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Posts Tagged ‘sourdough bread’

Weekend Baking

Posted in Frugal Living, Recipes, tagged , , on September 10, 2012| 84 Comments »

Something unusual happened last week.

Pete was getting some meat out of the freezer, and he mentioned that there were just two sourdough rosetta rolls left in there.  That’s probably the lowest our bread supplies have been in years – no doubt a product of my recent photo-snapping hypomania. It was time for some serious weekend baking.

I baked eight wonky sourdough ciabatta loaves and a batch of supernatural brownies on Friday. Only four of the loaves made it to the freezer – the rest were eaten or given away.

These were followed by a batch of Dan Lepard’s potato stotties, which were gone before they had a chance to cool…

Inspired by lovely Joanna’s recent post, I baked another batch of semolina bbq buns. I’d forgotten how much I adore these!  And it was fun to bake a couple of quick yeast breads for weekend eating – it made a nice change from sourdough.

As usual, I over-scored these, so some of them broke apart into teeny tiny mini buns.  We had visitors on Sunday, and their small children were absolutely delighted…

I uncovered an old tub of ricotta in the fridge nearing its expiry date, so I drained it and tipped it into a small pie dish.  The top was drizzled with a little extra virgin olive oil and topped with a scattering of citrus salt, rosemary and thyme, then baked in a hot oven until firm and golden. It made a great accompaniment to the buns and stotties…

And finally, I baked four large (1.3kg) white sourdough loaves in my Römertopf clay loaf pans.  These have become a house standard – the boys enjoy having “toast” bread, and I love not having to preheat the oven.  I now cut the loaves in half before freezing them, as the wolves have been known to defrost and eat a whole one at a single sitting!

I baked two regular loaves, and two with the Billington’s Molasses Sugar that I bought last week.  The small change resulted in a deeper coloured crumb and crust…

I slashed the tops with two sweeping arcs that crossed at either end, which produced a nice, even oven spring. Pete made a comment about loaves and fishes…

So…the bread drawer in the freezer is fully restocked. But given that school holidays are imminent, I’ll probably be baking again next weekend!

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Playing with Bread

Posted in Recipes, tagged , , , , , on August 24, 2011| 65 Comments »

I’ve been playing around with a new bread formula.

It’s a lower hydration (69%) version of my ciabatta con semola rimacinata di grano duro, and it’s proven (no pun intended) to be a good base dough for shaping.

  • 300g active sourdough starter (fed at a ratio of one cup water to one cup flour)
  • 580g cold water
  • 500g bakers/bread flour
  • 500g Semola Rimacinata di Grano Duro (remilled durum wheat semolina flour)
  • 18g fine sea salt

Note: don’t be tempted to use fine or coarse semolina instead of remilled semolina (durum wheat) flour – the former is too coarse and won’t absorb enough water, and you’ll end up with a soggy mess. If you can’t find the rimacinata, substitute more bread flour or 00 flour in its place and reduce the water to 550g.

. . . . .

I’ve been experimenting with a new shape, inspired by this photo sent to me by my friend Anna in Paris.  It’s known as La Sarmentine – a sarmenteux is a climbing plant, and Anna thinks the name might be related to that.

The bread is made by shaping a long baguette and then using scissors to cut a slit into the ends of each loaf to allow them to be separated into “ears”.  I was really happy with the crumb…

. . . . .

Also, inspired by Brydie’s quest, I’ve used this dough to make Italian style rolls.  After half a dozen phone calls, I finally tracked down a rosetta stamp at Chefs’ Warehouse (and I’m still wondering why I didn’t just call them first!).

The dough was shaped into 125g balls, before being imprinted with the cutter. Each batch of dough made 15 rolls…

Shape the bulk proved dough into a tight ball first, then dust the top well with rye flour and stamp hard – right through to the bottom of the ball.  Dip the cutter into rye flour before each press, and allow the rolls to prove a second time before baking. I didn’t manage to achieve a hollow centre, but Small Man did declare at dinner that he thought these were my “best breads ever”…

I now own three cutters – the rosetta stamp, plus a couple of German made metal ones which were a gift from the lovely Chris (who is not cranky, despite what his girls call him)…

I haven’t had much success with the small metal star-shaped one yet, but the spiral one has produced amazing rolls, which look like small sculptures…

This new dough recipe has been very popular – we’ve had the neighbours over filling large paper bags with rolls for school lunches…

Playing with bread is always such fun – thanks Brydie, Anna and Chris for inspiring this latest baking adventure!

