Success and Failure

Last Friday with The Dear Leader (confusion to her enemies) off diving, and Sternest Critic starting his new job, I had the house to myself with my last commission in hand despatched to the editor the previous day. Being 84.7 per cent retired is enjoyable, or at least it is for those of us with some resources financial and personal. I'd not want every day to myself, but the occasional one is a rare treat. Naturally I chose to spend the majority of it in the kitchen.


Of late I've been baking a lot of bread, in fact I haven't bought a loaf for I'd guess three weeks. I got fed up with either tasteless dross or stupidly expensive 'artisan' offerings (that may not be very artisan). With the freezer stocked there was no need for standard stuff, so I opted to go the more exotic route and try two of Ursula Ferrigno's Italian recipes for richer loaves. One succeeded, one failed - my fault not hers.


The success was an egg-enriched flatbread, flavoured with vanilla extract (not essence, crude oil derivatives don't tempt me) and as I lacked one stipulated ingredient, with rosewater. It rose nicely, came out golden and with a pleasing texture between chewy and soft, and was very tasty. The failure was fig bread, a bit like a pannetone. It was a salutary lesson in not just following the instructions, but thinking them through. It came out claggy, far too dense at the bottom, because I used some home-made figs soaked in alcohol, but still included the juice of three oranges the recipe included for wetting dried figs. It has actually improved over the days, probably drying out a bit, and toasting helps, but I'm annoyed at not seeing the problem coming.


You live and learn. I will give the fig bread another go, maybe near Christmas. The flatbread, and others in the same vein, will appear on our table shortly. Anna del Conte's book on Northern Italian cooking features a savoury one with walnuts and rosemary; Ursula Ferrigno has others that intrigue. I've improvised my own with spare dough, baked with loads of fried onions and some herbs on top, Not that I'm obsessing, but I'm about to re-read Elizabeth David's huge tome on English bread and yeast cookery with an eye to making some enriched breads and rolls of more local heritage. We're lucky that filler-upper bread is not a major component of our diet, but good bread - from the smell as it bakes to the taste as you get outside it - can be such a joy.

Reading (and Viewing) and Cooking, and My Bread Recipe

Reading and cooking are two of my favourite things, so an informative and literate cookbook is always a joy. Like the wonderful Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe I can read such works as if they are thrillers. This Christmas The Dear Leader (lingering agony to her enemies) bought me Anna del Conte's tome on the cooking of Northern Italy, and it has duly been read cover to cover.


With that AdC book it has been the baking that has grabbed my attention the most. I've pretty much given up buying bread from the supermarket: sourdough that uses vinegar; leathery, pappy French sticks whose production should be punishable by death; Sainsbury's 101 ways to present tasteless white rubbish. Instead I bake batches two or three times a week, freezing the spare stuff for later. That fascination has now extended to other baked goods: yesterday I made some onion 'biscuits' from one of her recipes, and very good they were too. Biscuits, however, is a misnomer, as they are more like tiny scones, and only baked once to boot.


For many people these days I imagine TV is more likely to be the spark to ignite their culinary creativity. I've never watched GBBO, and probably never will, but I'm glad that for a very small percentage of its fans the programme has led to actual cooking at home. The shops have far more bakery equipment of a practical nature on sale; supermarkets are stocking a huge range of ingredients for fancy cake making etc. A quick scan of the shelves at one supermarket today suggests that the look of the thing, and sweet items, are what has grabbed the attention most - far more variety in cake decoration than in bread flour as a yardstick. But I really hope that, the bug having bitten, people who have not done so already will move on to making their own bread, pizzas, rolls... Sadly, however, it is probably not yet the moment to sell off your shares in Deliveroo.


For what it's worth, here's my infallible recipe for making two large loaves, or one large loaf and about 10 small rolls. It uses a lot of yeast, but as I buy mine from Aldi for 59p for 8 sachets, and it has yet to fail me, no matter.


Just in case this is needed: hot ovens can burn you; so can heated baking sheets. Use oven gloves (and common sense) to protect your hands from such hot surfaces.


1: In a large mixing bowl make a 'sponge' with 125g strong white flour (though plain would be ok), 150ml hand-hot water, and two sachets of dried yeast. Stir them together and leave for one to two hours, covered with a tea-towel, in the airing cupboard or another warm spot. The messy putty-looking mix you put in comes out more or less flat, pocked with bubble holes.


2: To that sponge add 300g of strong white flour, 300g of wholemeal or seeded granary or similar flavoursome flour, two more sachets of dried yeast, 2.5tbsp of olive oil, 2 tsp of fine salt, and 425ml of hand-hot water. Mix it, then plop it out on a floured work surface, flour your hands, and knead for about five minutes. If you knead too much the flavour suffers; too little and the texture is wrong. I go by the dough feeling 'silky' and stretching nicely to the hand - sorry there is no more scientific way of putting it.


