Category Archives: Bread

Really good focaccia

Leave a reply
Beautiful focaccia

I am not short of focaccia recipes. I have ones that use a sponge starter, a sourdough starter, fresh yeast, dried yeast…but this one that I happened upon in Delicious magazine is my favourite to date. it is absolutely…delicious. And fairly quick and easy.

The dough is – be warned – incredibly frisky and difficult to handle, almost impossible to handle at the beginning. But don’t panic and use plenty of oil for your hands (and oil the surface you’re using). You’ll find you have to wash your hands a lot.

I used to do this in a mixer with a dough hook but a note here that the dough is easier to handle if you do the whole thing by hand.

The baking tray I use is approx 37cm by 28cm. It yields a focaccia which is a perfect depth for me.

Ingredients:

500g strong white flour

One and a half teaspoons of fine sea salt

3g/one teaspoon of dried yeast

400g water (make sure it’s not cold, I leave mine out for about 20 mins)

80g of extra virgin olive oil (note: you’ll use this during the stretching process but you’ll have quite a bit left which is okay, you use it just before baking)

toppings: salt/rosemary/chargrilled veg/olives/mozzarella (I use Mozzarella Cucina as it’s a lower hydration cheese but regular mozzarella is fine, just make sure it’s well drained)

Method

Put everything EXCEPT the oil in a bowl, mix up with a fork until it’s all come together, then add a handful of oil from the measured out oil and amalgamate as best you can, then leave it for about 20 mins.

After this, oil a surface/chopping board, again using a bit of the measured out oil to lubricate the surface you’re using (and also your hands) – or you can even use a large shallow tray. Turn the dough out, and gently stretch it out and fold it over on itself a few times. Leave for 30 mins and do the same thing again – stretch, fold. It’s nothing dramatic but you’re trying to get some air bubbles into the dough. Do this once or twice more (leave for 30 mins, stretch and fold) depending on the temperature of the room. You want it a bit bubbly and excited looking.

The recipe says to now put the dough in the fridge for 10 mins. I don’t really do this. After the final rest I pop it in the tray I’ll be using to cook it (I line mine with baking parchment but you don’t have to). Put the dough in, stretch it, fold it, stretch it fold it and then I leave it for about 20 mins to relax. I then stretch it to reach into all four corners of the tin, massaging in all of the left over oil and stick my fingers in to dimple it. At this stage I cover it with oiled clingfilm/more baking parchment (tea-towels tend to stick) and put it in the fridge overnight (I make it in the afternoon if I want it the next day) and cook it in the morning.

If you want to cook it straight away then give it about 30 mins to an hour at room temperature to rest.

I add my toppings before I bake it, top it with salt and bake it in a preheated 220C oven for about 20 minutes. The recipe says to put an oven-proof bowl of water with about 150ml of water in the oven too. Sometimes I do, sometimes I forget. It’s fine.

You want it golden on the top. When it comes out of the oven, brush it with more oil – this is important.

It’s really delicious. Makes excellent sandwiches but isn’t that great the next day (sure you can griddle it to make toasted sandwiches, but…nothing beats what it’s like on the day) – so don’t feel guilty if you eat it all.

It makes a great centre piece for informal dinners/lunches with cheese and cold cuts and if you add chargrilled veg – and I thoroughly recommend you do (chargrill first) it’s a meal in itself with some crispy green salad.

Here’s a pic of it with some toppings, it makes for a really gorgeous meal about 20 mins out of the oven.



I can tell you how good this was: really bloody good.

Hot oven? Cold oven?

Leave a reply

Most mornings I preheat my oven to put the day’s bread in. My oven has a handy timer which means I can come down, the oven is up to temperature (I put the baking tray in the night before) and then I can bake the bread. That’s the usual advice isn’t it? Bread goes into a hot oven.

But one day I hadn’t pre-heated the oven and I only had a certain amount of time to put the bread in so I just put the bread onto a cold baking tray, dusted with polenta, into a cold oven, with my regulation one ice cube on a tray underneath. Then I put the oven on to 250C fan and cooked it for 40 mins (as that’s all the time I had available).

The bread needs a bit longer cooking time – probably 50 mins for a decent crust. But guess what? Absolutely no difference. Here’s the loaf I made today which went into a totally cold oven..

