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Bank Holiday Weekend Baking Extravaganza

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.

Tuscan Spinach and Bean Soup and my favourite vinaigrette

To me, there are two rules of soup:  It must be made in winter, and it must take a long time to cook.  I love throwing a pile of veg into my slow cooker during the cold months, and letting it bubble away until I return from work to a warm and steamy soup-smelling kitchen.

But those rules go out the window for my beloved Tuscan Spinach and Bean Soup.  It's quick and easy (quick enough that you can throw it together on a weeknight), and it's a summer soup, without being served cold, like Gazpacho.

I always make this soup when I've bought an entire bag of spinach, left it in the fridge, it starts to wilt, untouched.  This recipe uses a whole bag, and it doesn't matter if it's not at its freshest.

Soup and salad is a complete meal at our house, and with only a few crisp lettuce leaves in the house and not much else, I decided to put them together with some croutons (from the crust of some stale rye bread) and my favourite salad vinaigrette. 

This salad vinaigrette is friggin' amazing.  Really.  The Husband didn't even eat salad when I first met him, but he will now sit and devour a bowl of salad with this vinaigrette on it like it's a bucket of fried chicken. 

Tuscan Spinach and Bean Soup

1tbsp olive oil
1 chopped onion
4 cloves of garlic
1 large carrot, diced
3 cups vegetable broth
1 tin chopped tomatoes (those new tinned cherry tomatoes are particularly nice)
2 tsp dried oregano
1 tin cannellini beans
1 package of spinach leaves, chopped
100g grated Parmesan or Pecorino cheese
salt and pepper

In a large saucepan, heat up the oil and add the onion, garlic and carrot.  Cook gently for 5 minutes.  Add the chicken broth, tomatoes and oregano and cook for another 10 minutes. 

Stir in the beans, and bring the soup to a boil.  Turn the heat off, and add the spinach.  Season with salt and pepper.  Serve with ribbons of Parmesan and fresh basil.

Jen's Favourite Salad Vinaigrette

salt and pepper
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
75mL rapeseed or sunflower oil
1 tbsp hot water

Grind some salt and pepper into a shallow bowl.  Add the mustard and vinegar, and mix to dissolve the salt and pepper.  Slowly add the oil, whisking at the same time to create an emulsion.  When it's really thick, add a spoonful of very hot water (from the kettle if it's on) to thin the vinaigrette out a little.  Pour over crisp salad leaves and crunchy croutons.

A most excellent day at Panary in Dorset

It's probably pretty obvious by now that I've become obsessed with bread baking.  I've never been a massive fan of bread - probably because supermarket bread tastes like chewy sawdust.  When I discovered (in my 6 week Little Portland Street Cookery School course) that I could bake bread from scratch, easily and with not many ingredients, and create a completely different food than those crumby (sorry) loaves they sell in the grocery store.... well I was hooked. 

I've been reading everything I can get my floury hands on lately about real, artisan bread.  We've been inundated with every type of bread in our house lately as I bake loaf after loaf, much to The Husband's delight. 

Speaking of The Husband - he's always been a bread fanatic.  He could eat an entire bloomer in one sitting.  Trouble was, bread gave him bad indigestion.  That is, supermarket bread gave him bad indigestion.  Since I've been baking it at home, without stabilisers, gums, enzymes and other nasty things I can't pronounce, he's able to eat as much of it as he wants with no gastro repercussions!  

So this week, I decided to take a day off work, and treat myself to a day in Dorset, at Panary Bakery training school, run by Paul Merry - longtime bread guru, and a bit of a celeb in the bread world.  It's in a fantastic setting - in Cann Mill outside of Shaftesbury, where they stone grind Stoate's flour.

And what a day!!  I was picked up from my b&b at 6:40am by Paul, and whisked over to Panary to start creating the day's orders.  I learned an incredible amount about how bread is made in an artisan way, on a large scale.  We made dozens and dozens of loaves of bread... London Bloomers, rye sourdough, spelt, white sourdough, baguettes, walnut loaves, olive loaves, four seed loaves....

The day went by so quickly, and there was barely time for a break as we mixed the dough in the giant mixers, let everything rise, learned to shape dough into tins, rolls, and even got a little preview of a Jewish Wedding roll. 

My favourite bit was probably putting everything into the oven on a pizza peel.  How I'd love to have a big hot oven in my kitchen with loads of racks, and a big peel to shove it all in on! 

There are so many things you learn onsite in a bakery that a recipe for home bread baking would never tell you.  I know now how to test rising dough to find the exact moment when it's ready to be shaped.  Never again will I blindly follow a recipe that tells me to "let the bread rise for 2 hours."  There are so many factors in the length of time dough takes to rise, that you could never predict it in a book!

