm happy enough with this as a first attempt, but I'm not sure if I will try this again.  It was fiddly and the shape is not very practical.  It was fun to try though.

I'm very excited because I have ordered two clay pots for under cover bread baking in the oven, from the USA.  They should arrive this week.  I'm going to experiment with them next weekend, but before that I want to try and make some barley bread, which is supposed to be good for you and less fattening.  We'll see about the last part.

Rice bread

All sorts of things can be added to plain flour to vary the taste and texture of bread.  In the 19th century, white flour was expensive, and other things were added to extend the flour and make more loaves.  Some of the less reputable additions include ground human bones, chalk, brick dust etc but I think we'll consign those to the past.  Rice was commonly added to bread, as well as potatoes, pumpkins etc.  Now flour is cheap, and rice is expensive, but it still makes great bread and the concept of additions to the flour is worth exploring.

Rice bread is soft, not crusty, and it retains its moisture and freshness longer than plain bread.  Food writers of the early 20th century recommended using rice bread for chicken sandwiches, and I agree, it makes very nice springy, spongy sandwiches with roast chicken. It is also great for toast, and I think makes the best toast of any bread I've ever made.  If you can imagine toast that tastes like crumpets you'll get the idea.  Having complained repeatedly about supermarket bread, it's ironic that this loaf looks and feels exactly like that when it is sliced, I suppose because the rice makes it lighter and softer.  I can assure you though, it tastes much better.

Ingredients

85g white rice - doesn't matter what type of rice
1.5 cups water

You will need 2 separate amounts of water, the first (above) is to cook the rice.  The second is for the dough itself.  Put the dry rice in a measuring cup and note its volume.  You need 3 times the volume of the rice for the dough.

500g strong white flour
10g dried yeast
10g salt
water 3 times the volume of the dry rice

Method


First cook the rice, via the absorption method.  Bring the rice to the boil with the 1.5 cups water, reduce to simmer, cover and cook for 25 minutes.  It is ready when the water has gone and there are little holes on the surface from where the bubbles are.  If it's still not ready check every 5 minutes until it is done.  Let the rice cool until it is warm to the touch, but not hot.

Dissolve the salt in the other water (the 3 times the rice volume amount).  It should be lukewarm.  Mix the warm rice with the flour, crumbling it gently and lightly with your fingers until it is all mixed in.  Add the yeast and the water, and knead for a couple of minutes only.  It's meant to be soft but not wet, so if it seems too sticky add some more flour - but not too much.  It doesn't require a lot of kneading, just enough to be well mixed.  Place it in an oiled bowl, cover and leave somewhere warm for about an hour, or a bit longer, until it has doubled in size.  Knock it down and shape into a loaf, and place into a greased baking tin, of 1.5 - 2 litre capacity.

Pre-heat oven to 230 C and cover the loaf, placing it somewhere warm.  Leave for about 45 minutes or until it has doubled again.  Place it on the oven:

230 C for 15 minutes
200 C for 15 minutes
Tip it out of the tin and onto its side, and leave for another 15-20 mins at 200 C

Keep an eye on it while it is in the oven, because it can burn.  If it's looking too dark, cover it with some aluminium foil at the first temperature change.

Again, this recipe is from Elizabeth David, which I have tweaked a bit, who in turn developed hers from Eliza Acton, a 19th century cookery author.  Most of the recipes we use, from any source, owe much to previous cooks and writers, so very little is new.  It's very important to acknowledge our sources though, even though I have noticed some modern TV cooks blatantly plagiarise their counterparts of yesteryear and give them no credit.

If you want to make some delicious chicken sandwiches, try mixing chopped roast chicken, a small amount of cream enough to bind the chicken together, toasted almond flakes or slivers, chopped flat leaf parsley, salt, pepper and a little paprika.

Pita bread

Tonight I wanted to have some grilled lamb in pita bread, but there wasn't much lamb at the supermarket, courtesy of the Queensland floods, so I am going to use chicken instead.

Pits, pitta, pizza, pide, pissaladiere - they're all the same thing, Mediterranean flat bread.  Very easy to make, and much nicer than those wrapped in plastic supermarket varieties, kept 'fresh' for months by the addition of various anti-mould chemicals and anti-humidity sachets.  Yukkety yuck.  Pita bread doesn't take long to cook, so you can throw it all together when you get home, and 90 minutes later it's ready to cook.  Pita bread should be eaten straight from the oven, warm, soft, and steaming when you tear into it.  Not the tough, chewy and tasteless version from the supermarket.

Ingredients:

225g strong white flour
140 ml lukewarm water
1 tsp salt
1 tsp dried yeast
2 tsp extra virgin olive oil

Mix everything together and knead for 8-10 minutes, or cheat as I do and use a machine.  Leave it in an oiled covered bowl in a warm area for 1 hour.  Punch it down, and roll into 4-6 balls.  Lightly flour and leave them under a tea towel for 5-10 minutes , then roll them out into 12-15cm diameter rounds.  If you don't leave them to rest for a few minutes, they will be tough and leathery and difficult to roll out, so this point is important.  It's exactly the same tip if you're rolling out a pizza.  Once they are rolled out, make sure they are lightly floured and leave covered for 20 minutes with a tea towel.  Pre-heat the oven to 230 C.