 

hipstamaticphoto-608024196.859590

All about the crust

6 Replies

I make bread almost every day. I put it in for final fridge-proving overnight and get up early (with the oven on a timer so it is up to temperature by the time I get up and a baking tray in the oven so that the raw dough goes onto a hot tray) to bake it.

I know. How lucky is everyone in my house.

There are many great things about baking your own bread but you can also custom-bake the crust so it suits you/what you’re going to use the bread for.

I usually bake sourdough bread at 220C for thirty minutes. This is how I’ve been doing it for years and it affords time for the bread to bake, and cool, in time for making sandwiches for packed lunches. And the first packed lunch leaves the house at 7.30am so you can perhaps work backwards and work out how early I get up.

(No-one makes me. I like to get up early and as the bread bakes I tidy up and get ready for the day.)

The crust on a 30 min loaf is quite thin, golden brown, it wouldn’t stop the room at a party but it’s good for anyone who can’t, or doesn’t like, very crusty bread.

But lately I’ve been craving really thick, dark, chewy crusts. To do this you need to bake for about 45 mins minimum but the longer you go the thicker the crust.

Of course if your oven is too hot it will also be too burned so you need to play with the temperature. However, what works for me is this:

250C ten minutes

220C twenty minutes

down to 200C for another ten if it’s looking too burnt, if not keep it at 220 for another ten minutes.

Yes I know this is 40 mins but timings are really tight in the morning which is why I blast it with a 250C heat to begin with.

My shelf is on middle and my oven is on normal oven (not fan) setting

The crust is amazing. I love it with butter and apricot jam.

I also stick an ice cube on a tray under the bread to allow for maximum oven spring (rising). Nothing beats the bread when it’s first baked – but cooled as I hate hot bread – and I will fight anyone for the crust-end, or ‘il culo’ (the bottom) as we say in Italian.

Back to retarded proving with sourdough

3 Replies

Like so much of my sourdough bread making, this reminder of how delicious a long prove can be, came about by accident. I’d started that day’s bread and had to go out for the day so I had to stick it in the fridge and pick up where I’d left off the day after.

Although the resulting bread was over-proved (see pic) the taste was sensational. You can tell when the bread is over proved because it has that ‘false ceiling’ look (I don’t know if that’s an accurate description but it is what I call it..), where the bread has risen up and can’t sustain its own, early, promise.

HipstamaticPhoto-603450013.505641

Super delicious but over proved sourdough

I’ve been baking sourdough for over a decade now and, as Dan Lepard so brilliantly put to me one day, sometimes we let success hinder progress. I know my shaping could do with (more) work, but I’ve grown lazy. And because I can make bread, now, I haven’t experimented much. And whilst my sourdough tastes good, a longer prove really improves the flavour.

I don’t do it very scientifically. Sometimes I start the bread with starter/water/flour/salt and leave it, unmixed, for a few hours. Sometimes I’ll take it to the first one hour rise phase and then put it in the fridge overnight and carry on the next day. Sometimes I start it, mix it up roughly and leave it til the next morning (in the fridge) – but if you rest if for a long time and the dough isn’t totally smooth, make sure it’s well covered, otherwise, as per point 2 below, you can get hard bits.

There are no hard and fast rules, but a few things to remember:

  1. You need a good starter to do prolonged proving, so one that’s been refreshed in the last twelve hours.
  2. Don’t leave it at the first (unmixed) stage for too long as hard lumps will form that will be hard to eliminate. Ask me how I know.

But other than that, just experiment. What can go wrong? Put it in and out of the fridge over a couple of days, see what happens. When I’ve finally shaped it, I leave it at room temperature for a few hours before putting it (back) in the fridge for its final rest. I tend to try to always cook it from fridge cold as it’s easier to handle and slash.

The mixture I’ve used recently has been 425g white bread flour with 75g rye. I had previously shied away from prolonged proving with white flour but it seems to be okay. If you need more information about sourdough do a search for sourdough in the search bar or select it in the drop down category menu on the right hand side of this page. If you’re new to it here is a step by step guide I did some years ago.

And if you’re totally new to it and fancy a try, do what I did many years ago: buy Dan Lepard’s excellent The Handmade Loaf. In terms of bread-making it changed my life.

