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?