January 2016 – The Walrus Blog

Seedy difference.

This is the “seeded sour” bread from Brilliant Bread. I increased the amount of rye flour, and reduced the amount of strong white flour.

The seeds need to be toasted in a dry frying pan, until the sunflower seeds start to look noticeably coloured. By this time, the sesame seeds are smelling lovely, like toasted sesame oil. There’s enough poppy seeds in this to make you fail a drugs test in America. See if I care…

Good grief, I’ve been using the same cheap plastic bowl for about 37 years. I’m introducing the toasted seeds to the dough here, as you can see.

Let this interesting dough rest for as long as it seems to want. Overnight in the fridge is pretty much a minimum. The recipe described this as a wet dough. I think it’s not particularly wet. I used a tin, and my baking stone. New addition was a dish of boiling water at the bottom of the oven, to produce steam, so the bread could stretch as it cooked.

I am pleased with the look of the result, and looking forward to trying it with a nice Worcester blue cheese I bought the other day. It might even warrant a glass of a decent red wine to help the cheese go down.

Roast Beef for Sunday

This fine thing is the piece of beef I bought to use during the Christmas holiday, but ended up freezing because there was so much other food we were in danger of bursting.

You may notice the silly bit of elastic that was holding it together has broken. I replaced that with two proper bits of butchers’ string before it went in the oven.

Almost there! The wine’s poured, and the real gravy is ready. This meal was a joint effort, as my lovely wife makes splendid Yorkshire Puddings, while I have no idea how to do them. There are quite a few things like that, but I think I’ll carry on pretending there aren’t….

And I apologise for this shot being out of focus. I was hungry, and wanted to start eating. Yorkshire Pudding with gravy has arrived, all is right with the world.

Yes, we actually had a dessert! This has meringue, ice cream, whipped cream and blackberries, so we decided it was a deconstructed [1] Eton Mess.

[1] I’m pretty certain that we can’t be the only ones to be annoyed immensely by the way cooks/chefs on the television spread the elements of something like, say, a meat pie around the plate, and announce proudly that they have deconstructed a meat pie. No, you pretentious idiots. You have failed to make a meat pie, and served some stew with a lump of pastry nearby.

Burns Night comes early in Wales.

Well, Burns Night doesn’t really happen earlier in Wales, but when one of you is going to be away on the actual night, it makes sense. Sadly, I completely forgot to arrange for a piper to pipe the haggis into the dining room, and the food would have gone cold if we had read all of Burns’ ode to the beastie…

I put those sauce jars on the table for no sensible reason, and neither of them got used. The potatoes were roasted in a little olive oil, with a sprinkling of salt. In the dish with them are a couple of Jerusalem artichokes that needed to be used up. To the left, mashed swede and onion; to the right, mashed parsnip and turnip. Simon Howie’s haggis has a plastic skin, but the contents are very authentic, and delicious.

Here’s mine. It was very tasty, but extremely filling. It was a good job I had forgotten to make any dessert!

Sausage sandwich!

Just so that you don’t think I make fancy food all the time, here’s the sensible loaf I made after the most recent sourdough rye saga.

As you can see, internally, it has a nice crumb. It was ever so slightly under-baked, but we needed sandwiches! Those little rolls of crumb in the foreground are the clue that tells you it wasn’t quite baked to perfection; those don’t happen after a few more minutes in the oven.

Sausage sandwiches! That has reminded me, it’s ages since I made sausages. These were rather nice ones from Mr Tesco’s Finest range, with 97% meat…

Man vs Rye – episode 94

I thought that it might be worth a further attempt at making a sourdough rye bread. I had not realised that rye is actively malevolent, with a vindictive streak a mile wide. Read on, if you can take the horror.

The main problem with the previous attempts, I think, was that there is so very little gluten in the rye flour that it’s well-nigh impossible to give the bread a decent structure. So I substituted 200g of very strong white bread flour for 200g of the rye in the recipe. I left out the runny honey, mainly because that stuff costs a fortune, and added a little extra water because of that. After a considerable amount of work with the dough hooks on my mixer, I ended up with what looked like a reasonably well structured dough. It wasn’t particularly wet, and it held its shape.

