Reciplace

Fat dinosaur-looking epi bread

There seems to be a theme in our house this week of baking bread that looks like a terrifying creature that nightmares are made of.   First there was the Cheese Kringel which turned into the King Crab of Justice.  Then I made this chunky French bread which looks like a dinosaur.

I was planning to make epi baguettes - the wheat stalk shaped bread you see everywhere in France.  You roll your dough into a long baguette shape, then use scissors to cut almost right through the dough, then lay each piece to alternating sides.

However, I wanted to use my pizza stone while baking today, and it's not big enough to hold a long baguette.  So I shaped the dough into shorter, stumpier batard, and cut the epi pieces into it.  (I'm sure Lionel Poilâne is turning in his grave.)

I was quite pleased with it.  It looks like a Stegosaurus - how cool is that!  And it's got even more crusty surfaces to tear off. 

It's not too elegant looking though, so next time I want to make epi and use my pizza stone, I'll probably just curl the baguette into a pretty wreath.  Or maybe I'll just find other dinosaur shapes to make out of bread.

Delia and Heston love Waitrose, and so do I.

I'm loving the new Waitrose campaign coming out today.  Legendary Delia Smith, and molecular gastronomy guru Heston Blumenthal are taking over the entire ad break of Coronation Street tonight to promote Waitrose.

You can preview the commercial before it airs live, (or just because you don't want to spend your Friday night watching Corrie). 

Personally, I loved it.  They are two of my favourite celeb chefs, and neither of them are over-exposed (like Jamie and Gordon), so they're still really interesting to watch.  The tone of the commercial is soft and warm, and even though you're very aware of who they're advertising for, the name Waitrose is hardly in your face.

Delia's rhubarb and ginger brûlée looks amazing, and totally makes me forgive her for her "cheats" sins of a couple of years ago.  In fact, the way she says, "Luscious, thick, Greek yogurt" had me running to the fridge to polish off a half eaten tub.  Oooh, guess I'll have to run down to Waitrose now to replace it!

Delia's rhubarb and ginger brûlée
From Delia Smith for Waitrose
serves 4

Ingredients

800g rhubarb
1 rounded dessertspoon Cooks’ Ingredients Organic Ground Ginger
2 pieces stem ginger, finely chopped
3 heaped tablespoons demerara sugar
200g Greek yogurt
300ml Waitrose Extra Thick Jersey Double Cream or essential Waitrose Extra Thick Double Cream

For the brûlée
175g demerara sugar

I used a heatproof oval dish measuring 23 x 15cm at the base

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C, gas mark 4. You need to begin this by trimming and chopping the rhubarb into 2.5cm chunks, then pile them into a bowl, add the sugar and the ground and chopped ginger and toss them all together. After that, transfer everything to the baking dish, pop it into the oven on the centre shelf and bake for 20 minutes. Then carefully stir the rhubarb, turning it over, and bake for another 10–15 minutes or until it’s tender.

2. When it’s cooked, leave the rhubarb to get completely cold, then tip as much of the juice out by drawing the fruit back gently with a draining spoon and allowing the juice to drain from one end of the tilted dish.

3. When you’re ready to do the brûlée, preheat the grill to its highest setting for 15 minutes. Now combine the yogurt and thick cream in a bowl, and spoon it evenly over the top, making sure it goes right up to the edges of the dish. Next spoon the sugar evenly over the cream right up to the edges, and when the grill is really hot, place the dish about 7.5cm from the heat, and just let the sugar melt, bubble and caramelise to a rich golden brown. This will take about 8 minutes, but you’ll need to keep an eye on it as it may need a bit more or less time.

4. When it’s cooled and the caramel has set, you can cover with clingfilm and keep it in the fridge till needed (it can be made up to 8 hours in advance). To serve, tap the caramel with a spoon and serve just as it is – nothing else needed.

Notes on ingredients

For a lighter version, the brûlée can be made with all yogurt or a 500g tub of fresh vanilla custard. If you don’t want to use preserved ginger add another quarter teaspoon ground ginger. This recipe is also brilliant with summer berries. And in the winter a pack of British garden fruits (or other frozen fruits) but in either case minus the ginger.

Fresh from the Oven: Kringel

Wow.

This month's Fresh from the Oven Challenge was Kringel - an Estonian bread as interpreted by the Hairy Bikers.

I don't think anything I've baked has gone this disastrously wrong since.....  um....   well maybe ever.

I knew it was going to go wrong.  I knew before I even started mixing the ingredients together. 

