mad about bread and a giveaway

i've been pouring over these these two bread books for the past few weeks. one is danish chef claus meyer's baking book. claus meyer is a passionate advocate of nordic cooking, using locally-sourced ingredients and there has recently been a 6-part series of his nordic cooking programs on television. i am utterly smitten by his passion and enthusiasm as well as his knowledge of the traditions and ingredients  in our part of the world. the other is one of the wonderful river cottage handbooks. i've got this one on bread, the one on mushrooms and the one on preserves. i can highly recommend the books as very useful, accessible, well-written and inspiring (and no, i have no vested interest in saying that).

both books cover the ins and outs of everything from all of the baking accessories you need (i've got to get my hands on some of those proving baskets like the one pictured above) to the different aspects of the grains and how they behave in their various ways of being ground. i found myself hanging on every word and generally being fascinated by the whole chemistry of baking. wishing now that i'd paid a bit more attention instead of reading dostoevsky during science class in high school. and both books sold me on the notion of making my own sourdough starter.

so, about two weeks ago, i did exactly that. for the first stage, you take 150g of good strong wholemeal flour (rye, spelt, wheat are all fine) and 250ml of water and beat them up well with a whisk in a container with a lid. i used a large tupperware container. it would be ideal and a bit more aesthetically-pleasing to have a crock of some sort, but i felt all of the ones i have were a bit large for the task, so tupperware it was. then you leave it sit on the counter somewhere out of the way and you begin to check on it. the natural yeast that's all around us will begin to work its magic (perhaps within a few hours, but for sure within a couple of days) and you'll start to see bubbles coming up in the mixture. once you see those little bubbles, it's time to feed the starter, which you do by adding 150g of flour and 250ml of water (that's approximately a cup of each for those using american measurements). you don't have to be exact about this, just use roughly equal portions of flour and water. 

you continue this feeding for a good ten days. after the first two rounds, you should discard half of your dough when you do the feeding (or it will become a VERY large batch rather quickly), which is again 150g flour/250ml water, well whisked in, because you want to get as much air (and thus bacteria) into the mix as possible. the whole process is quite fascinating and daniel stevens (who wrote the river cottage book) is not wrong when he says that the starter will become almost like a friend - which indeed it will become if you keep it going endlessly like many bakers do (daniel knew bakers who had had their starter for 30 years!). you'll constantly be checking on it to see how the fermentation is coming along. it will develop different smells along way. mine currently smells like apples. but it could smell vinegary or malty or even like sour milk. get to know yours.

after about ten days, it's ready to use. both books have a variety of sourdough bread recipes and claus meyer's book actually advocates using the sourdough starter together with a pinch of regular yeast in any bread you make. i have yet to try that.

it requires a bit more planning ahead to make sourdough, as it requires more proving time, but it's totally worth it. i used the river cottage sourdough recipe, which is as follows:

before going to bed, mix (using the dough hook of your mixer) well:
650 ml warm water
500 grams strong white bread flour
and a good ladleful of sourdough starter

remember to feed your starter after you take some, otherwise you'll deplete your supply.

the next morning, pour the bubbly, rather soupy mixture back into the mixer and add:
600 grams strong flour
25 grams of salt

that may sound like a lot of salt, but bread needs the salt (tho' it does interfere a bit with the rising) to get the right crispy crust. claus meyer is a big advocate of plenty of salt in the bread.  mix this in your mixer with the dough hook - once it's combined, turn it up on high and let the mixer knead it for 10-12 minutes. or knead it by hand if that's what you like (i'm lazy, so i let the mixer do it). plus, this dough is rather soft and sticky, so it's difficult to knead by hand.

for mine, i used a mixture of a couple of flours, but you can use a regular high quality wheat flour, or mix in a bit of spelt or whatever you'd like. my starter itself has been subject to my flour whims in its feedings, so it has had snacks of good wholewheat flour, some of the nordic grain sorts - emmer, ølandshvede and svejderug along the way, so it is very wholegrain. but you can be as purist as you like, or use what's available in your area. whatever you choose, the starter will have the personality you give it.

