Desolate.

This was the vacuous state of my fridge when I opened it yesterday.  I do love the challenge of being able to go to my fridge, assessing the ingredients and making something truly delicious.  This was a tough one.  Half an onion, a slither of lemon, a quarter of a cabbage, various condiments and a modicum of vegetable spreads.  The two vegetable troughs in the bottom were full of potatoes and some slightly green garlic bulbs.

I actually passed this one and grabbed some frozen stuff out of the freezer. 

As you might know, I had a bit of a baking cataclysm on Saturday.  My bread truly was quite unpleasant and most of it was deposited straight into the bin and forgotten about.  Just to make me feel even more insecure in my baking world, my girlfriend decided to whip up some banana bread.  It turned out to be absolutely delectable and gave me a stark lesson in how much I have to learn.

Banana Bread

The recipe for this you can find on the BBC website, I think its the first one you find if you do a search.

As far as dinner was concerned we managed to unearth a lentil curry from the freezer which still looked faintly edible after it's indiscernibly long incarceration in the frozen wastes of drawer number 2.

I made some turmeric rice to go with it (didn't you see all the blurb about curcumin in the news recently?) and fried up some fresh poppadoms.

Finally, just to enhance the aurulent presentation of this selection I finely grated some carrot and dressed it in a thick vinaigrette powerfully amplified by English mustard (something I am growing ever more fond of - who needs french wholegrain?).

Ok, it isn't the prettiest trio of colours you will ever find, but I thought the flavours worked really well.  Becca, however was unsure of the compatibility of the carrot dressing. 

Epic Bread Fail.

One of the great things about blogging is you are able to show your "warts and all".  Some of my cooking is rather proficient - I don't mind saying so myself.  Without doubt I have attained a fine understanding of Asian cooking, and I think I'm not bad at European styles too.  One feather, which seems particularly absent from my chefs hat, is baking.  I do seem to be rather rubbish at baking...

Ostensibly, this loaf seemed to be a success.  The crust was, well, crusty!  The base, when tapped, elicited a hollow echo.  It smelled delicious and its appearance was pleasing. 


When I cut through the bread it was still rather doughy, so I returned it, reluctantly to the oven for a further spell inside.  Again, after another 10 minutes, the same result.  A doughy middle.


I do not know what I did wrong, but boy did this piss on my chips.  Whenever I see the tag, "artisan baker" and whenever I gape at the astronomical price for a sourdough loaf I will just cast my mind back to this complete and utter baking failure.  


I think I'll stick to flatbreads!

Stuffed Sri-Lankan Rotis

As far as baking is concerned I really enjoy making different types of breads.  Pastry is a science I am learning, and cakes are something that remain rather foreign to me.  I decided I should step up my bread making skills, so I foraged around my Asian recipes for something that might stretch me.

I chanced upon a recipe for stuffed Sri-Lankan Rotis in Rick Stein's excellent, "Far Eastern Odyssey".  I cannot recommend this book enough, especially if you enjoy all the cuisines of Southeast Asia, and are what I would deem an "intermediate or better" cook.

This particular affair involved grinding a customized spice blend, making roti dough and making the stuffing - so, 3 processes in all (not including the actual cooking episode).  

As far as preperation time is concerned, this takes a good hour to an hour and a half to prep - but as usual I found Rick's guidance (almost) infallible.  His ingredients did list 75 leeks, but I interpreted this as 75g of leeks!

After making the dough and the filling I set about portioning and parceling up these goodies.  Here's what they looked like pre-cooking

The cooking process is fairly easy, and just requires you to dry-fry the parcels in a hot pan.  They all need to be rotated, so each side gets cooked, and browned.  It took about 30 minutes to cook them all.

I under-spiced them, as it was my intention to feed them to two unsuspecting 4 year olds.  I also omitted the extra chilli flakes.  In my opinion they turned out rather well, and we also had them for tea (with a hot mango pickle).  They are the closest thing to an "Indian Cornish Pasty" I can imagine!

