Category Archives: Bread

Burger/hotdog buns

Colomba – one of the most delicious things I’ve ever made

Colomba, soft, orangey, classy.

Colomba means dove in Italian and it’s a traditional Easter cake. It’s much like panettone – traditional Italian Christmas cake – except it doesn’t have sultanas.

Both colomba and panettone use a biga – or sponge starter. I’ve never attempted panettone because it’s not meant to be easy. Not difficult per se, but the recipe is long and there are various stages during which you really need to concentrate. Plus you need to hang panettone upside down when it’s done (until it ‘sets’). I was almost tempted last year when I found out that Patrick at Bakery Bits had started selling the waxed paper cases you need for panettone but then my mamma’s friend bought an exceptional one back from Italy so I never bothered to make my own.

Then Patrick posted a recipe for colomba and started selling Aroma Veneziana which is rich with citrus and almond oils with a hint of vanilla. He also sells the colomba cases (I found the 750g ample big enough for the recipe below. You can make the cake in a traditional cake tin but the dove shape is traditional). So I decided to try it.

God it was delicious. One of the best things I’ve ever made. So good that I couldn’t believe I’d actually made it myself. (I’m aware Easter has passed now, but this shouldn’t put you off trying it.)

I made a few changes to Patrick’s recipe which I’ve detailed below. I actually made two colomba cakes – retardeding the proof time on my first attempt because I ran out of time (I put it in the fridge at the stage marked * below, because from start to finish this cake takes quite a long time, you really need to start it in the morning) and cooked it for 40 mins. Refrigerating it didn’t seem to affect it at all, if anything I think it was tastier. It was supremely moist – a tiny bit underdone and doughy at the very centre, but unnoticeable to all but me. I cooked the second one for longer – probably 50 mins and it was more authentic ‘colomba’ but slightly dryer. My oven is ferocious so I cooked at more like 180/190C. Patrick’s tip of putting silver foil on top is one to be followed, as the egg white/sugar coating burns easily. In fact I covered the whole of the colomba for the middle portion of the cooking time.

Anyway, this is what you need to do.

First stage: the sponge

15g caster sugar
100g warm water
3 egg yolks (reserve two egg whites, freeze the others if you don’t know what to do with them immediately)
11g instant dried yeast
70g strong white bread flour

Mix together the sugar and water with the egg yolks; separately, mix together the yeast and flour and add this to the egg/sugar/water mixture. You get a thick batter. cover with cling film and leave for a good 30-40mins until it’s really bubbly and frothy (note: my kitchen is about 20 degrees, if yours is warmer/cooler you’ll nee to adjust the time accordingly).

Second stage: first dough

The frothing, elastic sponge, as above.
75g warm water
45g very soft unsalted butter
6g dried yeast
210g strong white bread flour

Whisk the water into the sponge, then mix in the butter. Separately mix the flour and yeast together and add these to the sponge. You should have a thick, stick, moist batter. Cover with cling film and leave for about two hours, until doubled in volume.

Third stage: second dough

The first dough, as above.
145g caster sugar
15g honey
3 egg yolks
grated zest of two oranges
2 teaspoons of Aroma Veneziana (this is my favourite big, I adore the smell and it gives you a hint of the good things to come).
115g very soft unsalted butter
250g strong white bread flour
5g sea salt, finely ground
150g chopped mixed peel

Take your first dough and now mix in the sugar, honey and egg yolks. It’ll look a bit unpromising and ‘separate’ – don’t panic. Add the Aroma Veneziana, the orange zest and butter, then the flour and salt. Now, Patrick didn’t add the mixed peel til later (see his original recipe, link above), but I added mine here too. Mix all together.

Now here, Patrick says to knead until you have a soft, smooth, elastic dough. My dough was sticky and a bit unmanageable so I rested it for ten minutes, then gave it a light knead, rested it for ten minutes, then gave it a light knead, rested it for ten minutes, then gave it a light knead. I did this on a lightly oiled chopping board.

Then I picked up the original recipe which says to put it in a oiled bowl and cover with cling film * and leave to rise ‘dramatically’, Patrick says until it’s about three times the original volume which takes about 3-4 hours.