Olive oil flatbreads

Leave a reply

These are so useful to make in a batch and then freeze. To defrost simply leave at room temperature for a bit or microwave for 10 seconds and eat immediately.

I love the meditative nature of making these. I make them on a large, flat skillet pan, prepping the ones still to cook by first rolling them into balls, then squashing into discs and finally rolling them out. I do this in stages – a mini production line – so the gluten has time to relax in between. I can’t get these super thin, but then I don’t really want to. They are really soft and tasty.

I keep them warm in my warming drawer whilst making the whole batch, but a very low oven serves exactly the same purpose.

I make eight out of this recipe, you could make more if you made them smaller as individual (as opposed to ‘tearing’) dipping breads.

 

7g of dried (fast action) yeast

600g strong white bread flour

100ml of extra virgin olive oil (doesn’t have to be super expensive)

350ml of water

half a teaspoon to half a tablespoon of sea salt

(depending on taste. If you’re going to serve these with super-salted food then you don’t have to put too much salt in. The first time make them with the lower amount and see how you go.)

These couldn’t be easier. You mix the 7g of yeast with the 600g strong white bread flour, and mix in the 100ml of olive oil and 350ml of water and, finally, the salt.  Mix to a rough dough just using a fork, and then rest in the bowl for ten minutes whilst you wash your hands and put everything away.

When the ten minutes is up, turn the dough out onto an oiled surface and give it gentle knead for ten seconds, then cover it with a bowl and rest again for ten minutes. Repeat twice more. By this stage you should have a smooth dough, with no bits.

If you plan to make these the same day, oil a bowl, place the dough in it, cover and leave until doubled in size. How long this will take depends on your kitchen. I tend to use a bowl that the original, unproved, dough comes up half way on, that way, I know that when it’s at the surface it’s doubled in size. If you plan to make these later put in a cold place in the fridge (by that I mean, as close to the bottom as possible) for the final prove, you could leave it overnight but I wouldn’t leave it for more than about 12 hours.

When ready to go, take the dough out, lightly knead and divide into eight/how ever many pieces you want to make. Roll into a ball by placing the dough on the flat palm of one hand and cupping the other hand over the top and making circular movements, or whatever works for you.

Then flatten each ball into a disc. Put a dry, large frying pan on a high heat and when you are ready to go roll out as best you can to about 18-20cm – if you’ve divided the dough into eight, obviously smaller if you’re making more than that.

As I said in the intro, you can get into a production line with them, prepping each before it goes on. I get it so that as I put one on to cook, I roll the other one out in preparation so it has time to relax a bit. If you can get them perfectly circular great – I never can.

When ready to cook you slap them into the pan and cook for about 5 mins – if you’re like me you’ll turn them often as I’m a bit of a flipper. You can see they’re done as they brown and go ‘dry’ – no more moist bits. If you need to turn the heat down for the second side do so, but turn up again for the new flat bread going on as it’s the dough hitting the hot skillet heat which causes the bubbles to form, which then blister and blacken.

 

Enriched bread dough with nuts and dried fruit (bread machine)

1 Reply

After I made enriched dough chocolate chip rolls, I thought I’d try making something similar, but stuffed with nuts and dried fruit instead. My mum especially, likes bread like this. She gets something from M&S that is stuffed with nuts and fruit.

I doubled the recipe used before and added 160g of mixed dried fruits and nuts of your choice. The bread was lovely, really soft, tasty and would be lovely with cheese or just eaten with a thick spread of butter. I made two loaves this morning and one is almost already all gone (the other, on its way to my Mamma).

Without adding any bits, these make a fantastic burger/hot dog bun and are now what I use for burger buns. You can also make, bake and then freeze for future use.

This is what I did:

One teaspoon of dried yeast (I use Dove’s Farm)

500g strong white bread flour (you could make this a teeny bit more healthy by using 400g strong white/100g of strong wholemeal, but I never do)

Two teaspoons of caster sugar

50g butter, chopped and added in

Two tablespoons of milk

One teaspoon of salt

Two eggs

175ml water

for later: 160g of ‘stuff’ if you are adding bits: dried fruit, nuts, chocolate chips or a mixture. My every day is chocolate chips and flaked almonds. I’ve now found a great source of very good quality chocolate chips which I can buy in bulk, as it was costing me a fortune. I like the 55% cocoa ones, as they are a good half way house, but you can go higher or lower.

