Bread and Pastry

I used to bake a lot of bread. In fact, during the whole of my time as a graduate student at Buffalo [1969-70] we only bought two loaves, one on the day we arrived and the other on the day we left.

More recently I had almost given up baking bread as what I was making was every bit as solid and dull as the store bought loaves. Then I read what it said on the yeast packages. 'This is fast rise yeast, no waiting, no mess, contains flour improver, blah de blah' and I just wondered if this could be the reason. So now I have discovered the old fashioned sort of dried yeast you have to get 'going' first and I'm back to enjoying bread making and its products.

The other important thing about baking bread is to get the right flour, it must be 'strong' and the stronger the better. This means that it will readily produce gluten when you knead it and it is the gluten that keeps the fermentation bubbles in and gives the dough the elasticity to stay together as a loaf while it rises.

Bread

If you need a recipe, read the back of the flour package. An old Colonial American recipe I once saw said something like, mix together the yeast, warm water and a little sweet butter and pour into your flour bin. Mix in sufficient flour to allow the dough to form into a ball, remove and knead for 10 minutes. It is notoriously difficult to gauge exactly how much liquid is needed by a flour, so don't even try!

Use olive oil as the fat content to make ciabbata bread.

This is how I make bread

Pour some warm water into a large mixing bowl and sprinkle on the dried yeast. I usually get the water from the hot tap but you can get it from the kettle, try mixing equal amounts of boiling and cold water. Whatever, the final temperature should be such that if it feels pleasant to you, it will be fine for the yeast.

Add a teaspoon or so of sugar and froth up the mixture with a wooden spoon. Recently, I went to an open day at our local micro brewery, Vale Brewery where they demonstrated the brewing process and how they got the initial brew going by vigorously mixing the yeast starter before leaving it to develop. It is just the same with bread, the frothing enriches the mix with oxygen which the yeast needs to develop, so keep on giving it a vigorous stir periodically.

When you have a good fermentation, add more warm water and a generous quantity of salt. Don't add salt earlier as it inhibits the yeast. I usually about half fill my mixing bowl. Next add the flour, stirring and adding flour the while and keep on adding until it becomes hard work. Now mix it up with your hands and start to knead.

The dough should be sticky and difficult to manipulate at this point. If it is solid and feels 'dead', add more water. Keep kneeding until the dough holds together well and you can play with it like a concertina.

Put it back in the bowl. Most people cover it with a damp cloth at this point but I rarely do, and leave it to rise. This is much easier in the winter when the fire is lit.

Leave the dough to double in volume. How long this takes depends on the temperature and the moisture content but is not critical.

Of course you can leave it a little too long!!!

When it has doubled, knead it again and distribute into whatever it is to be cooked in. The containers should be well oiled and the dough sort of turned over into them so that the surface is unblemished.

Put them to rise again somewhere warm. There is no need to cover them this time and again they should be left to double in volume. This time the timing is critical and the best way to see if they are ready is to press the top of the loaf gently with a finger. The surface should deform and then spring back again. Better to have them 'under proof' than 'over proof'.

Put them in a hot oven [200 C]and keep an eye on them. They are ready when they sound hollow when knocked with a knuckle. Those of you who were at Sir John Deane's Grammar School in the '50s will remember how Joe Band [The geography master] used to do this on the heads of those who had too much to say in class. One day, Gerald Bowden copied his technique on the large world globe that hung in the geography room much to Joe's annoyance and our pleasure.

Let them cool until you can handle them before you turn them out.

If you don't make Pizza with the leftover dough try what I call Stollen.

Cross Buns

As I was about to go to do the weekend shopping in Thame, Rosemary asked me to pick up a pack of hot cross buns.

Of course the shop was full of Christmas stuff and not a hot cross bun to be seen so I came home empty handed. Musing the while [well alright ranting the while] about how our expectation is that we should be able to get things out of season AND why we call them hot cross buns when they are always cold when we buy them.

This obviously impressed itself on my sub-conscious as that night I dreamt that I had bought hot cross buns but the baker had done his best to obscure the crosses with little patches over them, but that they were too small and the ends of the crosses showed through anyway, fooling no-one.

In penance, I made hot cross buns on Sunday morning and the recipe is below.

Ingredients

• 50% strong bread flour
• 50% plain flour I work on about a third of a mixing bowl's worth of flour in total.
• 4 tablespoons of vanilla [or ordinary] sugar
• good handful of mixed fruit
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons nutmeg
• olive oil or butter
• warm water of milk
• 1 egg if you have one [I didn't]
• yeast
• salt

Get the yeast going.

Mix all the dry ingredients together and add the yeast and sufficient warm water to make into a dough. Kneed for 5 - 10 minutes.

Lay out what look like pathetically small balls of dough in a body centred cubic array on a greased baking sheet. Allow to rise until they have doubled. [about 1 hour]

Decorate with err "crosses" or not as the fancy takes you.

Bake in a hot oven for 15 minutes or so.

Be careful when you take them out as unusually, they will be HOT.

Pizza

One evening a girlfriend of Donato's joined us for a pizza. She was so impressed that she asked Don for the recipe. Don's family regarded this request with consternation for how could one have a recipe for pizza? All you do is roll out some of the dough left from making bread, put some topping on it and put it in the oven! Donato's mother did not like cheese so their pizzas never included cheese.

At the risk of being derided here are a few hints for making pizzas.

Take some of the dough left when you are making bread....ok..... Actually, I often make just pizza, and you follow the general advice in bread making to do the dough.

The variations are the thickness and the topping. White flour usually rises further than brown so from the same starting thickness, white dough usually gives a thicker end product.

• Spread out the dough ball to cover your pizza tray
• Brush the surface of the dough with olive oil
• Distribute canned chopped tomatoes across the top
• Cover with strips or mozzarella cheese and then add your topping of choice

Toppings:

I like the seafood mix that most of the supermarkets do now. I also like to add a few clams or [opened] shell mussels and/or a langoustine or two. Depends what is available.

I'm sure everyone can think of a favourite topping though I draw the line at what Sj claims a friend of hers requested ..... bubble gum!

I don't usually wait for the base to rise before baking but put the completed pizza straight into a cold oven set to maximum temperature. This lets it rise a bit and I find it works for me.

On land I have a large round metal oven tray that has perforations in it, this works very well and cooks the bottom especially well. On Cribbit I use glass plates, but this is only because they don't rust, or haven't done so far at least.