Put them in the oven on a pizza stone or tray, it doesn't matter as along as it's hot.  You will need to do them in batches 2-3 at a time.  After 3-5 minutes, they will puff up like a balloon.  I leave them for no more than a minute at this point, otherwise they will go brown and crunchy.  That's ok, but I prefer them soft and white.  Remove them from the oven and wrap in a tea towel to keep them soft and warm.

Sometimes I cook them directly on the barbecue grill or in a hot frying pan (no oil) instead.  This method will give you a grilled flat bread, less likely to puff up, and more like the bread used to wrap souvlaki.

In case anyone is interested in the chicken/lamb marinade, it's extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice, a minced garlic clove, chopped fresh oregano, salt and pepper.  I never bother with amounts, just don't skimp on the oil.

Elizabeth David's Basic Loaf

Here is the first loaf of bread I ever cooked.  Elizabeth David is a hero.  Any time you buy good bread in an English speaking country you can thank her.  The appalling commercialised bread industry developed in England in the 1960s called the Chorleywood process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_process prompted her to write the best book about bread in the English language "English Bread and Yeast Cookery".  Read about the Chorleywood Process and buy this book if you want to understand mass produced supermarket bread forced on us from childhood and why we have been ripped off.

In a nutshell, yeast needs to act slowly on flour to allow flavours to develop and to allow the wheat proteins to be acted on by the yeast enzymes.  A rapid dough rise over minutes on highly processed white bread, with bran and wheat germ removed, results in white, puffed up bread that bloats you if you eat too much of it.  Your body can't digest the basically unaltered gluten.   I wonder if this also contributes to coeliac disease and irritable bowel syndrome as well?  Instead of the dough rising slowly over hours, the entire process takes minutes.  It's just not bread.

So, the basic loaf:

450g strong flour

120g wholemeal flour

1 teaspoon dried yeast

1 teaspoon salt

340ml water at blood temperature (lukewarm)

Mrs David goes into incredible detail, but this is a simplified version.  I use half the salt she recommends.  This is because she uses unsalted butter on bread, and we tend to use salted butter in Australia.  Also, she had a stroke in her late 40s and lost her ability to taste  salt, and to my taste she tends to overdo it.  Sadly, she had to make multiple versions with differing amounts of salt, and get friends and family to taste it so she could record the right amount.  Mrs David also smoked incessantly (hence the stroke) and drank Nescafe instant coffee, so I feel I can differ from her on this point about the salt.

Mix it together in a bowl and knead for 10 minutes.  Once you get the hang of it, you'll know when the dough is ready as it changes consistency and starts to feel silky and bouncy under your hands, I can't describe it any better but with practice you'll understand. Put it in an oiled bowl, not the same one as you started mixing in or you'll end up with concrete, and leave it covered with cling film somewhere warm to rise for 1.5 hours.  Punch the dough down on a floured surface, and knead for a couple of minutes into a sausage shape to fit an oiled or buttered bread tin (1kg capacity).  Put it in the tin, cover with a tea towel and leave somewhere warm for about 45 minutes until doubled in size.  Meanwhile, pre-heat the oven to 230 C.

Place the bread into the oven for 15 minutes at 230 C

Reduce the temperature to 200 C and cook for another 15 minutes

Reduce the temperature to 175 C, tip the bread out on its side into the oven rack and cook for 20 minutes

When cooked, it sounds hollow if you knock the base of it with your knuckle.  Leave to cool on a wire rack.  If the load starts to look as if it is in danger of burning, cover it with some aluminium foil.

I guarantee this will taste so much better then the sliced supermarket variety, but you will need get used to how heavy a slice of bread is meant to be.  It's not meant to be a feathery wisp of puffed up nothing that you can compress to a gooey bit of dough in your hand.

This method of a reducing oven temperature is meant to mimic the falling temperature in a woodfired oven, which is how bread was made until modern ovens were invented.  A high initial temperature, gradually falling, is a standard approach by Elizabeth David, and it's a good basic technique to become familiar with.  That's enough for now, next time I will do a variation of this loaf using rice, which makes the best toast I've ever tasted.

Basics - a few thoughts about equipment and ingredients

Basic Ingredients


I will go into more detail about each of these in the future, but here are some basic thoughts


The flour
It's important to use good quality, strong flour, also known as high gluten or baker's flour.  Gluten is a protein which stretches and becomes stringy, allowing the dough to 'wrap around' the bubbles produced by the yeast.  Some people are allergic to gluten, and suffer from coeliac disease.  I use Kialla brand flour, but if you can't get this try your local health food shop for an alternative.  Good quality organic flour from the supermarket will do just as well.

http://www.kiallafoods.com.au/




The water
Most domestic water contains chlorine.  I use filtered water at room temperature.  If you don't have a filter use still mineral water, tap water will impede the yeast.  I live in a warm climate, if you live somewhere colder you may need to heat the water until it feels slightly warm to your hand.  It doesn't really matter, but it will take longer for the bread to rise if the water is cooler.