next, the bread requires four provings (according to the book). i actually only gave mine two, because i had to go away during the day. and let's face it, four is rather intimidating.

the bread is baked at a very high temperature - 250°C/480°F when you first put it in the oven. there are a lot of instructions about spraying it with water and about putting a pan of water in the oven, but i'll admit i didn't do that (it was too overwhelming, but i will try it another time, especially after i sat down and read how that makes a good crusty crust). you turn down to 200°C/390°F once it puffs up (which it will do rather alarmingly) and the crust starts to brown. the recipe actually should make 2-3 loaves, but i made one giant loaf. mine baked for about 40-45 minutes, but it may take longer (i always think my oven is fast). you will know it's done by knocking on it. it just sounds done (vague of me, i realize, but try it, you'll see what i mean).  we ate it, fresh from the oven, with a fresh batch of hummus and i utterly neglected to photograph it.

this book can be yours!

and my adventures in sourdough will continue as i intend to keep my starter going for a long time to come. the best part about an established starter is that you can give a bit of it as a gift. plus, as it matures, it just gets better and better.

and to encourage you in your own baking adventures, we're going to give away a copy of the river cottage bread book right here (i somehow ended up with two - undoubtedly in a confluence of bad memory and amazon order button madness).  just leave a comment about your most memorable bread experience and we'll draw a lucky winner on friday, may 6.

lunch in the garden

take one sunshiney sunday with no wind at all, add daffodils in bloom all over the garden, and warm to temperatures approaching 20 (upper sixties for those in the US). put a pretty tablecloth over one outdoor table and add cushiony pillows to outdoor chairs. make sure there's some cold white wine in the fridge.

springy shrimp salad

400 grams small shrimp (ours come from greenland and are in a plastic container with slightly vinegary - salty water, but you can use big lovely precooked tiger shrimp or whatever shrimp you can get
1 ripe mango, diced
1 bunch of green onions, sliced into pretty rounds
1/2 a cucumber, diced
1 handful of ripe cherry tomatoes, sliced

dressing:
juice of one lemon
handful of fresh thyme (preferably from your garden), slid neatly off its stalks
good glug (my favorite measurement) of olive oil
salt & pepper

chop all of the ingredients and mix them with the shrimp in a pretty bowl. whisk up the lemon juice, thyme and olive oil and season with salt & pepper, pour over the shrimp mixture.

serve immediately with a loaf of fresh bread. either from the bakery or your own oven. basic bread recipe here.

i mixed up a pitcher of lemonade - using the juice of 3 lemons, about 1/2 a container of honey and sparkling water. the adults added a dash of white wine to theirs and the child drank it as it was.

and there you have the recipe for a perfect sunday lunch in the garden.

what's for dinner - risotto & potato focaccia

late yesterday afternoon, i had just turned on the oven to preheat before putting in the bread for a little dinner party we were having on a tuesday, since friends from manila were in town. suddenly, everything went dark. i thought that in this old house, since i had the dishwasher and my mixer going, that turning on the oven was too much and i'd blown a fuse. i went out to the new fuse board and flipped a few switches. nothing. the four guests would arrive in just over an hour and i had nothing finished to feed them. so i called husband in a panic. while i was photographing the electrical board for him and getting ready to send it through, the neighbor came by to ask if our electricity was out too. turned out it was the whole area and not my fuses at all! yay! or not, because who knew how long it would take before it came back on?

my planned menu was pretty simple - a potato focaccia, chicken risotto and a big salad. happily, husband recently built me a gas stovetop, so i didn't electricity to get on with the risotto.

risotto is my go-to dish at least once a week, especially in the winter. it's warming, hearty and lends itself to whatever you have at hand - you can add leftover chicken, peas, asparagus, leeks, mushrooms, safran - whatever you want, really. it's filling and all it really needs to go with it is a salad. plus, it makes great leftovers.  the first couple of times, it can be slightly temperamental, but once you get the hang of it, it's easy.

