Author: Walrus

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…

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…

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…

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!

 Here we see some interesting sausage-meat stuffing balls. They are made of sausage-meat, onion, garlic, fresh thyme and Greek oregano. The rest of the space in the dish was filled with balls of Paxo sage and onion stuffing, but that’s not as interesting.

Roast potatoes had been cooking in the tasty duck fat for 15 minutes before I added the parsnips. At the time, I thought this wouldn’t be enough parsnips. This is a common error with Christmas dinner.

Suddenly, I had carved lumps off the turkey crown, put the trimmings and vegetables on the table, and we were pretty much ready to eat our dinner!

We let the Youngling pour the Champagne, which he did very well. No wastage, no half empty glasses.

This was my dinner, before I added even more…


Turkey, Cameron’s delights, sage and onion stuffing, sausage-meat stuffing, roast potato, roast parsnip, carrot, peas, green beans, Brussels sprouts, and gravy. 

Of course, we have explained to the Youngling that Brussels sprouts are delicious, but he continues to believe his uncle’s remark that they can never be eaten. Here is the token sprout we always put on his plate, so he can discover for himself how lovely they are, when his uncle’s evil influence wears off.

Here’s a strange little adventure I had today, with an ordinary white loaf. 


I proved it in my nice new proving basket, turned it out, and scored it with a serrated knife. Now, as far as I could tell, and I was careful about this, all the cuts went to the same depth.


Here’s a shot, just after it went into the oven. The loaf looks jolly nicely shaped and even. The baking stone should have been evenly hot, but maybe it had not been heating up for long enough, and was hotter at the back of the oven. Quite early on, there was an obvious bulge at the back of the loaf. Yes, Deirdre, I do know the glass oven door could do with a clean.


Still, the loaf was rising nicely…


And, when I took it out of the oven, it was very obvious that the “oven spring” had not occurred evenly. One of the cuts has taken up almost all of the stretching that the loaf has done. I ask you all to theorise as to why it is like that.

• Uneven depth of scoring cuts?
• Unevenly heated stone?
• Shaping stresses in the loaf not evenly distributed?
• Fan oven hotter at the back side of the loaf?
• Act of God?
• Something to do with the curvature of space?

I was considering whether to cook something complex for our Christmas dinner, but decided to take the easy route this year, and chose a turkey crown. That will do for a couple of days, at least! We have had a commercial three bird roast in the past, and I was quite disappointed with it, because it had an awful lot of stuffing compared with the amount of actual bird meat, and was impossible to slice neatly. I do intend to do another three bird roast, some day, but I will try to use a minimal amount of stuffing, and use mostly sausage-meat, maybe with some chestnuts.

These chicken wings were cooked in our air fryer, and were very pleasant, but having to put the basket in the dishwasher to remove the burnt spices and remaining chicken fat was a bit annoying. You don’t get that problem when you do chips in them. Still, at least quite a lot of the fat didn’t get eaten, so that’s good.

 As threatened recently, I made a few pastrami on rye sandwiches. It’s supposed to be a classic combination, and they do go together very well. The price of the pastrami in the shop, at £3 for 110g, is ridiculous, though. It’s brisket, for goodness’ sake. I will most definitely make my own, some time. When I do, you’ll see it on here…