3: When the dough is right, put it back in the mixing bowl, pour a tbsp of olive oil over it and turn so the surface gets a sheen, though there's no need to be too fussy, and then cover with the tea towel again and put it in the warm spot to rise for another hour to two hours. It has to double in size, more or less.


4: Dig your fingers into the risen dough to knock it back (get the air out of it), form into whatever loaf shape you want and put these on a floured baking sheet, or put some half way up a greased loaf tin, and again give it two hours to rise. Again the loaves or rolls should double in size.


5: Pre-heat the oven (here's where it gets difficult - everybody's oven is different, conditions and ingredients likewise), I bake at 210C, in a fan oven, it works for me. When I've gone hotter the bread's surface has been tougher but not crusty; cooler and the texture is denser. Slide the baking sheet with the loaves on onto another that has heated up in the oven (so you have one baking sheet on top of the other), and leave for 15 minutes for rolls, 25 to 40 minutes for loaves, depending on their size.


6: When they are done (looks, smell, their bottoms giving a nice hollow sound when tapped) put the bread/rolls on a wire rack to cool for at least 10 minutes (it helps the finished texture) before succumbing to temptation.


There are few culinary pleasures to match eating fresh, hot-to-warm bread spread with butter that melts into the crumb as you watch. I tend to use organic flour, no additives, so while the bread is good for a day or two, it doesn't keep like commercial stuff. But then it generally doesn't get the chance.

Simplicity Itself

A year or so back The Dear Leader (cursed be her detractors) bought me a vegan cookbook. It was written by the chef who catered for a week-long event she attended. Interested though I may be in the topic, I have not cooked a single thing from it, as just about every recipe requires 20+ ingredients, several of which I've never heard of. I prefer to keep things simple.


Take a dish we ate yesterday: pasta with unpasteurised butter and a load of grated Parmesan. Ready in about 10 minutes, and delicious. We love pasta putanesca too - crushed garlic and chopped chili warmed in oil, with plenty of salt. Another 10-minute wonder. Given we have a healthy crop of chilies this year, we'll be revisiting that plenty of times.


Simple does not have to be quick, of course. I am writing this while waiting for some bread dough to finish rising for the second time. That was made with flour, water, yeast and salt, basic ingredients, but it takes time and patience and a bit of experience to avoid disaster.


As I've written before, it's sad that a life-skill as important as cooking isn't included in the education of many (all) our kids in the UK. It would take just a few lessons a year to teach them some building-block recipes. How to make a soup from scratch; pancakes, great for a quick pud, but the basis of some fine savoury dishes too; a simple tomato sauce for pasta, and the proper way to cook the pasta itself; maybe how to cook (without buying the sauce) a potato and veg curry; how to make an ordinary vinaigrette dressing for salad...


Simplicity itself, and satisfying to the soul and the stomach. Not to mention the benefit to the national purse of reducing what appears to be our growing reliance on unhealthy takeaways and ready meals, so saving the NHS billions from their long-term effects.

The Charm of Culinary Chance

I wish I had invented the term 'clean eating.' Since The Dear Leader (may her enemies be forever cursed) and I became an item in the late 1830s I've been doing what I'd term cooking from scratch - buying, or increasingly now growing - good ingredients, and making them into what I always hope will be successful meals. And unlike those zealots who communicate clean eating's precepts as a near fascist ideology, I love food.


Say it though I shouldn't, over more than three decades I've developed some skill. But it is one of the many charms of such cooking that things can go wrong, to varying degrees, or if you're lucky, they go very very right. Different atmospheric conditions; the age of ingredients; slight variations in measurement; the power reaching the oven...


Last weekend I made some bread, using my patent recipe, an amalgam of HF-W's magic bread dough and Ursula Ferrigno's biga starter/enhancer. It is consistently good, but for some reason - our new oven perhaps - this time the three loaves came out crustier and lighter and tastier. Same yeast, same flours, different result. Sternest Critic often takes me to task about my inability to bake crusty bread. This came out crusty, remained crusty, even defrosted crusty. SC is currently 2000 miles away, so presenting him with the evidence was impractical. I was so proud I gave one of the three to a friend eating with us that evening.


Last year I was obsessed with making gnocchi and similar creations. The first effort, a dough rich in ricotta, was stunningly good, little pillows of deliciousness, so good I tried to repeat the exercise a few days later when a friend (by coincidence the same one) was with us. Same ingredients, same recipe, same method, but the gnocchi were that bit tougher and denser. Tasty, but not as fine. A third effort months later was in-between.