• 40g of yeast?!?  FORTY? 
• Where was the salt in the list of ingredients?  No salt at all? 
• The flour was a very arbitrary amount (600g - 700g?  Well which is it?). 
• Worst of all, no mention of the type of flour to use.  Just 'flour'.   Come on Hairy Bikers, did you not realise that there is more than one type of flour?  What kind do you mean?  Plain? Bread? Rye? Spelt? Honestly!

But I dove in and baked it anyway.  I used half plain/half strong white flour.  I'd just used up the last of my fresh yeast, so used dried and halved the quantity, as you do.  But even at 20g, it still felt like going overboard. I reluctantly left out the salt, and used 650g of flour, to keep it even.

With the huge amount of yeast, you only have to leave it to rise for 30 minutes before putting it straight in the oven.  This goes against everything I believe about slowly fermenting good quality bread, but I put my panarian morals aside and did it anyway. 

I'm not a chocolate fan, so I opted for the cheddar version.  The dough was very stiff, like shortcrust pastry - so I had no luck rolling out a long, swiss roll type shape.  It was far too crumbly to even attempt to plait it, so me and my (at this point rather amused) husband just rolled it into a crescent shape.

Here's what it looked like.   Don't laugh. 

The only saving grace is that if I ever get invited to a crustacean themed party, I can bring this and call it King Crab Bread. 

As expected from the high amount of yeast, it tasted very stodgy, and staled very quickly.  Perhaps if I'd done the chocolate version, it would have moistened it up a bit?  Or at least covered up the terrible texture?

The Husband had a few slices of it - smothered in Marmite - before he declared immunity from having to eat any more of it. 

It's now about to become a very large bag of cheesy breadcrumbs.

The Old Mill Café, Llanddowror Wales

Here's a great place we stumbled upon in the middle of Wales, purely by accident, and only because we saw the sign around thirty seconds after we agreed we were both hungry.

The Old Mill Café, which sits on the road through Llanddowror village near Tenby, kind of twinkles when you pull in.  (I'm a sucker for fairy lights.)  It's all rustic looking on the outside, with farm trucks, big wooden tables, and chickens running around.  

The Old Mill Café, Llanddowror

Inside, there are more beautiful chunky wooden tables (all made from the trees behind the café), and comfy sofas.  It looks like some kind of rustic-chic yummy-mummy hangout in East Dulwich.  But in a good way.  You realise you're certainly not in Dulwich when you see the reasonable prices on the board, and when you catch a glimpse of the rooster staring at you from outside. 

This used to be a trucker caff, or "Transport Café", until three weeks ago when they re-opened as a beautiful roadside eatery.  The biker dudes are still in there, drinking tea from massive mugs, but the menu has changed.  Everything on it looked amazing - we had trouble narrowing down our choices.

In the end, we decided on Steak and Ale Pie, and an Aubergine and Chickpea loaf.  Both came with roast potatoes and parsnips, and a plate of fresh steamed veg.  

The rooster clearly wanted a bit of steak and ale pie action

It was all so incredible.  The steak and ale pie had the perfect amount of ale-y taste to it, and the meat was beautifully tender.  The aubergine loaf was ridiculously tasty - I'd like to know what kind of magic ingredient they put in there - tears of Welsh angels?  Pixie dust?  It was amazing. 

Before leaving, we had a look at their farm produce shelf.  We left with a half dozen fresh free range eggs (probably from the girls clucking at us when we walked in), and some Victoria plum, raisin and caramelised onion chutney. 

The trees behind the café that the tables and chairs are made from

I was sad to leave - it's the kind of place we would frequent if it wasn't over two hundred miles away from home.  Friendly, wholesome food, blindingly delicious, and reasonably priced.  I can only hope they'll one day open a second location in East Dulwich.  Lush.

Wild Garlic, Leek and Potato Gratin

There are a zillion good reasons to subscribe to a regular delivery of an organic veg box.  But for me, one of the biggest reasons is that it enables you to try things you wouldn't normally have a chance to cook.  Most of the time you get carrots, broccoli, and those damned potatoes that never stop piling up.  But every week, there is at least one interesting item that makes you get on to google, and learn about nutritional values and cooking methods for something you've never used before.   This week it was wild garlic.  

Wild garlic looks like a bag full of leaves swept up at the florists.  When it's growing, it can easily be mistaken for Lily of the Valley - apart from the smell.  

Photo of wild garlic from the RHS

The plant is completely different to the domestic garlic plant. The bulbs of wild garlic (Allium ursinum) take up to 3 years to mature, and are very small, so it's the leaves that we eat.  The smell is quite pungent, but the flavour is actually quite mild - and doesn't leave the after-effects on your fingers and breath that normal garlic does.  It's starting to emerge as a health-food because of it's high magnesium content.