Put everything, bar the fruit and nuts, into the bread machine and set to a dough cycle (mine lasts 2hrs 20mins). You can also easily make this by hand by mixing everything together, leaving for 15 mins, kneading lightly, leaving for 15 mins etc: repeat about four times until dough is really smooth and soft.

When done, take out and put in a bowl and mix in the fruit and nuts. Leave for ten minutes.

On an oiled surface, tip out and knead lightly to make sure everything is incorporated. Leave for ten minutes. Then cut in half and shape: either into a baton shape, a round or buns. I get eight good sized buns out of this but you can of course make them slightly smaller and get more. Place both on a baking parchment lined tray and prove overnight in the fridge (cover with a clean dishcloth).

In the morning bake for approx 12 mins at 220C.

Delicious!

(Apologies if I’ve made any mistakes, I’m typing this whilst also answering 101 questions about Our Generation dolls, posed by my youngest…)

HipstamaticPhoto-533895246.730634

 

Enriched dough rolls with chocolate chips (bread machine)

3 Replies

These came about trying to make chocolate chip brioches for my youngest who is obsessed with them. M&S does the best shop bought ones – most leave a really weird taste in your mouth. But we no longer have a local M&S (thanks Stuart Rose)  and anyway, shop bought bread-products are nearly always full of other ingredients I neither recognise nor welcome.

These aren’t strictly speaking brioches – there just isn’t enough butter or eggs to really warrant the name – but they are a lovely little enriched breakfast bread that’s a bit more exciting than bread, but with very little sugar. I promised my youngest I’d make her some brioches, but when the time came, I had very little time and was slightly awed by traditional brioche recipes which involve massaging an entire packet of butter into dough. Plus we were in the middle of jigsaw making and I didn’t want to “splinter off” as my youngest puts it, and start mucking about with dough when she is happy with shop bought. So I looked at my trusty Panasonic bread maker recipe book which is 20 years old; the newer models have actual recipes for brioche bread which I shall attempt anon, and also a special cycle for them which adds half the butter during the cycle. Mine didn’t, but it had a recipe for enriched bread dough. I tweaked it slightly, threw everything save for the chocolate chips into the machine – although I could have put those in too (if you put them in, put them in at the beginning with everything else not in any fancy dispenser drawer as they may melt and get stuck).

It was so easy. Ingredients in bread pan, dough cycle (which is 2hrs 20mins on mine), during which you can do a jigsaw, out, knead in about 80g of chocolate chips, shape into eight rolls – put on baking parchment, cover with cloth, prove in fridge overnight.

In the morning: oven on to 220C, little buns brushed with a bit of milk, baked for 10 mins. Eaten for breakfast. Delicious. I ate three just for testing purposes.

What you need

half a teaspoon of dried yeast (I use Dove’s Farm)

250g strong white bread flour

1 teaspoon of caster sugar

25g butter

1 tablespoon of milk

half a teaspoon of salt

1 egg

85ml water

80g chocolate chips

 

Fresh sourdough, from frozen

1 Reply

Making sourdough, once you know what you’re doing, isn’t laborious. Sure, I hate the beginning part: all that measuring out and refreshing (I am so lazy) – and have to gear myself up for it. But once the dough is formed, it’s just a matter of revisiting it for a little fumble every now and again. Until you need to shape and put it to bed in the couche cloth or banneton, for the final prove.

That said, there are some days when you just don’t have the time to do it. And often it is the days when you are the most busy, that you need to be eating good, home made food – but you don’t have time to make it.

I’ve long thought of experimenting with sourdough, to see if you can freeze it after final shaping. And you can.

Straight after final proving, flour it well, and freeze it. Your exact method may need some tweaking. I tend to make baguettes, so I shape, put on a tray, flour well, open freeze for a couple of hours then transfer into a plastic bag. If you have a boule shape you can freeze it in the banneton (well floured) but do set a timer to take it out and put it in a plastic bag – your bannetons probably won’t like being frozen.