(For the first colomba this * is where I refrigerated it and the next morning, took it out and let it sit all morning until it got to room temperature and then started to rise ‘dramatically’.)

When that’s done, Patrick cuts his dough in half and puts it in the case (after rolling it), one half making the ‘wings’ and one half the head to tail bit (so they overlap). I didn’t do this, I cut three pieces to fit head to tail, and two for the wings, rolled it out to flatten it put it in the case and pinched the dough together.

I found the case was quite floppy once the dough was in it, so I sat it on a baking tray and when the time came put the whole lot in the oven.

At this stage you let it sit and rise again for about 2-3 hours, until doubled in volume, covered with a damp tea towel. Mine easily took more like three hours.

Fourth stage: the delicious topping

2 egg whites
25g caster sugar
25g ground almonds

crushed sugar cubes
flaked almonds

Just before baking you make a paste of the topping ingredients: 2 egg whites, 25g caster sugar, 25g ground almonds and put the whole lot on top of the colomba, spread out with a pastry brush/back of spoon to make sure every bit is covered. Please don’t miss this bit – it’s the topping which really makes it. Scatter broken up sugar cubes and flaked almonds on top – I used three sugar cubes and that was plenty.

Cook for 40 mins at 200C and check if it’s done by putting a skewer in. If it’s burning put silver foil on top. Even if it looks really done – do check with the skewer, if it comes out really gunky it’s not done yet.

I can’t even begin to tell you how great this is. Patrick says it keeps for four days in a tin, but I made my two a week ago and although one is gone, the other is still superb. But if you do have any left you can always toast it/butter it. We eat it in the morning dipped in caffe latte.

This recipe seems long – it is. But take your time and try it. It’s pretty fool proof considering the result!

Let me know how you get on…and don’t save it just for Easter!

Pete’s pizza dough

4 Replies

This isn’t sourdough, and it’s a bread machine recipe. But it’s a lovely pizza dough, and one which Pete, my partner, has perfected over the years.

I don’t understand people who ooh-ahh over the fact that we make our own pizzas. It’s simplicity itself and you can make them in advance.

I make these in two Mermaid trays – but I like them thin. If you like your pizzas thick well, I’m not sure I have much to say to you really. Pizzas shouldn’t be thick.

From start to finish you can have pizzas on the table in about fifty-five minutes. The pizza-dough cycle on my bread machine takes 40 mins, then you just roll out, put toppings on and they’re cooked in 8-10 mins. And for those of you who have children, this is a lovely thing to get them involved in.

Here’s what you need (Pete works in ounces, I work in grams, I’ve kept true to his recipe here):

8floz hand hot water
2tablespoons olive oil
12oz of plain white, soft flour (note: not bread flour)
1teaspoon caster sugar
1teaspoon salt
2teaspoons yeast

You put all the ingredients in your bread machine in the order the manufacturer recommends, above is the order I put mine in as that’s what Panasonic recommends. The pizza dough cycle is, as I said, 40 mins long on my machine. (The regular dough cycle is 2.20mins so that should give you an idea, you don’t want a long cycle.)

The pizza dough before rolling

When it’s done, oil a suitable surface (I use a very large chopping board so that I can move it about if need be) and your hands, and take the dough out. Sometimes this dough is really sticky, other times more manageable. It makes for a better dough when it’s stickier (higher hydration) so there is a compensation.

Because I use the dough across two baking trays, I cut mine in half; but if you’re making – say – four round pizzas, cut into four..etc. I’m sure you can work it out..

Roll out the dough, as thin as you can, to fit your tray/tin. If you can do that thing of throwing the dough up in the air to make it thin, great: do teach me how to do it too!

When it’s rolled out to an approximate size, I lay it on the tray (note: I oil the tray and coat it with polenta/cornmeal), rest if for five mins and then stretch it into the corners/sides.

Now you can, at this stage, go straight into doing the toppings and either cook it or put it in the fridge (naked or with all the toppings on, I put mine in naked). You can also freeze it (in which case cook straight from frozen, just give it a few more mins). I cover mine with cling film place one tray on top of another (if no toppings on) to save space in the fridge.