This week, when Riverford Organics sent me some wild garlic, they also included a recipe card with instructions for Wild Garlic Risotto, and for Potato, Leek and Wild Garlic Gratin.  This is some top drawer vegetarian comfort food.  And not half bad for you either - especially as I substituted soya milk for the double cream.

Potato, Leek and Wild Garlic Gratin
From Riverford Organics

4-5 large potatoes, peeled & sliced
300g leeks, trimmed & thinly sliced
50g butter
3 cloves garlic, crushed
large handful wild garlic
leaves
100ml double cream (or use soya milk like I did)
100ml milk
2 tbsp of grated Parmesan
salt & pepper

1. Melt butter in a large pan - add leeks and cook gently until soft. Wash and roughly slice the wild garlic. Next, add garlic and wild garlic leaves and cook for 5 minutes.

2. Season well. Add cream and milk and bring to the boil. Add 1 tbsp of Parmesan. Check seasoning. Mix in a bowl with potato slices. Arrange in a gratin or ovenproof dish.

3. Cover with tin foil and bake at 180ºC for 1 hour, until the potatoes are just cooked. Remove foil, sprinkle with the rest of the cheese - place back in the oven and cook until brown on top.

Richard Bertinent's Wholewheat Poppy Seed Stars

Mega baking this weekend!   I whisked together a biga to make some slowly fermented Italian bread on Friday, Saturday morning it was crumpets, Sunday it was a wholewheat loaf to get us through the week, and these cute little poppy seed stars from Richard Bertinet, author of Dough.

Poppy Seed Stars
from Richard Bertinet, author of Dough

300g strong wholemeal flour
200g strong white flour
10g fresh yeast
10g salt
350ml water
handful of poppy seeds

1. Mix all the ingredients together, knead for ten minutes, and let it rise for an hour.

2. Once you've got your dough ready, divide it into twelve pieces, and roll them into balls. Flatten slightly with the palm of your hand, dip the roll into a shallow dish of water, then dip it into a plate of poppy seeds.

3. Here comes the fun part - take a (clean) credit card, and with the smaller side, cut three diagonal slits in the roll.  Push the card down into the dough until it slices through to the counter - but make sure it doesn't slice through the sides of the dough.  Make two more slits diagonally that intersect with the first slit. Then carefully turn the roll inside out so the points of the star are on the outside.

4. Bake in a 200 degree oven for 10 minutes, and leave on a rack to cool.

Guerilla Burgers, London

I love a good burger, I do.   Not McDonalds "made of whatever we could scoop off the floor" burgers, or Burger King "this patty's only been under the heat lamp for 6 hours, it'll do" burgers.  But good, juicy, quality beef, succulent burgers.  The kind your mum makes in July for your dad to put on the BBQ, or the kind found in newly opened Guerilla Burgers near Bond Street.

My American friend at work is near-fatally obsessed with cheeseburgers.  She's also one of those hip arty London types that always knows what exhibits are on, or new venues are opening.  (Unlike me, who struggles to remember what night Glee is on).  So when she found out about Guerilla opening a mere ten minutes away from the office, we promptly organised a work team outing to check it out.

It was almost at full capacity on a Thursday lunch time, but the friendly waitress who greeted us when we arrived managed to pull together a table for eight in no time.  We knew we'd made the right decision when the menus arrived.  How are you supposed to choose between things like chili cheese fries, rodeo burgers, and loaded hot dogs?  They even have Brooklyn Lager on the menu - something I've never seen on this side of the planet. Drooling, we finally decided on a variety of things - including cheese burgers, crinkle fries and sweet potato fries.  Glory days!!  

The decor is really well done - the artsy hip people on either side of me made artsy hip comments on the lamps and tables. 

Everything we ate was top notch - the burgers were cooked medium rare, the toppings were fresh and plentiful, the fries were the kind that you can't stop shoving down your mouth no matter how many times you tell yourself you're going to stop and throw your crumpled napkin on top of them to try to block them out of your sight. 

The portions were a great size too - more like the kind your mum makes in July than some massive, gobby American sized portion you could share with 4 people.  I like that. 

We each spent around £10 including drinks.  There were many more things on the menu we wanted to try, including fish tacos and an aubergine burger, so we'll no doubt be back soon.

Apparently it's owned by the same people who own Giraffe - which kind of sprang out of nowhere last year.  So no doubt, there will be many more Guerilla Burgers popping up in the future.