Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

French bread

Monday, March 31st, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

All the breads that I have featured here have, so far, been recipes collected by two Danish food journalists and they have been published by one of the largest Danish publishers around. There is little competition for their book, there are only one or two other real contenders for bread and pastry recipes. Despite the fact that Denmark has experienced a flurry of interest for cookbooks of all sorts and kinds, the diversity is still rather depressing compared what you may find if you venture abroad into English books. The largest detractor for this is, of course, that there is an annoying tendency to measure everything by cups in these books, which is extremely unfamiliar to us Danes as most of us have very good scales at home—even the cheapest kitchen scales here measure within a gram of the actual mass. Anyway, not shy of having to do a few conversions, I ordered some baking books in English, one of which is Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread. This book is fairly much intended for the rather advanced home baker or, more likely given the content, for the professional baker, so I was a bit overwhelmed by it, considering I have only really been baking for a month or two, but I persevered and kept reading through the book, trying to make sense of everything. Fortunately Hamelman lists everything not only in imperial and metric measures, but in percentage measures as well. Very nice way to list ingredients! So today as I was a few breads short of having a lunch, I thought it was time to try one of his ‘straight doughs’, the classic French bread.

The French bread is ubiquitous in Denmark, almost to the point that it is synonymous with a white bread. Fortunately, it is also possible to find Spanish country breads, Filone breads, or Ciabatta breads (although not usually in slipper shape), that haven’t had milk added to them (yes, I know, it’s an egregious sin to add milk to French bread, but seemingly a lot of bakers here do so).

The French bread recipe is, as far as I can reckon, one of the easiest ones in Hamelman’s books, but even then it is a good deal more involved than the recipes I have followed to date.

My shaping skills leave a bit to be desired, and even though I have got something that is sort of oblong shaped, the breads are way too loose, and as can be seen vaguely in the picture, I have unfortunately left a bit too much flour residue on the top. I almost forgot to score the breads, so I had to pull them out of the oven again after having put them there for half a minute, and the knives I had were not entirely sharp enough, which caused the bread to fall a bit more apart, unfortunately, causing the few blisters that can be seen in the photo below. Also, the gray streaks that can be seen is due to the excess flour that I did not manage to remove. I will have to be a bit more careful another time.

Despite the visual shortcomings of the bread, the inside looks moist, and the crumb has that slightly shiny quality that supposedly good crumbs have, and even the crust crunches ever so lovely when you squeeze the bread carefully, despite the fact that I did not use any steam at all.

While all the breads that I have baked to date have been decent, there has always lacked a certain ‘something’ from the breads that I could only get if I bought it from one of the many bakeries that are close to my house. But not with this one. It was like tasting French bread again for the first time. Bon appétit.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Brown sugar brownies with sea salt

Sunday, March 30th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Over the past few weeks I have been taking my first few steps into perusing the huge number of food-related blogs on the web, and among other things fell into a couple of interesting food ‘happenings’ like the daring bakers who all try to make the same recipe each month and post their results, or the bit more fickle ‘browniebabe of the month’ (the month should be taken with a grain of salt as it does not seem to run that often). However, as a confessed brownie lover, I was hooked with the huge number of different brownies (many with recipes!) that were linked to from there, and I just had to try to make one of the most solid brownies I have seen to date, sporting no less than 340 grams of chocolate.

The recipe I attempted is Brown sugar brownies with French sea salt, and it is dense in all respects. To complement all the heavy ingredients, there is only 60 grams of flour to lighten it up a bit. The beginning of the recipe comes together nicely like any of the brownies I normally make. The margarine (as a substitute for butter) and chocolate mixture was delicious.

After baking it, the recipe calls for you to turn it out to cool off on a rack, but that was easier said than done, not only did the centre of the brownie stay in the roasting dish, but the cake further cracked when I pulled it out, yielding a veritable brownie crater landscape.

The ganache, in which I had to replace the cream with an oat based cream, came together nicely, but due to the fracturing of the cake I had to get it a lot more solid than it was after mixing and resting on the counter, so I had to put it in the fridge for 30–40 minutes before it was so solid that I dared smear it across the cake. And finally sprinkle it with a bit more sea salt. The ganache has a nice chocolate mousse quality to it.