When you’re ready to cook, if you haven’t already, put on whatever toppings you want. For the tomato bit on the top, I use Waitrose Sundried Tomato paste – a tiny amount spread on the pizza base (it’s quite salty so go carefully). Then I put on artichoke hearts, salami slices, olives, ham, mushrooms, mozzarella, asparagus if in season etc. Or just the tomato paste and some mozzarella for those who like it really simple (boring..) Just before it goes into the oven, splash some olive oil on it and cook it for 7-10 mins. My oven is very hot and has a pizza setting, yours might too. You can tell when it’s done as it will have bubbled up and be golden.

Take out and slide onto a chopping board, slice up, eat and feel very virtuous. Pizza doesn’t have to be unhealthy..or at least whilst not pretending this is a health food, it’s as healthy as pizza can be.

La pizza, I put the rocket on after it came out of the oven

Le Couronne, or the loaf with the hole

5 Replies

I got really excited when Patrick from Bakery Bits, tweeted to say he had a new banneton in stock in a couronne, or ring shape. It was in cane, which I’ve never used before (all my bannetons are wicker and lined in linen).

I’ve a healthy collection of bannetons that I’ve built up over the last year, but in baton and round shapes. I really fancied a couronne shaped one. (I’ve been obsessed with round bread with a hole in it since my purchase of a Tortana from Flour City.)

So I bought one, and also took the opportunity to replenish my Aroma Panettone, which immediately transports me back to my childhood (you seen that scene in Ratatouille where whathisface the restaurant critic, goes back in time to his mother’s kitchen? That’s what this does to me).

Anyway, I was EXCITED about it. Made a batch of my every day bread, put it into the fridge for a retarded proof and got up in the morning.

First thing: the dough stuck to the banneton (the middle bit is wood). Not a good start. I slashed and cooked it and the hole completely closed up so that I ended up with a round loaf with a tiny dimple.

Not good.

I emailed Patrick. He recommended rice flour to aid non-stick (I had used rye). That remedied the sticking situation, but I just couldn’t get the hole to keep. (Sadly no pictures of bread proved in this banneton as I just never had a camera handy.)

When you cook bread, you want it to rise, but you can’t choose where it rises, so any hole you make (like in bagels) has to be bigger than you want it to end up with. But I just couldn’t get the hole to stay.

I knew the fabulous (and far more experienced baker than I) Joanna from Zeb Bakes had also bought one, so I asked her what she thought. She was also struggling with it. We both thought the middle bit should be thicker.

Patrick was v.helpful and kept going back to the manufacturers who said it should work. But it didn’t. Patrick got another banneton in, this time in linen lined wicker. He sent it to me free of charge. This banneton just looked much better, the middle bit was thicker and the whole shape was more promising.

It worked much better, too. Here is the loaf I made that first time. I did however, enlarge the hole once it was on the baking tray, which isn’t for the nervous. I haven’t fully got the hang of slashing the dough however (any thoughts anyone?) as I find it quite hard to make slashes on such a small ring of dough, such as it is before it puffs up.

First loaf using linen-lined wicker couronne banneton. V.nice.


Second loaf in the couronne, this was a white dough

Second time I made a white loaf but was more gung-ho didn’t enlarge the hole on the tray. This is what happened:


Hmm.

The third time I tried sticking a muffin ring in the middle. This did indeed hold the middle open, but a) the middle didn’t crust up properly and b) the ring sort of got swallowed into the bread. It was fine, and a really great loaf. I’m going to carry on experimenting with a tin in the middle and maybe even – gasp – put ice cubes in there. Just till the bread has developed a crust and then remove the tin.

In the meantime, if you’re careful you can get a really nice ring shape, but you need to play around with the dough on the tray. I do love the couronne bread shape however as you get maximum crust, not great for children who are fussy about these things, but good for me, who does.

Any more experienced bakers out there with any tips, I’d welcome them. Grazie!