Paul is such an excellent teacher, and it's obvious that he knows an incredible amount about the craft of artisan bread.  I was sad to leave at the end of the day, and momentarily contemplated texting my boss my resignation and staying in Dorset to spend the rest of my life baking! 

The only thing that made me get on that train back to London was the huge cardboard box of bread I was lugging, and the lip-smacking grin of The Husband when he picked me up at Waterloo and laid eyes on it. 

Take a day out of your life (or two, or three) and go spend some time down at Panary with Paul Merry - you'll come back inspired and riddled with professional bread baking knowledge!  Visit Panary Bread Courses for more info.  Go!

Jerk Cookout Festival at the Horniman Gardens

The Husband LOVES Jerk chicken.   ("You are what you eat!", I always tell him.  Har har).   He comes from the Midlands, where there is a large Afro-Caribbean community, and lots of Jerk chicken to be eaten.  So imagine his excitement, when we cycled past the Horniman Museum and Gardens, and saw a large banner advertising a Jerk Cookout Competition and Festival!!

Bikes screeching to a halt, we quickly changed our plans for the day and headed inside.  I kid you not, the gardens were filled with around fifty tents - each one owned by a different South East London Jerk chicken restaurant.  BBQ smoke and reggae music filled the air, and we walked around in awe - not wanting to commit ourselves to one tent before looking at them all. 

We started by stopping at a fruit stand, where a man hacked open a strange large round fruit (what is that?  Why don't I know what it is??) with what looked like a machete, and the put two straws in it for us.  It made a pretty refreshing drink, and when we were finished with the mystery fruit, he used the machete again to chop it up so we could eat the pulpy insides. I was hooked!

But.... I'm going to be quite controversial here now.  I wasn't a big fan of any of the jerk chicken we ate at the festival.  Jerk chicken is bigged-up to be this fantastic thing, when actually it's just some cheap chicken parts thrown on a BBQ, then tossed on some dry white rice, with even drier kidney beans.  Errrr....  What is the big deal about this stuff?

I have a recipe for slow cooker jerk chicken, which I came across before I'd ever eaten from a jerk chicken restaurant - so I used to think that my yummy, succulent, thick sauced chicken was the way it was.  Wrong.  Apparently my delicious version is not authentic enough, and for the real-deal, it has to be dry and tasteless. 

You have to BEG to be allowed to put hot sauce on it, too.  Everyone looked at us like we were crazy when we asked for the scotch bonnet sauce - like because we were English we're completely unable to eat anything hotter than mild salsa.  (Which, for some of my friends, is true - but don't take it out on us!!)

I resisted the urge to mouth off to everyone that I thought my jerk chicken recipe would knock the socks off any off the professional competitors. (I guess dry and tasteless suits most people just fine!)  The Husband didn't agree with me, and didn't think it would go down too well with the pros or the judges.

One stall which had some amazing food was the Gold Coast restaurant in Brixton.  We had some incredible mutton skewers from them - and couldn't help buying this amazing garlicky chilli sauce they were selling, despite the creepy sounding name, "Chef's Special Sauce".  This stunning kicker has featured in a zillion different things I've cooked since buying it! 

All in all, a fab - if unexpected - day out.  Maybe I'll enter my Jerk chicken recipe next year!  Or... not.

Step by Step guide to Hiroshima Okonomiyaki

This is a post I've really been meaning to do for a long time.  When we were honeymooning in Japan last October, we had a zillion amazing meals.  This one, however, was really cool - because we got to watch it being made! 

Okonomiyaki is a popular dish in Osaka and Hiroshima. It's essentially just pancakes with layers and layers of different ingredients.  It's cooked in front of you (apparently some places you can make it yourself at your table), on a big metal hot plate, called a teppan.  Sometimes in Hiroshima, they call it "Hiroshima-yaki".

When we were in Hiroshima, we went to a hidden little place right next door to our hotel, (the World Friendship Center - not quite as hippy-fabulous as the name would suggest.)  I'm not sure the name of it, but judging from the sign, it's 'Okonomiyaki' then 3 stars, then something else in big letters, then 'Itsuki' below it?  (Must send this photo to my Japanese teacher for translation!)

Even though it was fairly late at night, the tiny restaurant was full of Japanese men, grabbing a quick meal on their way home from a late night at the office.  (Or so they say....)  We pulled up to a couple of stools in front of the teppan (no elbows on the table here!), and ordered.  Not much choice really, you either have a vegetarian pancake, or a meat one.  We ordered one of each, and a couple of bottles of Asahi.

 

The great thing about sitting right up at the teppan is that you get to watch every step of the process.  We were mesmorised as we watched the precision that goes into each layer of the okonomiyaki!  First, the batter (made of flour and dashi soup stock) is poured out onto the hot plate in a pancake shape.

The noodles are set out on the teppan, to warm up.  The pancakes are sprinkled with kezuri-bushi (fish flakes) and kombu-ko (seaweed flakes).  No sir, no maple syrup on these pancakes!! 