I celebrate such unpredictability. Naturally I'd prefer it to be degrees of wonderfulness, but I don't want production line soulless regularity. As I write a batch of dough is rising in the warm conservatory. The bread it will produce later today will almost certainly not be as crusty as the previous stuff. But maybe it will be richer; or with larger bubbles; or somehow more savoury. As long as the results are not downright bad, I'll be content, and if they are excellent I'll be delighted.

The Chosen Ones

Looking at the post I wrote yesterday focussed on the threatened fiasco of Brexit, what it may mean to our food supplies, and similar woes, all the good stuff I feel about matters culinary was squeezed out. That's sad. As I hope is evident, food, cookery and all related matters actually bring me enormous pleasure. The resilience of providing some of our own food and the economy of using what we have intelligently, and what can be the joy of food, can be closely linked.

One of my food habits illustrates that. When we are at home I try every day, year round, to pick something from the garden, the (soon to be vacated) allotment, greenhouse or conservatory that we will eat that day. There is a comforting, or perhaps complacent, pleasure in choosing what to gather in. In the autumn it's very easy: fruit from our growing collection of trees; the remaining salads; crops various, and so on all need picking and using. In the winter it gets tougher, and often I'm limited to picking a herb or two - bay, sage, rosemary... But they're still fresh additions that perk up innumerable dishes. They are in their own tiny way life enhancing, and certainly flavour enhancing - sage picked seconds before going in the pot is vastly superior to the musty leaves sold in supermarkets, and I resent being asked to pay £0.75 for the privilege of using them.

Similarly one of today's culinary tasks, baking bread, fits both the careful husbandry (how apt) and the epicurean sides of my existence. It started yesterday with the preparation of a biga - the Italian version of a (very much sort of) sourdough starter, that isn't sour (unless forgetfully you leave it much more than 24 hours before using). This afternoon I'll be making dough - rather a sensual process in itself - to which a ladle of the biga will be added, and cooking it up for the evening meal, fresh, warm and scenting the whole house, with a loaf or two for the freezer as well. Sadly, as the currently absent Sternest Critic is wont to point out, I never manage a decent crusty crust, in spite of which only crumbs remain when I do have time to bake my own, which will cost a lot less than £2.50 for a Waitrose grand pain, excellent though they are (and with a good crust). And baking is far more fun than the work to which I'll now return.

I Wish to Register a Complaint

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is one of my heroes, as I have said previously in this blog. That comes with a few caveats - for what I am sure are good-hearted reasons he has a habit in his TV programmes of being rather condescending to, as it were, the lower orders: wouldn't it be good if the world's workers discovered vegetables, for example?

That said, I admire his food and food ethics, love his writing style, he seems like the sort of bloke you'd enjoy a pint with (the highest of praise) and I have found his methodical approach with things like meat timings to be spot on. But. I recently tried his sourdough loaf recipe, making a starter with enormous care, feeding it, scooping the right amount off to make a loaf, kneading as per instructions etc etc. The results were uniformly disappointing, no great flavour, a sad waste of high-grade flour, and rubbish texture however carefully kneeded and risen the loaves were.

So I gave that up, and reverted to my standard method. Unfortunately I took his word as gospel that you can't make bread unless you bake it at a very high temperature, so I ruined another two loaves that were not burned but developed a leathery crust and unpleasant dryness.

When I went back to baking at 180C or 200C depending on style, it worked again. Good bread.

This had me thinking about how much we trust such experts, thinking that when things go wrong with their recipes it must be us/our ingredients/our equipment. The blessed Delia is not without the occasional fault (apparent lack of humour aside), as I twice tried an oxtail and bean dish in one of her books, convinced I must have erred the first time when it failed, only to find it was equally unpleasant the next however great the care with which her fiats were followed.

Other than on certain holidays and business trips (time was) I have cooked daily for more than 30 years. Really I should have the confidence to stick to my own ideas and recipes. There is one major reason why I continue to follow their strictures on occasion, and that is the desire to try new stuff. Left to myself I'd cook many different things, but they would be familiar favourites. So I'll continue to trust HFH and TBD, and if I can get past his annoying writer's tics Nigel Slater too who churns out excellent ideas, along with new demigods to be discovered. But not Jamie Oliver thanks. Nor Nigella Lawson.

That may well be the legacy of the age of the TV cook. Those of us who actually do cook frequently have added to our repertoires, while those who live on ready-meals and takeout limit themselves to enjoying cooking vicariously on TV (and via pristine coffee table tomes).

Better Bread Better for Us

The healthy eating programme has pushed me into even more bread making than usual, partly as the wholemeal offerings at the supermarkets are less than tasty, partly as it saves me going back for another loaf and ending up spending £20 on other stuff.

Yesterday's rolls were so good that even SC complimented them. They were not in truth wholemeal, as my 100 per cent wholemeal attempts have yielded somewhat dense results. Tasty but dense. Think any number of celebrities.