Bagels – not sourdough

16 Replies

These bagels are not just not sourdough, they’re made in a breadmaker. Nevertheless, here they are, all blousey and almost industrial compared to my artisan sourdough.

But look: they’re delicious. Nothing at all like bought bagels which may look surgically enhanced but are as interesting as dust to eat (although if you remember that fantastic sketch from Little Britain, dust is a valuable diet food…). The only memorable bagel I ever had out was at the Geffrye museum cafe, I had it with smoked salmon and a very fine cappuccino. A memorable little lunch that shows food doesn’t have to be fancy to be remembered.

So, my bagels. I’ve been making them for years and the recipe is from some bread machine book I had but adapted slightly (in what way I can’t remember now but anyway it works which is what matters). They don’t look pretty – ignore that and just enjoy the taste.

These are excellent for children – they just love them. In which case I make them smaller and end up with 12-16.

For eight large bagels you need:

2 teaspoons of dried yeast
450g strong white bread flour
1 1/2 teaspoons of salt – I grind up Maldon sea salt
1 1/2 tablespoons of sugar – I use caster
230ml water, whatever temperature it comes out of the cold tap.

egg or malt wash – see later

baking tray
clean tea towels
saucepan and slotted spoon

I put it into my bread machine, which is a Panasonic bread machine and the only sort I recommend. Your bread machine may ask for the ingredients to go in in a different order but mine asks for the yeast first. You then select the dough cycle. Mine is 2hrs 20mins long. Be careful not to put it on a short dough cycle (mine also has one for pizza which is 45 mins long) as it won’t work.

In the meantime, get a baking tray

When the dough is ready, you divide it up into how many bagels you want. This mixture makes eight regular sized bagels, but I have made more mini ones. I roll each piece of dough between my palms to make a ball. I rest them for a few minutes (in reality you can start on the first one by the time you’ve done the last one if you follow), then roll them into sausage shapes and loop the ends around. This isn’t a regular bagel shape – none of that perfect roundness – but honestly once baked you won’t care. It’s the best way, I’ve found, of keeping the hole intact.

As you shape them, place each one on a lightly oiled baking tray or one with baking parchment on it – make sure they’re not touching or you’ll have a hard job separating them and they might collapse as you manhandle them. When they’re all shaped, leave them to rise, covered with a dry, clean [why do they always say this, does anyone use a dirty one?] tea-towel ** for about 10-30 mins (30mins if your kitchen is cold, 10mins if it’s warm or you put them in a warm place). There’s a lot of yeast in them so don’t overprove.

**Note here: you can – and I regularly do – also put them, at this stage, into a refrigerator overnight for their rise, and then go straight to boiling them. I think this gives them a nicer flavour and chewier texture and it also means you can have freshly baked bagels for breakfast.

Whilst they’re resting and puffing up, put a big saucepan of water onto boil and preheat the oven to 220C/Gas 7. I use a casserole dish pan which is shallow, but wide. You don’t need the water to be deep deep, as the bagels will float, but if you have a wide aperture then you can get more in at once.

When they’re done and the water is on a rolling boil, put the bagels in to the pan. Unless your pan is a huge paella pan, you will have to do them in batches – that’s fine. You boil them for about 30 secs each side (so turn them over with the slotty spoon). Watch them puff up more. Take them out one at a time with the slotted spoon and place on a clean tea towel to drain them and do the next batch til they’re all done.

Either get a clean baking tray and oil it lightly, or wipe off the last one you used and re-oil it. OR if you’re like me and have one of those reusable baking sheets that you used to prove the bagels on, you just now put them back on them. But either way, place the boiled bagels onto the tray. It’s fine if they touch, because once cooked they’re more stable than at the proof stage, so you can tear them apart. But if you can do them so they don’t touch all the better. Mine are always crammed together as that’s the only way you can get them cooked all in one go and at this stage – i.e. proved and boiled – you don’t really want them hanging round waiting to be baked for longer than necessary.

Once the bagels are on the tray, you’re on the home run. Either make an egg wash of beaten egg, or use this fabulous dried malt extract which I mix up with some water and brush on. You can then either cook the bagels plain or scatter on some sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower, linseeds etc.