Shredded cabbage (lots of it) is the next layer in the pancake.

Next up is Ikaten, or dried squid flakes to you and me, spring onions, and bean sprouts. 

Bacon goes on the non-vegetarian one...

...Then another finished pancake gets thrown on top!

 

The noodles are finally ready to be broken up and put over the pancake.

Just when we thought it was all over..... more layers!  Eggs were brought out, cracked on the teppan, and swirled around.

The pancake is carefully and skillfully lifted on top of the egg.

A lattice pattern of okonomi sauce and some aonori (seaweed flakes) completes the meal.  It's amazing how the cabbage and other ingredients have worked their way down to make something so flat and dense!  It was at this point I realised we probably didn't need to eat a whole one EACH.  But seeing as I was already halfway through my bottle of Asahi, I decided to treat it as a challenge.

 

Straight off the teppan with a little trowel-like cutting device, and on to the plate!  What a meal!  And all for around £3 each.  Our £3 also included some helpful beginner Japanese lessons from the cook:  "Itadakimasu" is a polite thing to say when you recieve your food, and "Oishi" to say that it's delicious! And delicious it was!!

Andrew Whitley's Floury Baps

Mmmm!!   I've been trying to find a decent floury bap recipe for ages!  Google is full of weird crispy buns that weren't what I was looking for at all.  Until I stumbled across these bad boys in my new favourite book, Bread Matters: Why and How to Make Your Own, by Andrew Whitley.

These are soft, grainy, and floury - just like they should be.  I love experimenting with bread, so i rolled half of them up tightly to make small, high buns - perfect for eating with cheese or soup - and the other half I squished down a little to make lovely little sandwich buns.  Oh yes sir, I would make these again.

Now, I don't want to reproduce the recipe for you here, since I think that Andrew Whitley's book about why you should never buy supermarket bread again is a must read for everyone.  Seriously - go buy the book!  But I will give you a few reasons why I think these baps turned out so well....

1)  It uses a larger than normal amount of yeast.

2)  You use a bowl of flour to dip each of your baps into before putting them on the tray.

3)  You put a plastic bag over the top of the tray while proving the baps to keep the moisture in.

4)  You nestle each of the baps against each other on the tray so they are touching - this makes them rise straight upwards. 

5)  The butter makes them really moist and gives them a nice savoury flavour.

Sourdough - making both a white and a rye leaven

Meet the newest members of our family:  Our white leaven and our rye leaven.   These little guys have been taking up more of my time lately than the cat does.  

I made these two sourdough starters using the method documented by Dan Lepard in (The Handmade Loaf).  They each have their own personalities; the white leaven is bubbly and excitable, the rye is a bit stiff and practical.  I love them both. 

It's so satisfying making sourdough bread - if you do it right, you can create amazing bubbles in the loaf, and I LOVE that tangy taste.  Downside though (and you knew there was going to be one), is that it takes up an entire day of fermenting and rising when baking without commercial yeast. 

In an ideal world, I'd be removing leaven to bake with every day, and refreshing the mixture.  But since this is confined to being a weekend project, I end up having to throw away a lot of starter when refreshing it during the week.  I've found that by keeping the mixture stiff (using the same percentage of flour to water when refreshing), and keeping the mixture in the fridge, I can slow the process down quite a bit, and leave more time between refreshes.

They're a bit temperamental though - notice the labels are ripped, and there's dried flour running down the side?  This is because they both seem to get a bit angry in the night, bubble up furiously, and pop their lids.  The cat never does that.   They both seem to be pretty happy though, and, like the cat, they don't seem to mind if I forget to feed them once in a while. 

 

Mung bean sprouts - make 'em yourself!

Do you, like me, gasp in amazement in the supermarket when you see fresh bean sprouts?  They can cost up to £3 for a bag!  Sure, they're healthy and a superfood, and pretty tasty.  But they're how much?

Why, when you can buy a bag of dried beans for pennies a pound, do these little moist versions (that only last a few days I might add) cost so much?  

Okay - I don't have the answer for that.  It's probably a get-rich-quick scheme... or "Value Added Product" as the food industry nonces call it.

But good news!  You can make them yourself at home!  Here is a photo of some mung beans I bought (£1 for a lb of them), soaking in some water in an air-tight container.  That's all you do. You put the beans in the container, add some water, change the water every day, and there you have it - in a few days they will be soft enough to throw into stir-fries, salads, and sandwiches. 

Super easy, super healthy, and super cheap!

A word of warning however - the smell of the water when you change it is not nice.  It's beany and gassy smelling.  I don't have to tell you what OTHER smell you might confuse it with.  Let's just say The Husband got some undeserved dirty looks the first time I changed the water.  Sorry, Husband.