Anyway, I added some flour to my nice round proving basket, and put the dough in. I knew it was going to need a long prove, even though, this time, the starter had been very active. I sprinkled it with a little flour, covered it, and left it overnight at room temperature.

Next day, it was still looking good. You can see it has expanded quite well, perhaps not the doubling in size that every bread recipe seems obsessed with, but by a respectable amount. So, I put a wooden board over it, and turned it the other way up. It should have fallen gently onto the board, ready to go into the oven after a quick couple of cuts. Look away now, if you wish to avoid the horror.

In an imaginative new way of going wrong, the dough separated into a main chunk on the board, and a smaller one, which was inexplicable stuck to the proving basket. And you can see that somehow, it had become wetter, and was spreading rapidly. At this point, I may possibly have muttered something like “Sod it!”

Throwing it away, and becoming a monk, might well have been the sensible next move. Instead, I scraped the stuck bit from the proving basket, stuck it on the dough, folded the damned thing like a calzone, so it would fit on the baking stone, put it in the oven, and added water to make steam. The dough was clearly angered by this, and tried to slide off the side of the stone.

Some of it actually managed to flow over the edge of the stone, and drip into the tray at the bottom of the oven, where it turned into these bizarre things. I’m lost for words to describe them, but I can tell you they didn’t taste pleasant.

So, here is the thing that I baked. It smells like bread. It has a nicely baked crust.

It can even be sliced, and eaten. The crumb is much better than previous attempts, although it still has a slightly under-baked layer in the middle. And it does taste very good, in spite of its efforts to become some sort of alien life form.

I mentioned these misadventures to my wife that evening (she was working away from home) and she, very sensibly, said “Why don’t you make some ordinary bread, the way you used to?” So that is what I am going to do. Rye is clearly more powerful than me, and I surrender. I will leave it to the superhumans who are able to defeat it, and force it to make proper loaves. I’m even going back to the old recipe I used to use, with a pound and a half of flour and a pint of water. In the event that even ordinary bread goes horribly wrong, and becomes possessed by demons, you will see the pictures here. More soon…

Roy Batty – the continuing story.

After four days of curing, I have taken the Lomo I have named Roy Batty out of the cure, rinsed it, dried it, and tied it up. A light sprinkling of pimenton on the outside, and it was ready for weighing. Now that piece of meat started out at 2000g, so I’ve already removed 475g just by curing it.

Here’s the book I am using for inspiration, with my notes on the progress so far. As you can see, I will now have to wait until the weight of the Lomo has dropped by a further 30%, to about 1070g, at which point it will be ready to eat. I’ll probably divide it up and freeze most of it, to make it last a reasonable time, and just have one cling-filmed piece on the go in the fridge, for use when required.

And here’s the Lomo in its new home for however long the drying process takes. It will probably be a few weeks, even though fridges are very good at drying out food, often when you don’t want them to.

For a next project, I think I’ll maybe try making some pastrami…

Sunday – some nice, ordinary food.

Here’s a loaf of white bread that has just gone into the oven, before the “oven spring” expansion has started. It’s the ordinary yeasted white loaf, the first recipe in “Brilliant Bread”.

And here it is a couple of minutes later, after the oven spring has started. I threw a cup of water into the tray at the bottom of the oven, when the loaf went in, so the crust wouldn’t harden before the expansion got going.

And here is the result, with a split on the left, in spite of my careful scoring, and the steam. This was a very active dough!

Meanwhile, I was also making a tasty bacon, chorizo, chicken, and potato stew to feed us. There’s no recipe, as this is just something I make “out of my head”.

Forgive the hasty post, and boring formatting. The Blogger editor screws up my work quite horribly at times. When I try to move a picture, it deletes a nearby one….