Cook for 12-15 mins (this is in my oven, yours may differ). They’ll be a lovely dark golden brown when they’re done.
These keep for a day or two but are best eaten on the day of being made and toasted thereafter. They freeze really well – just freeze when cooked to have lovely fresh bagels another day!

The shaping is getting better..

Number of the beast bread

9 Replies

I love this loaf

We do love white sourdough in our house, but there’s only so much white flour stuff you can (should) eat. I like the Mill loaf but that’s not sourdoughy enough for us. What I wanted was something very similar to the bread I get in Italy that’s not white, not wholemeal but suitably tangy and ‘paysan’ as we call it.

I think this loaf is it, although the more I make it the more I’ve realised that it really improves from a very long proving time, it doesn’t like being too cold and the dough should be fairly wet and sticky, so you need to be brave whilst kneading and use oil and not add any more flour. There can be a dramatic difference – better crumb, better flavour – between a loaf that’s been proved over ‘just’ 12 hours and one that’s had 24hrs plus. If the prove is too (relatively speaking) short, the bread becomes a bit too ‘wholesome’. It’s a difficult bread in that respect, to get right.

This is what you do to make two loaves.

You take

400g white leaven
666g cold water (number of the beast, hence the name)
500g white flour
500g wholemeal/other flour
3tsp salt (I’m experimenting with cutting this down).

You mix the leaven with the water, add the flours and salt and mix to a messy dough.

Rest for 10 mins, then, a la Dan Lepard, knead lightly.

Rest 10 minutes then knead lightly (I knead for twelve counts).

Rest for 10 minutes then knead lightly. Rest for 30 minutes then knead lightly.

Rest for 1 hour then knead lightly.

Rest for two hours, then knead lightly and shape and place into two bannetons (I use a 1kilo round and a 600g baton).

Rest in fridge overnight for a good twelve hours or more. I’ve rested it for up to 72 hours.

Preheat oven to 220 with one baking tray on a high shelf, one underneath. When up to temperature turn loaf out of the banneton, slash with a bread knife and put in the oven. Whilst oven still open, turn ice cubes onto the bottom tray. Close oven and turn the temperature up to 250C and cook for 15 mins. Lower temperature to 220 for further 15 minutes.

A tale of two loaves

Making sourdough whilst drunk

2 Replies

A few days ago I started making some white sourdough, in large part to take to a friend’s house and also because I fancied a change from our usual largely-wholemeal sourdough. It turned into a long process. I kept taking out the starter, meaning to get the dough going, but somehow never finding the five minutes I needed to do it.

On Thursday of last week (it’s Monday as I write now) I weighed out my starter, refreshed it in the bowl to make it up to the weight I wanted (400g of starter), refreshed the starter in the Kilner jar and put the latter back in the fridge. However, in between me doing this and the starter in the bowl becoming active, my partner had made a loaf of yeasted-bread (no doubt fed up at having no bread..) and used up some flour. Because I needed a lot of white flour – 1k of the stuff – there now wasn’t enough. So the dough became a mishmash of white flour, wholemeal and whatever else I could bung in. It ended up being 500g of white, about 430g of wholemeal and 70g of barley flour.

I started it off. Knead, rest, knead, rest. Somewhere along the line, that magic, nebulous hour of evening came, the one that tells you it’s socially acceptable to have some wine and thus it was that I poured myself ‘un dito di vino’ (a finger of wine): it really doesn’t take very much to make me feel merry. I started chatting to my partner, had another dito di vino, la la la la. Suddenly I remembered the bread. It had sat there for hours (it was at the ’30 min rest’ stage, some 30 minutes that ended up being).

I kneaded it, slung it in a bowl and put it in the fridge, thinking “fuck”. Over the next few days I kept doing this – taking it out, kneading it and then putting it back in as I kept running out of time. Look, I’m a very social, busy person when I’m not being a hermit. To cut a really long story short, it wasn’t til last night that I put the dough into some bannetons and put it in the fridge for what I planned to be the final rise.