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In My Kitchen, November 2010

Posted in In My Kitchen, tagged , , , , , , , on November 15, 2010| 39 Comments »

In my kitchen…

…is a batch of sourdough spelt epi. They’ll be served with extra virgin olive oil and homemade dukkah.  Epi are easy to make (there are step by step instructions here), and they never fail to impress…

In my kitchen…

…are our very first new potatoes!  The plants aren’t ready to be harvested yet, but we’ve been bandicooting (pinching new potatoes from just under the soil at the top of the mound).  They’ve grown surprisingly quickly – we only planted our first batch of potatoes in late August.  Below are a large red norland, a few King Edwards and our first baby bintje…

In my kitchen…

…is today’s harvest of beans.  We’re picking this amount every other day at the moment, and often eating them raw…

In my kitchen…

…is a homemade bug catcher.  A wineglass half-filled with cider vinegar or white wine vinegar is irresistible to annoying little fruit flies, and by adding a drop or two of dishwashing detergent to the mix, the bugs aren’t able to fly out again once they’ve dropped in for a drink…

In my kitchen…

…are bread making treasures!  Lovely Wendy went hunting for proving baskets for me in Hong Kong, ever generous Christine sent me one of her homemade bread bags, and my dear friend Joanna organised a Danish dough whisk to be sent to me from the UK (I’ve been brandishing it like a magic wand!)…

In my kitchen…

…are the salt holder and egg beater of  Mrs M, our beloved neighbour who passed away in July. I think of her every time I use them…

In my kitchen…

…is a tray of supernatural brownies – my default recipe whenever I need a large quantity of baked treats in a hurry…

In my kitchen…

…are the first fruits from our supposedly non-fruiting prunus!  I took these photos for Heidi in August.  At the time our tree was covered in blossoms…

In the eighteen years it’s been growing, our prunus has never fruited properly – we’ve had the occasional tiny orb which fell off, but never anything worth picking.

This year we were surprised to see quite a few medium sized plums – they were dropping off the tree before they were ripe, so we collected all we could reach – about 450g (1lb) in total.

Not surprisingly, the plums weren’t great eating, but loathe to waste them, we submerged them in vodka and brandy with sugar.  Hopefully we’ll end up with a drinkable plum brandy in a few months’ time!

So tell me, what’s happening in your kitchen this month?

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Sourdough Fruit Loaf

Posted in Recipes, tagged , , , , on August 27, 2010| 31 Comments »

I’ve been experimenting with sourdough fruit loaves, and came up with this rather pleasing combination. It’s slightly spicy, slightly sweet and quite addictive!

For my sourdough baking friends, the formula is listed below, but in more general terms, I adapted my standard recipe as follows:

1. The all white bakers’ flour was replaced with a mix of bakers’ flour to organic wholemeal spelt to organic rye in a ratio of 4:2:1 (600g bakers, 300g spelt, 150g rye).

2. A teaspoon each of honey and ground mixed spice was added to the dough.

3. Approximately half the flour weight in walnuts and mixed dried fruit was worked in at the initial kneading.

I didn’t soak the rye or spelt, but will try doing that next time to see if it alters the texture of the bread at all.  These loaves tend to brown very quickly in the oven, so need to be monitored carefully to avoid burning.

As you can probably guess, we’re having lots of fruit toast for breakfast this week!

Sourdough Fruit Loaf (makes three 850g loaves)

  • 300g sourdough starter (166% hydration)
  • 550g water
  • 75g extra virgin olive oil
  • 600g bakers’ flour
  • 300g organic wholemeal spelt flour
  • 150g organic rye flour
  • 1 teaspoon honey
  • 1 teaspoon mixed spice
  • 16g salt
  • 100g walnut halves
  • 100g raisins
  • 200g dried cranberries
  • 200g Turkish figs, chopped

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Let Them Eat Bread…

Posted in Food & Friends, Recipes, tagged , on August 6, 2009| 22 Comments »

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I am seriously chuffed with today’s bread.  See the coveted “blistered crust” in the photo above?  It takes a lot of skill and technique to achieve that…or in my case, blind luck.  I’ve never been able to identify what I do that causes the crust to occasionally bubble and blister, but when it does, I feel very pleased with myself nonetheless.

I had to bake four loaves of sourdough this morning, because those sons of mine eat like wolves.  They devour a 650g loaf of sourdough bread every day, plus the occasional loaf with dinner, which means that I need to bake a large batch twice a week. Fortunately, my sourdough starter is now so well trained that it’s a pretty easy process.  It involves very little handling on my part, but lots of time.

Here’s my twice weekly Winter schedule (it changes in Summer because the dough proves much faster):

Day 1, 9am: Take the starter out of the fridge, feed it some flour and water.

Day 1, 2pm: Feed the starter another serve of flour and water.

Day 1, 7pm: Mix up the dough, let it rest briefly. Give it a short knead, then pop it into a large, oiled plastic box to prove.  Actual amount of time spent handling the dough at this stage is about 10 minutes all up.  Go to bed.

Day 2, first thing in the morning: Turn the risen dough onto an oiled bench, divide it up, and shape it into loaves.  Pop them into plastic wicker baskets to prove, covered.  Turn the oven on.

Day 2, an hour later: Turn the loaves onto a peel, slash the tops, then shovel them into the oven.  Bake for 40 minutes.  Remove from oven and cool on wire racks.

That’s it.  Once cold, I slice the loaves up and store them in the freezer, taking one or two (loaves) out each morning, as needed. It’s now so ingrained in our weekly rhythm that I can’t remember the last time we purchased a loaf of bread.

One of the best things about baking your own is that it frees you from the  daily supermarket trek – we only have to go once a month, if that.  Plus it saves us a fortune – a good loaf of sourdough can cost between $5 and $8, whereas our loaves work out at about 65c each.  And that’s using premium extra virgin olive oil and top quality bakers flour. When you multiply that by at least eight loaves a week, it’s a pretty substantial saving!

 

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