Both my partner and I loved them, but I have to confess the kids did not share our enthusiasm for these dainty little cubes.  They liked the bread on the outside, which they peeled off in swathes with much gusto, but it was the filling which I think they found somewhat alien to their infant taste buds.  How their opinion of curry will change in later life!

Using your loaf

Baking is a skill which I have been honing for some time now.  I really have no interest in creating anything sweet (you might have noticed a complete absence of anything sugary in my blog?).  Making bread is something I like to try my hand at with limited and sporadic success, but there is something compelling and rewarding to create a tasty loaf from a few, key ingredients.  Flatbreads are, in my opinion easy to master, indeed, any bread that doesn't require leavening or cooking in an oven (as opposed, to a hot, flat pan) seems to be rather manageable.

Today I had an urge to make a loaf, and after some probing through a couple of cookbooks I settled on a Moroccan rustic bread from my Moro cookbook.  I followed the recipe, but found that it required some tweaking - with the ingredients and methodology.  Baking, although a fine art, seems to hit the middle ground between alchemy and science - not really proliferating enough into either craft to firmly establish its cooking roots.  

Here's what I did:

Rustic Moroccan Bread

•    Add 3/4 of a teaspoon of yeast to 20ml of tepid water.  Allow to mix together for 2 minutes.
•  Add a good few squeezes of honey to the warm water.  Stir.
•  Warm 100ml of milk in a pan.
•  Mix 200ml of wholemeal flour with 100ml of plain, strong bread flour.
•  Make a well in the middle of flour, add the water/honey/yeast.  Add 1 teaspoon of fine sea salt.
•  Using your index finger like a dough hook start to mix the liquids in.
•  Slowly add the warm milk until you have a tacky, but not wet dough.
•  Flour a surface.  Kneed the dough for 5 minutes until it becomes soft and elastic.
•  Split the dough into 2 balls.  Roll each ball into a disc, 1cm thick and 15cm wide.
•  Oil 2 baking trays.  Place each disc onto a baking tray.
•  Cover the trays with a tea-towel each.  Leave in a warm place for 4 hours until they have roughly swelled to double size.
•  Preheat the a fan assisted oven to 200C.
•  Put the two trays in.  Bake for roughly 10 to maximum 15 minutes.  The bread should resemble the photo above.

Enter, Auntie Pat

I often wonder where I got my enthusiasm and affection for cooking.  Some of it is down to my stubborn reluctance to eat pot noodles every day at university, some of it was due to my love of extremes of flavour (maybe why I love Haribo fangtastics so much), but some of it definitely stems from my Auntie Pat.

I can distinctly remember, as a child, going down to my Aunt's house in deepest, darkest Surrey and being hit by the beguiling smells of unfamiliar ingredients - garlic being one of her favourites.  

I discussed the concept of a guest blogger with my aunt.  I thought it was a great idea, and hence, here is her first (and hopefully not last) contribution.  This one is for Soda Bread, and I for sure will be giving it a whirl.

Without any further ado, I hand over to Auntie Pat:

Soda Bread

 

In these times of ‘belt tightening’ and with the average cost of a shop bought ‘pappy’ sliced loaf being over a pound these days, this little recipe is a winner.  It looks and tastes like one of those ‘designer’ breads you pick up at the “oh so expensive” Surrey Farmer’s markets and simply costs peanuts.  Its best eaten on the day of baking but still good after 24 hours and you can even toast it when it is 2 days old.  It freezes well and is very quick to make.

Note:  Do not be put off if your dough is sticky – it should be very sticky and you will need to rub your hands in flour to rid them of the goo!

Another point – as long as you stick to the weights and measures you can actually use a mixture of flours.  Oh, also don’t get hung up over the exact quantity of the lemon juice – I use all the juice from a medium sized lemon and some ‘purists’ insist on just 2 tbs of lemon juice to 320ml of milk – bring on the lemon I say!

