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?
Showing posts with label home-made bread-sticks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label home-made bread-sticks. Show all posts
Sunday, 14 April 2013
Thursday, 4 October 2012
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.
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.
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