chicken leek risotto

3 C of chicken broth (preferably homemade, but it's ok to use a bouillon cube and hot water)

1 C good quality white wine (if you wouldn't drink it, don't cook with it)

1 C risotto rice 

3 leeks, finely sliced and rinsed well

olive oil

butter

2 C chopped roast chicken

1/2 C creme fraiche (optional)

fresh parmesan for grating over the top

put the broth in one pan and heat it up to simmer. meanwhile, melt a good knob of butter and a glug of olive oil and sauté off the leeks. it's ok to have more oil than you'd normally think is ok, because next you're going to add the rice and it should be well-coated in the butter-olive oil mixture. stir until the rice goes a bit translucent, then add the white wine. stir and once the rice absorbs the white wine, begin to add the warm bouillon one ladle at a time. stirring frequently, but not necessarily constantly. once you've added all of the bouillon and it's been absorbed (which takes 20+ minutes), stir in the chicken and creme fraiche and allow them to warm through. serve with fresh parmesan grated on top.  it will be quite creamy, even without the creme fraiche, so that's optional.

the focaccia recipe was posted here.  this time, i sliced 3 small potatoes very thinly (you can do it with a mandolin, tho' i just used the slicing bit of my big hand grater, since i have developed a strange fear of my mandolin), sprinkled them over the top with some dried rosemary and flaky salt.

they went all yummy and a bit potato chip-like on top of the bread.

happily, the electricity came back on and i was able to bake the bread so that it came out of the oven just as they arrived. sometimes you just get lucky.

the salad was simply a package of mixed leaves, a handful of tomatoes, an apple, half a cucumber, diced and a package of blueberries. for dressing, i drizzled a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  i served a south african chardonnay with the meal.

p.s. utterly neglected to photograph the risotto. sorry about that!

boutique flours and the baking of bread

i don't know if it's the same everywhere, but increasingly here in denmark, there are exciting and interesting new varieties of flour on the market. especially flour for baking bread. denmark is full of good bread (which is why husband is always shell-shocked when we go to the US and encounter the bread there). the danes do an excellent rye (rugbrød) that's excellent no matter where you buy it - from the discount supermarket to the local bakery - so i don't really tackle the dark breads. but 2-3 times a week, i bake a loaf of ordinary white or lighter brown bread. and these newly available flours are taking those loaves from ordinary to extraordinary.

a number of the new types of flour are from grains that were found in the nordic seed gene bank and which have been revived and cultivated back to commercial capacity in recent years. my weekly organic box provider has recently added baking boxes which include a variety of these newly-available flours.


~ ølandshvede - with higher protein and gluten content than ordinary flour - the dough you make with it tends to have excellent elasticity and thread very nicely. the ølands wheat flour that i get is stone ground, and they say that stone ground wheat keeps more of the nutrition and taste.

- emmermel - this is a heavier flour, also stone ground. it tends more towards the rye-type and you mix it with wheat flour to get a dough that you can form into a good bread that can stand on its own. the dough is quite soft and ends up a more golden brown (the loaf below used emmermel) and has an almost nutty, hearty flavor.

~ svejderug - a revived grain related to rye, but which gives a lighter bread than rye bread. the seeds were found in norway and it has taken forty years to bring them back to commercial production.

~ spelt - spelt probably makes the most reliably good, hearty bread. you want the dough to be quite moist and loose and it's best to use a bread pan, but if you mix half spelt and half ordinary flour, you can easily form a free-standing loaf. i often use spelt when i make focaccia, as you spread it out over the pan anyway.

i tend as well to buy organic wheat flour as my everyday white flour and that's both widely available in any grocery store and some rather special ones are available through aarstiderne, the folks who bring my weekly organic box. the wheat flour i'm using right now, for cakes as well as bread consists of 75% organically-grown wheat and 25% biodynamic, which has even stricter guidelines. it's also stone ground and is made by aurion.

we intend to get our own flour mill as well and we'll be able to source the grains for grinding ourselves through aurion, so we've got no intentions of going into farming them ourselves. but for now, i'm really happy with what's commercially available. plus, the good folks at aarstiderne bring it straight to my door - what could be easier?

emmerbrød (adapted from aarstiderne)

500ml warm water (2 C)

