Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The sourdough from the Flour Station kept us in bread for a week and it’s inspired me to get back to breadmaking so I made this farmhouse loaf today, using a multi-grain flour along with the strong white and strong brown.
I drew it with a .25 Rotring Rapidoliner then added the bolder lines with a .70. My great hero amongst Victorian art critics, John Ruskin, is emphatic that this illustrator’s trick of adding variety to a drawing is always bad practice. Sorry about that John.
THE PROOF will be in the tasting but this bloomer is the best-looking loaf that I’ve baked so far. It gets its name because it ‘blooms’ in the oven and I admit that I was concerned that it looked a bit flat and floppy when it went in. You start it off at quite a high temperature, 220°C, so the steam must give it an extra rise.
We couldn’t resist the new Paul Hollywood Bread book and we’ve already tried the pitta bread and his twisted wholemeal cob (which isn’t in the book). I think that I’m now ready to move onto the malt loaf and the rye, ale and oat bread.
When we cut into it, it had a good crust and even texture. Nothing wrong with the taste but I prefer the nuttiness of wholemeal and multigrain loaves but it does make nice toast. I cut down the suggested salt by two thirds so I’ve got to accept that I’m going to lose a bit of taste there for the sake of being marginally more healthy.
AS 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).
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;
and, 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.
We 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.
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 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.
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.