Reading about healthy eating has convinced me we need to eat more seeds, so armed with flaxseeds from Holland and B and sunflower seeds from Booth's I mixed dough per the following recipe:

1 cup s/s milk
0.25 cup lukewarm water
1 beaten egg
1 tbsp avocado oil
1 tbsp walnut oil
0.5 tsp salt
1.5tbsp sugar
0.25 cup seeds (mainly linseed)
0.75 cup wholemeal flour with seeds
1 cup wholemeal spelt flour
2 cups unbleached white flour
7g dried yeast sachet

Mixed and raised in the bread-maker, then knocked back, formed into rolls and left on a floured baking sheet in a warm place to rise for two hours they more than doubled in size before being put in a cold oven turned on to 200C and left to bake for about 25 minutes.

The results are soft crumbed, really tasty (in spite of the reduced salt), and satisfyingly bitty with seeds throughout. A perfect breakfast roll with coffee.

Using flaxseed reminded me of something from my childhood. The grandfather of my best mate of those days, at whose house in the depths of Norfolk I was sometimes invited to stay, used to take a teaspoonful of linseed oil (aka flaxseed oil) every evening. I can remember thinking this odd, and mentioning it to my parents who said something rather deprecatory about old country remedies. We now know linseeds are packed with antioxidants and Omega-3. Not for the first time we find that such remedies had real benefits. But I won't be following my Gran's advice and putting a clove of garlic in my sock the next time I get a cold.

I Bake, but not on Tarty TV

Our ridiculous culture of copycats and characterless celebrities has spawned a phenomenon - the rise (he-he) of baking - about which I am ambivalent. It's great that people are being drawn into cooking of any sort; but it is annoying that in the way of these things some media outlets act as if a) baking is new to the world; b) only the photogenic (count me out then) should be doing this; and c) we suddenly need 50 programmes on the topic.

A rainy Sunday and I felt the need to do something physical and creative, so I made some pizza dough and ended up with an onion and cheese tart of sorts - rolled over edges, base cooked on its own for 10 minutes, then filled with onions sliced thinly and previously cooked until very soft in olive oil, plus some grated cheddar. The filled version needed another 15 minutes to finish.

It was meant to be a slice each for lunch with a small salad, and some left for my wife's pack-up tomorrow. We ate it all.

As far as austerity goes it was about 25p of bread flour, 5p of yeast, at the very most 35p of onions (I used red to brighten it up), and £0.75 for the cheese. Even allowing for under-estimates and the cost of heating the oven to maximum something that proved (he-he again) to be fresh, warm, and really tasty cost well under £2.

Actually the surplus dough made a small garlic bread and some breadsticks, so even more of a bargain.

I posted about the madness of us spending £13 billion on the Olympics in the foolish belief that it would change the health of the nation (or at least that was one of the reasons given). Teaching people to cook would have been a far better use of the dosh. Am I turning into Ed Balls, spending in my imagination the same notional money over and over again, as I had posted before about using some (a very small part) of those wasted funds to provide allotments for a million people?

Bread-stick Bonus

Baking rolls yesterday to go with homemade burgers I had some dough left over. Waste not etc, so I decided to give bread-sticks a go.

The dough btw was made (in my bread-maker) with 3/4 strong white bread flour and 1/4 cornmeal, largely because I have some cornmeal that needs using soon, but also because it gives a nice hint of gold to the end product. As I've had problems with bread rising of late I used a whole sachet of dried yeast, part of which was revived in some warm milk. It seemed to work well.

Forming the sticks was a challenge, but fun. It took me back to infant school days playing with plasticine, rolling a small ball into a sausage into a snake. As with those rather earlier efforts the final shape was less than even, but that (I hope) added a certain rustic charm to the snack.

The uncooked sticks were placed on a steel tray and left to rise for an hour or so, then put into the top of an oven just set to 220C (that is, they were put in a cool oven as it heated to 220C). I do that instead of putting bread in a pre-heated oven to give it a bit more rising. They took longer to bake than I had expected, almost as long as the sizeable bread rolls, so approaching 20 minutes, though I took the very thinnest out sooner, judging by their colour that they were done.


Sternest critic - my son - tried one and said less than flatteringly that he didn't believe I had made them. Crunchy, with a nice yeasty bread flavour, they were a winner, and I'll do more in future. On my austerity hobby-horse they were almost free, made from a scrap of dough that might have been binned otherwise (though I would probably have made a small roll for later use).



The picture shows the fatter models as the thin ones went almost instantly.

If anyone in the big-wide world can given me ideas about how to make them more even, and evenly thin to boot, I'd be grateful. I'm wondering if I could get some Parmesan to cling to the surface to add another dimension, but they were very good as they were.