1 cube of fresh yeast or a generous spoonful of dry

a generous pinch of salt

1 spoonful of honey

1.5 C of emmer flour (or other special wheat sorts)

3.5 C of wheat flour (preferably organic)  (depending on the weather and your flour, you may need more than this)

combine the warm water, yeast, salt and honey in your mixer bowl and let it stand 5 minutes or so. add the emmer flour. once it's mixed, begin to add the regular flour until you have a soft, pliable dough. i let my kitchen-aid do this entire process, but you can also mix by hand in a bowl and then knead. the dough hook on the kitchen-aid does all of this for me, freeing me to do other things (like make a coffee).

place it in a large bowl that you've wiped with olive oil and allow it to rise for several hours, covered with a clean tea towel. turn it out onto the counter, sprinkled with a bit of the emmer flour and fold it over onto itself repeatedly until you have a nice, tight round loaf. place it on a baking sheet (i always use baking paper underneath, for ease of cleanup), slash across the top with a sharp knife, so it looks pretty, sprinkle with flaky salt and allow it to rise again for 30 minutes to an hour. if you lack time, you can actually put it directly into the oven and it'll be fine. bake for 30-40 minutes at 180°C/375°F. 

another bread i've been baking a lot of lately is this:

feta & pine nut bread

500ml (2 C) warm water

1 cube of fresh yeast (or a generous spoonful of dry)

generous pinch of salt

a good glug of a tasty, fragrant olive oil

1 spoonful of honey

6 C of flour - it can be a mixture of organic white flour and spelt or other wheat varieties (i use ølandshvede lately)

120 grams of feta, crumbled

100 grams of toasted pine nuts

a bit of chopped rosemary if you have it

combine the water, yeast, olive oil and honey and allow it to stand until the yeast bubbles. slowly add the flour and salt until it begins to form a ball on your dough hook (again, i totally let the kitchen-aid do the work). add the crumbled feta and pine nuts and rosemary. it may go rather loose after this and so you can add a bit more flour if desired. but better to leave the dough a bit more wet than you think it should be - it makes for a more moist loaf of bread.

set it to rise in a large bowl that you've wiped with olive oil. let it rise for several hours in a warm place under a clean tea towel. turn it out onto a floured countertop and form it into a nice round loaf. slash the top for prettiness and sprinkle with salt. allow it to rise for 30-60 minutes and bake. you can also just pop it into the oven, no problem. bake for 30-40 minutes at 180°C/375°F. you can tell it's done by knocking on it. it's hard to describe, but it just sounds done and you'll know what i mean if you try it.

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baking bread is easy, but you can have the odd day where it behaves in a temperamental way. last friday, my bread was an utter failure and i'm honestly not sure why, but i do think the weather and especially the barometric pressure can have an effect. i had a loaf of feta & pine nut spelt that just would not bake properly - it was still strangely doughy on the inside, despite nearly an hour in the oven at 180°C. some brownies i baked the same day turned out strangely as well. some days are like that and you just have to try again.

i realize that many of you won't find these same sorts of grains, but i'll bet this phenomenon isn't unique to denmark - so check your grocery store and see if there aren't some special kinds of flour available. it is well worth it to try them out.

lucia bread

december 13 is st. lucia day in sweden- that means beautiful blonde girls wearing angelic white robes and crowns of live candles and it also means the most lovely, golden, saffron and cardamon-scented buns. i made them for the first time this year (despite more than a decade married to an actual (half) swede.  the recipe comes from danish t.v. cook camilla plum's christmas cookbook - jul.

luciaboller (that's the danish version of it)

25 g yeast

4 dl warm milk

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. saffron

1 tsp. ground cardamon

1/3 C sugar

2 and a half C white flour (preferably organic)

100 g melted butter

1 egg, beaten, to brush on before baking.

mix the yeast and milk together while you grind the saffron with a spoon of sugar in a pestle and mortar, add the cardamon to the saffron mixture. add the remainder of the sugar to the milk and yeast mixture, then add the spices and begin to slowly add the flour. mix in the melted butter (taking care not to add it while it's too hot or you'll kill the yeast. the dough should be a bit sticky, so take care not to add too much flour.

allow it to rise for several hours in a warm place or overnight in a cooler place. form into rather pagan curly swirls, allow them to rise, brush them with the beaten egg and bake at 180°C/375°F for 20 or so minutes (my oven may be a bit fast, but let them get browned and lovely).  serve them with a pot of fresh tea. 

makes 18-24 buns (depending on how creative you get with your shapes/how much you let your 9-year-old help).

happy st. lucia day!