Ingredients

• 450g/1lb of wholemeal flour or a mixture of wholemeal and white (plain).  Actually, I use seeded wholemeal 12oz and plain white 4oz (seeded wholemeal from that famous ‘partnership’ shop!!
• 1 heaped tsp bicarbonate of soda – again I go heaped for a bit more air
• 1 rounded tsp of salt – I grind up finely coarse sea salt.
• 1 tbsp of butter
• 320ml semi skimmed milk
• Juice of small/medium lemon
• A Handful of mixed seeds (optional)

Method

• Preheat oven to 200c – depending on the accuracy of your oven you may wish to drop that down to say, 190.
• Sift flour and add back into bowl the seeds etc. At this point you can also sift the bicarb and salt into the same bowl.
• Rub in the butter – this won’t take long as there is heaps more flour than butter – don’t worry, it will work out!
• Mix the milk and lemon use together and stir – it will now thicken.
• Add the milk mixture to the flour etc and stir using a flippy floppy spatula to make a sticky wet dough.
• Plop the mixture onto a floured baking sheet, (I actually use non stick silicone paper) shape into a large bun shape. Score a deep cross into the top. At this point, if you haven’t used a seeded flour, sprinkle some seeds onto the top.
• Bake for approx. 40 mins and then turn over to bake the underside for approx. 10 mins.
• The loaf should sound hollow (like a usual yeast loaf).
• Remove from try and cool on a rack.

IMPORTANT

Make sure you do cool on a rack as the condensation from the cooling loaf can evaporate – you don’t want a soggy bottom do you?!

Great with sweet and savoury, very moreish!

 

Flatbread Fetish

So, it's February 2012.  I always fancied myself as a bit of a writer, a bit of a geezer, a bit "weeyyyyy" a bit "woooooooah".  But I never actually had the cojones to do it.  

I've got a little bit of time on my hands at the moment.  I'm a man of leisure without a job - well, not a real job, one where you wake up in the morning, jump on a train and smell someone else's armpit until you arrive in London Waterloo.

I thought I'd combine two things.  One that I _know_ I like doing - cooking.  And one that I think I like doing but haven't really tried yet - writing.

The aim of this blog is rather selfish really.  I want to start cataloging the recipes and cooking trends that I am currently enjoying.  It's funny.  I get the "oh you like cooking?  Whats your favourite recipe?" scenario often.  It's quite similar to trying to decide what flavour of crisps you prefer.  I don't have a favourite recipe (or a favourite flavour of crisps come to that).  Sometimes I want to melt into the oozing warmth of a freshly cooked shepherds pie.  Sometimes I want to cauterize my tongue with some bhulot jokia infused mayhem.

I'm currently experiencing a serious flatbread craze.  I'm a huge fan of the Moro ethos (www.moro.co.uk).  I love the sentiments towards simplicity, freshness and simply "what works".  I've used their flatbread recipe to make anything from pizza bases to pitta pockets to wraps.  Its seriously easy, requires almost no proving and within 30 minutes yields 6-8 super tasty flatbreads.  Here's how you do it:

• Use a decent flour, organic at least, fill a bowl with 200g or so.

• Mix 3/4 tsp of quick yeast with some warm water (about 80ml or so) 

• Tip the yeast water into the bowl.  Use your index finger only (a bit like a dough hook attachment) mix in the water.  

• Add some finely crushed sea salt to taste.  Add a good slug of decent extra virgin olive oil.

• Mix until you get a nice consistency of dough - then knead it until it begins to relax and become soft and pillowy (usually 5-10mins).

• You can prove this dough for 30-60 mins if you like but its not essential.

• Cut into 7 or 8 balls.  Flatten each ball out on a floured surface.

• Heat a heavy frying pan until it gets really hot.  Slap the disc of dough on.  You'll see bubbles form on the dough - flip it.  20-30 seconds on the other side and its done.

Repeat for the other balls.

Whilst we're on the subject of baking lets talk about something that pushed me to the brink of baking insanity.  Yeast - it's got a use-by date!  I never knew this and for a while used OOD yeast and wondered why the hell I wasn't getting any rise!!  I keep my yeast in the fridge now and keep a carefully attentive eye on the use-by date.