Category: Food

Loaf and Landscape

farmhouse loafAS I’M TRYING to get familiar with hills & dales of Yorkshire at the moment, it’s not surprising that this drawing of a farmhouse loaf has ended up looking like a landscape; I’m reminded of geologist P.F.Kendall’s description of the Cleveland Dome, gouged into by the deep dales of the North Yorks Moors, as resembling a ‘slashed doublet’ (doublet; a close-fitting medieval/Tudor jacket).

Breadmaking

I’m currently enjoying making our own bread, partly inspired by our new oven (the old one was getting through an element every six months) but also our large Ikea beechwood worktop that is such a pleasure to work on.

At the moment I carefully weigh out the five ingredients of a farmhouse loaf into a mixing bowl;

ingredients

  • four different kinds of flour, strong white, strong wholemeal, multi-seed or granary and rye
  • yeast
  • honey
  • warm water
  • a pinch of salt (less than the recipe suggests)

bread makingand, if I remember, a few extra mixed seeds. There’s no oil or margarine in this recipe.

Once I get familiar with the quantities, I’d like to try the method of making a circle of the flour on the worktop and adding the liquid until I get the right consistency.

Kneading the dough is a relaxing process and gives my arms and shoulders a much needed ten minute work-out. Something that I don’t get when I’m drawing or sitting at the computer.

Machine Made

breadmakerWe first started making homemade bread in a bread machine and did it that way for about ten years. It’s lovely to wake up in the morning to the smell of freshly baked bread but it’s a shame that apart from a little window in the machine you’re cut off from the process. You hear it clunking around as it mixes and kneads and it makes it seem a mysterious rather complicated and precise process.

food mixer

Two years ago we bought a food mixer with a dough hook and decided that was a simpler way to make bread. Getting so familiar with how the mixer handles the dough, we realised that the next step was to do the whole process by hand (and save a bit of washing up in the process).
If you miss out on the ‘knocking back’ process, you can produce a loaf in about an hour but the new oven has a rising setting so we knock the dough back after the first rising (in the oven) and let it rise again (out of the oven) as the oven heats up to 190°C.

knocking backKnocking back is part of the fun, as is slashing the dough with a sharp knife before the last rising. I like a cross for a round loaf and three slashes for a longer loaf.

Raspberry and Peach

THE AUTUMN Raspberries, variety Joan J, are beginning to ripen faster than we can eat them, so this morning we decided to make some jam. Yesterday Paul the gardener presented us with a bag-full of fully ripe peaches (which he grows in a greenhouse) so we decided put the two fruits together.

Once prepared we had just a fraction under two pounds of fruit so we added the same amount of granulated sugar, the best part of a bag. We suspected that peaches might be short in pectin so I added the juice from one large lemon.

The Three-drop Method

A professional jam-maker once told me that the way he gauged when a pan of jam was reaching its setting point was when he held the spoon and three drops dripped from it. We never seemed to get to this stage, it seemed more like syrupy fruit juice every time I tried it, so, after about half an hour, we checked using the cold saucer method. After two minutes in the fridge it was obvious that the jam was ready; it had skinned over and started to set.

You can hold a jar of the finished jam upside down and it won’t flow out but luckily it’s still easy to spread. And delicious. I can’t claim that I can taste the peaches – for me the raspberry dominates – but they do add something to the mix. There’s the difference in texture; how can I put it – a bit floury? A fruit element in addition to the berries.

Banberries

If trying to describe a fruity flavour is difficult for me, imagine how difficult it would be for Alex, the African Grey, described as the world’s cleverest parrot. He had already learned the words for ‘banana’ and ‘cherry’ so when he was presented with an apple he improvised a new word for it; ‘banberry’, a combination of the two.

Alex might describe our jam as ‘peaberry’.

These watercolour and gouache raspberries were illustrations I drew for a Marks and Spencer range of bisuits back in the late 1980s or early 1990s. At that time I worked through an illustration agency, Bernard Thornton Artists.

Rye Bread

WE SOON got used to homemade bread when we bought our first breadmaker about 15 years ago. Ever since we have rarely bought a loaf. It’s great to wake up in the morning to the smell of fresh-baked bread. Last autumn we bought a new food mixer and I decided to try it out on different recipes. There didn’t seem to be much advantage to mixing scones in it – they only need roughly mixing by hand – but it consistently produced a good bread dough.

We use Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s basic recipe for white bread from his River Cottage Family Cookbook but we find that with the mixer we can dispense with the stage where you ‘knock it back’ – fun though that is! We always get a consistent texture.

In place of the 500 grams of white flour that he suggests, we invariably use a mixture of strong white and wholemeal and recently we’ve also been adding a proportion of rye flour. 100 grams – one fifth of the flour mix – is enough to give it some flavour without loosing any of the rise.

I made this loaf in less than 20 minutes (which was the time it took me to cook some homemade oven chips using our Kestrel and Desiree potatoes). After measuring the five ingredients; flour, easy-blend yeast, salt (we use just a pinch), honey and warm water from the tap (you can also add caraway or mixed seeds); it needs just 2 minutes of mixing with the dough-hook on setting one and a further 10 minutes on setting two. While it’s doing that there’s time to clear up and grease the loaf tin before the dough is ready for shaping to rise in the tin, covered by a tea towel. I score three diagonal lines across it, to give it that artisan look.

It usually takes no more than half an hour for it to double in size then it has another 25 minutes in the oven, turning it upside down in the tin for the last 5 minutes. That’s somewhere between an hour and 90 minutes from weighing out the ingredients to the finished loaf. The quickest loaf in the breadmaker takes 4 hours. With our breadmaker we always get a hole where the paddle has been and, as the non-stick coating is now wearing off the paddle, this can mean that a quarter of the middle slice is a gaping hole. You don’t get that using the food mixer and our old breadmaker now hardly ever gets used; in fact we recently consigned it to the attic.