The salt
I used non-iodised salt, because as for the chlorine in water, I worry about iodine interfering with the yeast.  Coarse sea salt or rock salt is ok but you will need to grind it or dissolve it in the water.  Otherwise you'll have a crunchy load, and not in a good way.

The yeast
I have found the best yeast to use is the dried yeast sold for beer making.  I keep it in the freezer.  Most authors say fresh yeast is better, but dried is perfectly fine.

A bit of fat
A small amount of butter, oil or cream added to a basic load is not necessary, but it can improve the taste and the texture of a loaf.  Not too much though, roughly a tablespoon for a standard load.

Basic Equipment


You don't need much, but once you get into it you could keep on buying forever.

Oven
Each oven is different - you just need to know your own.  I have made bread in a pizza oven, in a Weber barbeque, and attempted and failed dismally to make some in a brick woodfired oven on a holiday in Cyprus.

Kneading
I have to confess I cheat here.  Kneading by hand is ideal, and I do do it, but I find it really boring and I have a wrist injury, so I tend to be lazy and use machines to help.  Kneading is good exercise, and the warmth and moisture from your hands will make a better loaf, so please try!  Or you can be lazy like me.  I always do the second knead and shaping by hand so that makes me feel less guilty.

Initially I used a dough hook on a Kitchenaid mixer, but I found this unsatisfactory.  I now use a machine called Thermomix, which as well as having a dough mixing function can also mill the wheat grain, so this is perfect for me.  It is an incredible machine which does a lot of other useful things, but it is expensive.  If you're interested:

http://www.thermomix.com.au/

Bread tins
I tend to go for the free form loaf, but bread tins are useful.  I will do a couple recipes using them next.  I have to say the standard bread tin available in most department stores etc are next to useless.  They are not deep enough and they are too light, and buckle in the oven.  I managed to find a couple of bread tins in various cooking/kitchenware shops that are solidly made, black on the outside and grey on the inside.  I don't know the brand but these are the only ones worth buying.

No knead dough and cooking under cover
Most of the bread I cook is inside a cast iron pot or clay roaster, inside the oven.  This is a fairly new technique which gives an incredible taste and crunchy, shattering crust otherwise not possible in a home oven.  To read more visit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html

These guys are simply amazing and I will do a separate post on this type of bread baking in the future.  It's so much fun to experiment with this style of cooking, and I have used a number of different techniques and pots to get some really good results.

First post - my bread making philosophy

I love to cook, and I love making bread.  Bread gets bad press these days, especially from the "no-carbs" brigade.  I even read an article the other day that said no-one ate the bread provided at top Australian restaurants in case they got fat.  Miserable thin people don't appreciate bread.  In some ways, you can't blame them as most of the bread we get in this country (and in any English speaking country) is atrocious.  Factory bread is violently agitated, made to rise once rapidly, and steamed to dubious perfection.  It is highly processed, has all sorts of additives designed to 'improve' it, and it tastes terrible.  Have you noticed how light a loaf of bread in Australia is?  All of the 'improvers' puff up the bread so a standard loaf is mostly air.  This is banned in countries like France and Italy.  When you pick up a loaf of bread there, you can feel the heft and weight of it, and the crackling crust, all of which we are sadly denied here!

Although it smells good and looks good, bread made in your corner hot bread shop is made the same way as factory bread, just on a smaller scale.  Even your home bread maker uses the same process - highly refined flour, bread improvers, rapid agitation and a single rise, and steaming rather than baking it.  When you see a job advertised for one of these hot bread shops ( and I'll bite my tongue and not name any) it says "no experience required".  This is because everything is premixed and automated - no skill required.

Anyway I have a lot of fun baking bread, and eating it, so I hope to chronicle my successes and failures and hopefully encourage some real home bread baking.

To start with, a standard loaf which has been adapted from a Stephanie Alexander recipe.

Ingredients:
400g plain strong flour (Baker's flour)
100g wholemeal flour
300ml water
1 dessertspoon dried yeast
1 dessertspoon salt
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
Optional - 1 tablespoon molasses (treacle)

Mix it all together in a bowl and then knead it by hand or in a machine with a dough hook for 10 minutes.  Place it in another lightly oiled bowl and clover with cling film.  Let it rise in a warm place for about 2 hours or until doubled in size.  Bash the dough down until it is deflated, knead it into a sausage shape and place it on a folded tea towel which has been covered with flour or polenta (so you can roll the load off easily).  Heat the oven to 230 C with a baking tray inside the oven so it gets hot.  Let the dough rise for 45 minutes, then roll it onto the hot tray from the tea towel - it's ok to roll it on upside down.  Bake for 20 minutes, then turn it over and bake for another 20.  Cool it on a wire rack, and there's your bread!