I had no idea what to expect, so we’d made some ‘normal’ bread for eldest daughter’s sandwiches this morning, just in case (I say ‘we’ it was of course entirely not of my doing).

What I really didn’t expect was to get some bread that was – is – just delicious. It’s far more aerated than a normal loaf (which usually contains 60/40 white to wholemeal; this loaf as you see above was 50/50. This is because it had a higher hydration than my usual loaf (65% instead of 55%), whilst having less starter (40% instead of 50%). I have no idea what any of those numbers really mean, but for once, making a mistake whilst cooking has led me to a happy discovery. Not only has it got far bigger holes than my usual 60/40 loaf, because I made it over four days, it has a wonderful taste to it.

This is, perhaps, how people invent their own recipes. My knead/rest cycle went something like this, for those interested:

Knead, rest for ten minutes.
Knead, rest for ten minutes.
Knead, rest for ten minutes.
Knead, rest for four hours.
Knead, cover guiltily with a cloth and put in fridge for 14 hours.
Take out of fridge and ignore dough for an hour or so.
Knead, put back in fridge for a day, or so.
Take out of fridge, knead. Put back in fridge for another day.
Take out of fridge. Knead. Rest for one or two hours – who can remember. Shape, put in bannetons, cover, put in fridge for 18 hours.
Cook. Eat. Enjoy.

When I said sourdough was the most forgiving of breads, I wasn’t lying.

A very good sourdough me thinks.

Making sourdough: what equipment do you need?

8 Replies

As has been mentioned before, I like gadgets, I like buying new kit. But there are some things that are more important than others. Making sourdough bread should be about connecting you to an easier, but also harder, time. When things were simpler, but more effort went into them. I promise you that once you start making and eating sourdough on a regular basis, your life changes in little ways.

Yeh, yeh, whateva. But until that happens: shopping.

What to keep your sourdough starter in?

You need to be a bit careful about what you keep it in. A clean glass jar will do, but it has to have room for the starter to grow. If you refresh it to capacity, there’s a very real possibility that your starter could explode the jar as it ferments. I use a Kilner jar. You can use a large jam jar. You can keep your starter in plastic of course, but yuk.

My starter in its Kilner jar, aka the mothership

Okay what other bits do I need?

Disappointingly little, really. If you want a past-time that involves spending loads of money on kit, you need to take up fishing or golf. Things that I use and think are really useful are:

Large stainless steel bowls that I bought in Ikea once. Actually that’s a lie, I inherited them from my boyfriend when we moved in together. But you can buy stainless steel bowls anywhere. Don’t spend loads and bigger rather than smaller but not so big you could spin yourself round in them. But don’t sweat it if you don’t have the, any big old bowls would do.

A dough scraper: absolutely worth buying if you don’t have one. When the dough is really frisky, there are times it’s hard to handle and I knead it using just the dough scraper, moving the dough around as I go. Without wishing to start sounding like an ad for it, ours is from Ikea. It’s stainless steel and I also inherited it when my boyfriend/partner blah de blah moved in together. See “living with a boy” as Monica from Friends once put it, has it uses. I recommend using a stiff (rather than those super flexi ones) dough scraper, insofar as I’m experienced enough to recommend anything bready. They make it easier to handle the dough and easier to scrap up bits of dough that have dried on any surface you’ve been working on.

Bannetons or proving baskets – covered in full here. You can make sourdough without them, but they make life so much easier and sweeter.

You also need something to cook the bread on. You’ll have baking trays, so use them. I use my Mermaid baking trays which I also use for tons of other stuff: not cheap but I bake a lot and they last years. I love the older Mermaid trays, the anodised aluminum ones rather than the non stick ones. Non stick, I find a bit scary. Again, any old baking tray will do, what’s important is to preheat it.

Top Gourmet chopping board with my scraper.

