I will continue to write a more personal blog here, which will include my ongoing love of baking sourdough bread.

beetroot sourdough

After the battle with the sticky tea towel my bread had a rustic shape to it but smelled divine.

The texture seemed fine and the colour less garish than the purple sticky dough I had left to rise for a couple of hours.

Nice.

bad blogger but...

What happened to the summer? My last post was in May, I'm afraid I am a bad blogger. On the plus side, my enthusiasm for baking has not waned. I have made a lovely sourdough bread most weekends. Even thought about taking my starter away on holiday to Berwick-upon-Tweed last month, much to the despair of my wife!

I have not been that adventurous though, with my favourite loaves being baked with 50-50 granary flour to either white or wholemeal. Until today that is, when I decided to have a go at a gloriously messy beetroot sourdough that I saw in Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's book How to make bread. Its a beautifully produced book and the purple dough leapt out from the page at me.

It's in the oven as I type. It was a much wetter dough than I am used to and I made a right mess in getting it into the oven from my improvised prooving basket (an under-floured sticky tea towel and colander). Flat and misshapen it may be but  the aroma wafting up from the kitchen is just fine... and there's the buzzer... got to go...

Cookbooks

I am currently reading Nadine's Abensur's Cranks Fast Food and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Everyday to improve on my repertoire of quick and simple after-work supper dishes, however the above photograph shows the bookshelf with my favourite cookbooks. There's enough inspiration here to last me a lifetime and though I may still purchase the occasional cookbook I think I am becoming clearer about the kind of food I would like to be able to prepare more regularly. A sort of vegetarian Nigel Slater with a touch of the Ottolenghi's at the weekend...

Pizza

I have been enjoying asparagus, a wonderful seasonal produce, mostly simply steamed with an olive oil and lemon dressing, but last night it found its way onto a pizza with blue cheese. Nice.

(not) like a knife through butter

Three cities. Three specialist cook shops. No luck.

I thought I may find a banneton or proving basket somewhere in Leeds, Manchester or Sheffield. The cook shops were full of lovely shiny things but when I enquired about proving baskets I got blank looks. When I explained what they were for, the Leeds shop assistant exclaimed that though they were not afraid of a niche market, this product was still too specialised for them. So much for the great real bread revival.

C is for Curry

I love a curry but the average high street curry house tends to disappoint with the uniformity of their menus, and I am still mourning the loss of the Kashmir Curry Centre last year which closed after being open for business for 36 years, a victim of the recession. I guess I'm not the only person wishing they had frequented it a little more regularly. I know of two Sri Lankan/South Indian restaurants in Sheffield so I think I may try them out.

I use a couple of Indian vegetarian cookbooks by Julie Sahni and Monisha Bharadwaj but this is not from them. There's no claim for authenticity in this simple Nigel Slater dish. I used his recipe  from the BBC Food site. he describes it as a "creamy korma" which would ordinarily have me running in the other direction - I'm not a fan of cream and kormas are often sickly sweet. But here the spicing is light and fragrant, the sweetness comes from a handful of raisins, the creaminess from a mixture of creme fraiche and yoghurt but what I found most surprising was the addition of a handful of skinned hazelnuts which added an unusual and pleasant texture to the dish. I could see me doing something similar with spinach, aubergine and chick peas. I served it with sourdough bread (naturally) and some pickle. 

C is also for "cramming" which is what I will now be doing for the coming week as I have an exam on Friday for my OU  course.  Can't remember the last time I did one of those...

B is for Beetroot

The juicer has sat sulking in the corner of the kitchen for months and months and months. It took a part-time job as a stand for the digital radio helping to improve reception but it was not happy. Until this morning, when a glut of beetroot and carrots led to a dusting down and resuscitation. WARNING - beetroot juice is a devastatingly messy substance that will mark its territory in the unlikeliest of places in your kitchen.

Beetroot zinger

1 beetroot

2-3 carrots

2 apples

knob of ginger

splash of lemon juice (optional)

Juice and drink.

Mick's Classic Sourdough

This is a fifty-fifty wholemeal to white flour sourdough, the second recipe I have tried from Bethesdabasics. It's cooling on the rack as I write... It looks great.

