The August bank holiday weekend is always a little bittersweet. I'm not going to complain about having 3 days off work, but it's always a bit of a let down. There are "planned engineering works" all over the tube network, so you can't go anywhere. You can't buy a train ticket anywhere because the rail companies charge 5x the price over the long weekend. You can't go away anywhere by plane because you'll end up paying through the nose, or having to go to Cork. Oh - and there's always that bit of dread in the back of your mind that this is the last bank holiday until Christmas. (Everyone else gets Remembrance Day off! We should be protesting in the UK over this!)
So naturally, my mind turned to baking bread. I always have a queue of new recipes I want to try, and baking sourdough is always confined to a weekend because it takes so much time to make. So this weekend I raided my flour cupboard and got to work baking.
First was a beautiful white sourdough which ended up making two huge loaves. I made a sponge the night before from my leaven, and in the morning it was really bubbly and ready to get to work. It rose the dough really quickly, with huge big holes. I put one loaf into my proving basket, and made the other into a wobbly loaf.
Second was my latest attempt to perfect my own recipe that I will be entering into the Brockwell Bake competition in September. I can't give too much away yet - the only clue I can give is that it is called "Marmasan".
Third was a batch of baguettes. These had real potential to be amazing, but a bit of a miscalculation with oven timings meant that they stayed on the counter too long proving, and collapsed into flat bread-stick type things. They're still pretty soft, if a bit ugly... so not a total waste of time.
After ten hours of baking, The Husband volunteered to make pizza for dinner. Was I sick of mixing flour and water with yeast? Hell, no! But I then realised I had run out of white bread flour. Which meant we had to have wholewheat pizza bases. Which also lead me to discover that I had EIGHT bags of wholemeal flour in the cupboard. I'm going to need another bank holiday weekend.
