Image by Michael Fenichel
Hand To Mouth is very happy to say that it’s off to to the South of France for a week.
I will be mostly hanging out in Provence, drinking wine, eating bread and cheese, and checking out a food market or two.
See you en l’autre side.
À bientôt
I’m going to be away for Easter in Australia visiting the future in-laws, so am going to miss out on the traditional treats that I’d be indulging in with the family down in Cornwall.
Food wise, the main thing I’m going to miss is the Hot Cross Buns. I love them. Toasted, slathered in melting butter and a good dollop of course bitter sweet orange marmalade. Anyway, I told myself that I wasn’t going to miss out, so decided to make my own for the first time. This recipe is lifted pretty much lock, stock and barrel from here on the BBC Food website, and the results went down a storm.
Ingredients
625g strong white flour, plus extra for dusting
1 tsp salt
2 tsp ground mixed spice
45g unsalted butter, cut into cubes, plus extra for greasing
85g sugar
1 lemon, zest only
It’s been around for a while, but I first read about Jim Lahey’s ‘no knead bread‘ in a Saveur magazine when I was in New York last year. I’d already got the bread baking bug, and the idea of a loaf that required no kneading seemed a bit odd, even a bit sacrilegious. I did a bit of research on line, and found out that everyone raves about the loaf, and it basically put Lahey’s Sullivan Street Bakery on the map.
Anyway, it definitely got me interested. How could a loaf requiring so little work be so good? Life just isn’t like that. So I gave it a go. The loaf is cooked in a cast iron pot, a bit like an Australian damper, so you’ll need a Le Creuset or something similar for it to work.
Ingredients
3 cups (430g) flour
1½ cups (345g or 12oz) water
¼ teaspoon (1g) yeast
1¼ teaspoon (8g) salt
Olive oil
Rye flour (for dusting)
Method
Mix all of the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix together for a minute or so to form a ’shaggy’ dough. Transfer the dough to a larger bowl oiled with some olive oil. NB. the dough will expand to around 4 times the size, so make sure your bowl is big enough. Cover with clingfilm and let the dough develop for 12-18 hours at room temperature.
As mentioned in a previous post, I’m a bit obsessed with Poilâne bread. I bought some grey flour from the shop in Paris when I was over there for New Years, and just got round to using it to bake my first loaf of the year. It also gave me the chance to use a couple of Christmas gifts I got from The Lighthouse Bakery, namely a peel and a proving basket.
Not surprisingly, I’m still a way off nailing a good imitation, but this bread is pretty tasty, even if I do say so myself, and has a great crust. The recipe uses an 80 to 20 mix of grey flour and rye flour to add a bit more flavour and texture. If you can’t get grey flour, strong white would do just fine.
Ingredients
400g grey flour
100g rye flour
5g yeast
7g salt
300ml water
1 x teaspoon honey
1 x tablespoon olive oil
Happy New Year from Hand To Mouth. Hope you all had a good one.
I had the good fortune to be in Cornwall for Christmas, and then Paris for New Years. Good food was eaten accross the festive period, more on this in subsequent posts, but first of all something for the bread geeks out there.
Whilst in Paris I made a pilgrimage to Poilâne. It may not be a familiar name, but if you love good bread it should be. It’s a bakery in Saint-Germain, and makes the most insanely tasty ‘miche’ or traditional French sourdough loaves. Set up by Pierre Poilâne, a young baker from Normandy in 1932, the shop has been knocking out these beautiful large round loaves ever since to Parisians hungry for something a bit more interesting than the regular baguette.
Having wanted to be able to bake my own bread for a couple of years, I finally got my arse in gear in January and started doing it. To start with I picked up recipes and techniques from the web, and the early results, whilst edible, weren’t exactly great.
Then I came across ‘River Cottage Bread’; a small but sensible handbook on the subject, which has basically become my bread bible. The book contains lots of recipes for breads from standard loaves, to ciabatta, naan and beyond, which are great, but for me the most interesting part of the book is the more practical stuff.
From my limited experience, it seems to me that once you’ve got the basics of making dough down, you can freestyle to a certain extent. But the stuff that is more rigid, and vital to creating consistently good bread, are the techniques and tips, and thats why this book has become so invaluable.
For example, the book explains that you need to try and re-create the conditions of a bakers bread oven as closely as possible in your own home. It recommends that as well as having your oven as high as possible for the initial baking process, that you should also have a tray of boiling water in the oven to generate steam, as this creates optimum conditions for the bread to rise. This is the sort of stuff that you don’t discover by trial error, and kind of need to know. As you might expect, there’s also lots of practical advice on rising, proving, how to prepare your dough properly for the oven and so on. (more…)
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