The night before you need your bread – or a few hours before – take the shaped dough out of the plastic bag and transfer either back into a well floured banneton or a well floured couche cloth. Just as if it were ‘fresh’. I put it in the fridge to defrost til morning and have it’s final, final prove. You can leave it at room temperature if you are in more of a rush.

Remember that frozen and defrosted dough is far stretchier, so handle it as little as possible (hence all the flouring). You then do everything as per normal – heat up the oven with a tray in it, transfer the dough when it’s time to cook, slash, ice cubes, bake. This is where my flipping board, or planchette, comes in really handy for transferring it to the baking tray as the dough is harder to handle than fresh dough.

The one you see here suffered all sorts of indignities – I didn’t flour it, it was so stretchy I had to peel it off the planchette, it went into the oven full of injury and I didn’t hold out much hope for it. But sourdough is a miraculous thing and as forgiving as the best mother can be: 10 mins at 250C, 10mins at 220C and out it came: a perfectly wonderful loaf of bread, with an excellent crumb and a great taste.

Sliced sourdough from Waitrose. The best sliced white ever.

Leave a reply

I have been making sourdough bread for about seven years now (shout out to Emily for the starter). Thanks to following Dan Lepard’s recipes from his bread book, and a bit of occasional hand holding from him via the medium of technology, I feel I can bake a really quite good loaf of sourdough. Shaped as baguettes, rolls or one big boulder loaf of bread.

But sometimes I don’t want to. I’m just too lazy. And sometimes I crave uniform slices of bread, toasted.

Commercially available bread usually doesn’t interest me. (I have no chi-chi artisan bakers near me, which is why I started baking my own bread in the first place.)  I find the long list of ingredients terrifying. And yet, sometimes, I want a white bread sandwich or toast, all neat slices and not made from ‘home made bread’. I search in vein on the shelves for something that isn’t full of things I’ve never heard of and if I do ever give in and buy white sliced, it’s like eating nothing – completely unsatisfying.

A few months ago,  I read that Waitrose was going to introduce sliced sourdough which contained nothing but flour, water and salt. And lo, it did.

Bertinet sliced sourdough comes in white or wholemeal (not tried the latter as it’s always sold out). The white is glorious. I’ve only ever had it toasted so far but it makes the best toast. I would go as far as to say it is the best sliced white bread I’ve ever tasted. It’s quite sour – I like that – and it’s really satisfying. I can never, quite, eat two slices. With normal sliced-white I could keep eating it and just get hungrier (sourdough is supremely satisfying bread, with a lower G.I than commercially yeasted bread).

It’s no substitute for when you want a hunk of delicious home made bread dipped in olive oil or soup. And it’s not cheap compared to many white sliced loaves: but then, good bread shouldn’t be. It costs £3.50 a loaf. But you can stick it in the freezer and toast it when you fancy ‘hospital toast’ without the trip to hospital, but also want something more substantial than the usual pitiful offerings of white sliced.

(I know the photo I took isn’t up to, ahem, my usual standard, but I just wanted to show the packaging and it was 6am..)

Pump Street Bakery, Orford

2 Replies

Orford ness is one of our favourite places. We go there at least once a year, for a very long walk, a picnic, and chats. Even my youngest can manage to walk around the red and blue walk (not green though, it’s never been open when we’ve been there, we always time it wrong).

(For those on Fitbit, you can rack up about 15,000 steps, or six miles  walking those routes.)

What we like to do is get up really early and head out without breakfast, fantasising about what we’ll eat from the Pump Street Bakery, when we get there. The fact that such an amazing bakery exists in what is a tiny village in the middle of nowhere astounds and delights me. And makes me very jealous. I wish we had one where I live in Suffolk.

This is a tiny bakery, that is crammed into an old house. There are very few seats. But it is glorious. Please don’t miss it if you venture anywhere near Orford (which is a very pretty village). We’ve sampled the Bear’s Claws, the doughnuts, the brownies, the Eccles cakes and the almond croissants so far. You have to try the Eccles cake to believe that currants can be held in a puff pastry and be a thing of eye-watering beauty.

We have breakfast – cappuccinos (very good) with pastries dipped in them, perched on the benches outside.  I want to try a gibassier next time I’m there. I’m afraid the pastries are so good, I completely forget to photograph them, so the picture above is a photo of my feet on Orford ness beach. Probably my favourite beach in the world.

Not to be missed.