Pain de Campagne

This is my first loaf from Mick Hartley's Bethesdabasics - Sourdough made Simple and I started with his Pain de Campagne, a classic white sourdough. The recipe and instructions are easy to follow and the loaf was lighter than I expected possible from a sourdough starter. 

If I said we had bread and cheese for Easter Sunday lunch it sounds a little austere, but when you realise that the bread was fresh out of the oven, and the cheese a very special mature organic cheddar alongside an unpasteurised Smoked Lancashire, then you may agree that coupled with a green salad it was a veritable feast. 

If you are sad like me, click for further photographs....

Salad days

A lovely sunny bank holiday weekend - I can't remember it being so warm in April.

White sourdough

My first white sourdough bread - Didn't know white bread could taste so good!

Wild garlic gnocchi

aaaaa

Never made gnocchi before. This is what happens when you read other people's blogs. Carl @ lynnlines had recently made nettle gnocchi which, to be honest, you would just have to make because it sounds so good on the tongue. I had planned to have a go too but that wild garlic patch kept calling me. I found a recipe on the internet from Demuths restaurant in Bath which I loosely followed though decided to boil my potatoes and used a potato ricer to get that lump-free texture. My first attempt at shaping the mixture was not all that successful, resembling fish fingers rather than any gnocchi I have ever seen. So, at the suggestion of my despairing wife (I am a messy cook...) I halved them before immersing them in boiling water. I am not sure which of us was the most surprised when a minute or so later they did actually bob to the surface. With a tomato sauce and some parmesan the resulting meal was pleasant enough, and very garlicky!

Today I had the remaining for lunch with a little lemon butter and basil. The lemon went well with the garlic. Both dishes tasted better than any shop bought I have previously tried but I need a little more finesse in the kitchen!

I still have 50g wild garlic to play with so another pesto is planned.

Lazy Sunday

Bread by Daniel Stevens, part of the River Cottage Handbook series, has been my guide into baking sourdough bread. Yesterday I had a go at the River Cottage sourdough bread. this is 3 parts white flour to 1 part rye and follows the usual pattern of making a sponge the night before, kneading in the morning, allowing to ferment through the day and then prove early evening. The result was a nice, lighter well-risen bread that has made excellent toast with marmite. Tomorrow I am going to have a go at my first white sourdough bread to see if I can bake one of those breads with large air holes.

I'm really excited to have received  a copy of Mick Hartley's Bethesdabasics: Sourdough Made Simple - Techniques & Recipes from Bethesdabakers through the post yesterday. I read it in one sitting and have a much better understanding of how to maintain my starter and prepare ahead for each baking day. There are 13 basic recipes and I hope to share some photos as I attempt each one. Why not get your own copy here?

Lazy Sunday. I went to a Quaker meeting this morning and then on the way home I picked some more wild garlic by the river. Last week's wild garlic pesto was a great success, I used it in a number of pasta dishes and flavoured a tasty bulgar wheat salad to take to work for lunch which received some positive comments. I used the traditional combination of parmesan, olive oil and pine nuts but I have an idea for a more English combination....

Malted sourdough loaf II

My latest malted loaf almost fell prey to our cat, Bodhi.

This loaf had a better shape than my last effort. I had made a sponge the night before, kneaded it for 10 minutes in the morning; let it rise for 5 hours and then knocked it back, shaped it and left it for a further 2 1/2 hours.It had a much milder taste than my last loaf which I had let prove overnight. I am just beginning to see the number of variables that go into making sourdough, despite the limited number of ingredients! Still, its not just about producing a uniform loaf each time. Much to learn!

Hungry City

"With farmers' markets, speciality food shops and fancy restaurants popping up all over the place, we are supposedly in the midst of a gastronomic revolution, yet our everyday food culture belies this. We have never spent less on food than we do now: food shopping accounted for just 10 per cent of our income in 2007, down from 23 per cent in 1980 ... We are losing our kitchen skills too: half of those under the age of 24 say they never cook from scratch, and one in three meals eaten in Britain is a ready meal. Hardly a revolution.

