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!