Top Gourmet chopping boards – I really rate these. As chopping boards but also as surfaces to make your bread on. I have the big size one (40cm by 30cm) and I can move it around the kitchen as I work. You may not work like that and working on your regular kitchen work top may be fine for you, but remember that sourdough is hours in the making, which means it could be taking up that bit of work surface for half the day. I oil my board before each kneading and rest the bread on it (covered with an oiled bowl, so I lift the dough up, oil underneath where it was laying, then knead etc). So any chopping board will do in theory, but these are good: light and therefore easy to move around, hygenic (you can dishwasher them if you want to, bear this in mind when ordering the really big ones) and they store easily as they’re so thin. These are the future of chopping boards as far as I’m concerned. Plus they’re black so chic in my book.

What you really don’t need when you first start out:

You really don’t need a peel if you use bannetons, you just flip the bread out onto the tray (always preheat the tray).

You don’t need a bread stone. But when you get one, you’ll need a peel.

Special dough hand whisks: a fork will do just as well.

You don’t need a grignette or lame, just use a bread knife.

You don’t need a couche proving cloth until you start making baguettes.

Save all that stuff as incentives to go further into making sourdough and for present material.

Arkansas bread

2 Replies

I have a habit of not being able to say certain words correctly. Often I’ve said a word the same way for years, in the privacy of my head, but no-one knows I can’t pronounce it properly. It’s rarely a problem unless I have to suddenly say that word out loud and can’t get away from it and then people start pointing and laughing. And because of this, I often get words mixed up.

It started with ‘calzolaio’ and ‘colazione’. When I was a little girl, and in Italy with my Daddie (I feel compelled to point out that my parents are still together, my mother was just back home in central London, this wasn’t a ‘summer with the estranged parent kinda thing), I remember seeing a sign saying ‘calzolaio’ (cobblers, shoe-menders). The next day I said to my father “I’ve found a place we can go to for breakfast (colazione).” You can guess the rest.

Like a lot of stupid people, I used to pronounce ‘Arkansas’ just as it looks ‘Ar-Kan-sas’, instead of Ar-kan-saw. In my head, I still do. I’m not related to George Bush, I promise.

What has any of this to do with bread?

In the search for more sourdough recipes, I recently bought Andrew Whitley’s Bread Matters. Loads of people, far more experienced bakers than I, rave about this book. So I in no way mean to detract from that. The fact that I didn’t get on with it – I didn’t – is entirely due to my own failings.

It’s a big book with almost no photographs. I need pictures to help me with the words where food is concerned. Where almost anything is concerned. The way Whitley makes his sourdough is also different from the way Dan Lepard makes his. I can see how people would think sourdough is even more complicated than it is after reading Bread Matters. I just couldn’t get my head round it and I almost ended up crying.

Anyway, in it was, and I’m imagining still is, a recipe for Arkatena bread. Which I immediately, and persistently read as Ar-kan-sas bread, hence the name of this post. I fancied the look of it because it contains gram (chickpea) flour, which I had in and wanted to find a use for. But I could see instantly that I’d never be able to follow the recipe for it, so before I threw myself down and started kicking my feet into the wooden floor, I decided to bloody well vary the recipe to suit myself.

This is what I did.

I used 300g white levain starter

to this I added

50g gram flour
50g wholemeal flour
300g white bread flour
7g sea salt, ground up in a pestle and mortar
300g cold water

I mixed the starter up with the water, then added the flours and salt and then kneaded it for 10-15 seconds at a time, resting it for 10 mins. Then kneading it for 10-15 seconds and resting it for another ten minutes, then kneading it for 10-15 seconds and resting it for another ten minutes then repeating but this time resting it for

30 mins
1 hour
1 hour
1 hour

Then I shaped it and put it in a banneton to prove overnight at 4 degrees. Then I cooked it at 220 for 20 mins or so.

It was probably the most ‘worthy’ loaf I’ve ever made, in other words it was quite dense. And it smelled very ‘yeasty’ despite me not adding any yeast. It would be very, very good with some soup or cheese and chutney. I’m not sure I’d like it for sandwiches.

The Arkansas bread as I’ve named it, with a big cross slash to celebrate the forthcoming visit of the Pope. Yeh right.

The crumb. Pretty impressive save, me thinks.

Pane Amore e Cha Cha Cha

This is a blog about things I consume