In truth, British food culture is little short of schizophrenic. To read the Sunday papers, you would think we were a nation of rampant gastronomes, yet few of us know much about food, or care to invest our time and effort in it. Despite the recently acquired veneer of foodie culture, we remain Europe's leading nation of “fuellies”, happy to let food take a back seat as we get on with our busy lives, unconscious of what it takes to keep us fuelled. We have become so used to eating cheaply that few of us question how it is possible, say, to buy a chicken for less than half the cost of a packet of cigarettes ... It is as if the flesh we put in our mouths bears no relation to the living bird. We simply don't make the connection.

So how come a country of dog-owning bunny-huggers like us can be so callous about the critters we breed to eat? It all comes down to our urban lifestyles. The oldest industrialised nation on Earth, we have been losing touch with rural life for centuries. Over 80 per cent of us in Britain now live in cities, and the nearest most of us ever get to the “real” countryside - the working sort, at any rate - is when we see it on television.

We have never been more cut off from farms and farming, and while most of us probably suspect, deep down, that our eating habits are having nasty consequences somewhere on the planet, those consequences are sufficiently out of sight to be ignored."

Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives by Carolyn Steel

I was pleased to find this title, I think it is exactly what I was looking for. I want to get a better understanding of how our food is produced and the implications that this has for the future. What does this mean for me as an individual and as a part of my wider local community? What can we do... how are we to live our lives?

Wild garlic

Inspired by Joanna's recent  Potato Masala Dosa with Wild Garlic  post I thought I would venture across the fields that back on to our estate and pick some wild garlic by the wooded stream. Each year, Sue and I notice the ransoms growing but often we leave it too late to pick. I have added it to salads and used like spinach in spicy lentil dishes but I thought I'd try something different this time and ended up making a delicious pesto instead. 

Malted sourdough loaf

I have just ordered Bethesdabasics, a guide to making sourdough bread from the PArtisan Baker. I am looking forward to trying some of his recipes and techniques and hope to post some of the results here. I have fond memories of Bethesda as I lived in North Wales in the late eighties/early nineties.

I have been making my own bread over the past three months. I have made a tasty wholemeal sourdough bread but my favourite sourdough loaf so far uses Dove Farm's Malted bread flour. I have been using a simple method I found at  River Cottage. Last Wednesday night I added 250g flour to 300g  water and 100g of my starter (which has a thick batter consistency), mixed it up and covered it, leaving in a cool place.

The next morning I added 300g of flour, a glug of olive oil and 10 g of salt. I kneaded the dough for about 10 minutes, it was initially quite sticky but I resisted the temptation to add more flour. I then shaped the loaf into a tight ball and then left it covered in a bowl.

Up to now I have usually gone to work and then at 6 pm I have knocked back the dough, reshaped in a tight ball and then left it for 2-3 hours to proove before baking in the oven. The results have been good. However, I was wondering what it would be like if I left it to prove for longer, so I improvised a proving basket (mixing bowl and a floured tea towel!) and left it overnight.

Friday morning I quickly placed the risen dough on a floured wooden chopping board, slashed the top of the loaf and put it onto a hot pizza stone in the oven, with the usual misty spray of water to create a steamy atmosphere. The bread had a great aroma as it baked.

The crust was chewy and the tangy complex flavour of the bread only required a little butter to complement it.
.

Best tasting loaf so far. I think I've caught the bug for this sour dough  bread-making!

A is for Aubergine

"The aubergine seduces. No other vegetable can offer flesh so soft, silken and tender.You don't so much chew an aubergine as let it dissolve on your tongue."  

Nigel Slater, Tender Vol I, p. 39 

A new global food store has opened up just opposite to where I work. It has a wide array of middle eastern products as well as pulses and spices and I intend to supplement my weekly organic veg box with some of the  produce they sell. I love the large bunches of coriander and flat leaf parsley, such a contrast to the plastic packaged supermarket trimmings.

I saw these aubergines and immediately thought of a recipe I had read in Yotam Ottolenghi's "Plenty", a book I received as a present last Christmas. I have long enjoyed his weekly column in the Guardian newspaper.

The recipe for burnt aubergine with tahini can be found on his blog here. I made it as a salad with cucumber and tomatoes and very good it was too.

One of the reasons for starting this blog was to encourage myself to try new recipes from cookbooks I already own.

Wholemeal sourdough