The Bread

thanks to my favorite jamie oliver - happy days with the naked chef - i am mildly famous in our social circle for my stuffed bread. i make it as a little something to serve with drinks when people arrive whenever we have a large gathering and occasionally when it's a smaller gathering, mostly because i'm absolute rubbish at having the real meal ready even close to on time (i like to think of it as a signature). jamie uses his basic bread recipe and stuffs it full of parma ham, cheese, egg and basil. naturally, i have strayed from his original, making some mistakes along the way (using my swedish sister-in-law's bread recipe, which just really didn't enfold the ingredients as it should have, but is otherwise a brilliant bread recipe). however, i think at last, i have perfected it.

fabulous eep tea towel by heather moore (skinny laminx)

i have a basic bread recipe that i printed back in 1997. although it's spotted with dots of olive oil and the ink is blurred, it says that it belongs to emeril lagasse and it must have been from the foodnetwork website. i try other bread recipes but have to admit that i go back to this one again and again.

basic bread

50 grams fresh yeast (or 1 envelope dry yeast)

2 T olive oil

2 T sugar

2 C warm water

2 T sea salt

6 C organic wheat flour

mix the yeast, olive oil, sugar and water in the bowl of your mixer with the dough hook attached. mix to combine and allow it to begin to froth, activating the yeast. add the flour and sea salt a bit at a time, until it's all combined, continue to mix on the dough hook until it's well-kneaded. i do this entirely with the mixer, because i'm always making this bread in the midst of half a dozen other preparations. although this robs me of the pleasure of the contact with the dough, the kitchenaid does it brilliantly and frees me to get lots of other things done in the meantime.  when the dough seems elastic and is gathered into a tight ball, transfer it to a greased bowl and cover with a tea towel to rise. if you have a warm room or a fireplace, it only needs about an hour to double in size, especially if you use a block of fresh yeast (i've never seen that in the US, so our american friends may have trouble finding it and dry yeast works just fine).

while your dough is rising, prepare the following:

stuffing (mine varies every time, this reflects the pictures)

1 jar pesto (i used artichoke this time, but use whatever you have on hand)

1 package bacon, fried 'til crispy

2 C hard cheeses, grated (i used goat gouda, sage gouda and prima donna)

handful of thyme

handful of sage

3 eggs, beaten

when the dough has risen, turn it out onto a floured board, fold it over and knead it, then roll it out into a  8-10" wide length of dough that's about 24"-30" long. spread the pesto down the center of the dough, then add the bacon, herbs, cheese. make a little trough down the center of the cheese and add the beaten eggs in the trough, to hold them. then fold the edges over and pinch them together. move it to a baking tray covered with baking paper, making it a circle by pinching the dough together. cover it with a tea towl and allow it to rise for an hour (i've skipped this when in a hurry and it's actually been fine). bake for 40+ minutes at 175℃/350℉. you can tell it's done by knocking gently on it, it just sounds crispy and done (try it you'll know what i mean).

i try to serve it still warm and it warms up nicely again in the oven, should it cool off. you can actually stuff it with whatever you have in your fridge...a jar of basil pesto or a fresh pesto you make yourself (i do that in the summer when i have the basil at hand), artichokes, olives, parma ham, chorizo, a mushroom mixture, boiled eggs (jamie's recipe calls for boiled eggs), leftover roast chicken, whatever cheese you have at hand. as for the dough, you can also mix spelt flour or another whole wheat flour with the regular flour, for a more dense texture, but i have to admit that i prefer it with ordinary organic white flour. but pretty much regardless of what i've stuffed this bread with, it's a big hit whenever you assemble a group of people.

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quick update on the halloween party, because you've got to see the cupcakes:

and my best ever carved pumpkin:

a very grand time was had by all.