The sea salt in the dough gives it a very nice touch, much like what is used in regular breads, but the sea salt on top of the brownie just does not work for me. I sprinkled a good deal less than what the recipe calls for (I guess I was a tad skeptical in advance) and even then it was much too salty. The brownie in and of itself without the sprinkled sea salt is wonderful, though, and can very much be recommended. I think I need to work on my cutting capabilities, though. My brownie pieces always turn out a bit rugged.

Tags: baking, brownies, cake, dessert

Olive oil bread

Thursday, March 27th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

We had just bought a new spring form a few weeks before baking the lovely torta con le mele, and naturally it would have to be leaking a bit of liquid, so yesterday after my wife had gotten up at 5 am and surprised me with bread rolls I woke up to smoke everywhere in the kitchen and the smoke detector going off. Oof. The rolls were pretty good, but had a faint scent of twistbread. I guess that is one way to wake up.

Despite this, the rolls were so good that they disappeared entirely before I even got a chance to take a photo. So, another day, another bread, and this time I took on an olive oil bread with some wholemeal flour, giving it a bit more coarse texture than pure wheat breads.

The crumb and the crust on the bottom turned out fairly decent, but the top crust is much too thin and flimsical. I will definitely need to either add some steam the next time I make this, or alternatively bake it higher in the oven to give the top some more heat during the bake.

Being a sucker for pure wheat breads, the tinge of wholemeal puts me a bit off just eating the bread plain, and the boring top crust does not help here, but it does go very nicely with the traditional Danish dressing: liver paté with preserved, sliced beetroots.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Home-made pappardelle and torta con le mele

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 | Cooking | 1 Comment

Pasta is one of the two things that Italy has really succeeded in exporting far and wide (pizza being the other), and we see them everywhere, the penne, the conchiglie, the fettuchine, the farfalle, and the list just keeps on going and going.

One of the bit more expensive pastas here is the fresh pasta, and it only really comes in one form: fettuchine. On the bright side it comes both plain and with spinach. But anything beyond that and you need to go hunting in specialty stores. So, rather than go hunting, I figured that I was in good shape with all the baking to try to make pasta myself, which went rather well up until this point:

Now, the book on pasta that I have indicates that you should let the pasta hang to dry for a while until you use it, not place it mashed together on a plate like I did. The reason for this is that once we were ready to use the pasta (after a measly 30 minute wait) the strands were pretty much glued together and impossible to separate, so our pasta was twice as thick as it was supposed to be. Bummer. It was still decent, but not quite like pappardelle is supposed to be.

While the dish is normally served with spaghetti and some cheese, we made Pappardelle alla carbonara, which is a thick sauce with egg, cream (we use an oats-based cream since I am lactose intolerant, and it does nicely in pasta sauces) and fried bacon (I think the regular Carbonara calls for a specialty ham, but those are fairly hard to get here as well). To add some colour, we added peas and a few leaves of basil. Even then photos of the dish looks fairly… icky… so we settled with just eating it.

To stay in the Italian kitchen, my wife prepared a lovely torta con le mele (apple tart/cake), just topped with icing instead of cream. Very wholesome cake that will make you think of cosy winter evenings huddled together in the living room with tea and small-talk.

Tags: baking, Cooking, pasta, tart

Canadian oatmeal bread

Monday, March 24th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

The Canadian oatmeal bread is a sweet bread, containing both sugar and syrup that is stirred together with oats, butter and boiling water. The sweetness may make it unusable for certain kinds of lunch food dressing (yes, we are one of those weird nations that eat cold lunches) as it can taste through the dressing. It is marvellously good for breakfast, though.

The bread is quickly made, as it contains a fair amount of yeast (at least according to the recipe I have), and it develops a fairly dense crumb and very soft crust. In that sense it sort of resembles a bread form of tea buns, although tea buns are normally a good deal lighter, sweeter and washed with eggs.

It goes very nicely with marmalade.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Country and rye bread

Friday, March 14th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Another favourite white bread of mine is the country bread. I suspect that the one that you can buy in bakeries is made on sourdough, but the recipe book I have is without a sourdough starter for the bread. The dough is slightly sticky, but otherwise elastic and fun to work with. I had not quite counted on how much this bread rises during fermentation, so I had to transfer it to our largest bowl during the process, and it almost rose out of that as well!

This is what it looks like after it has been kneaded, fermented, and folded.

The oven rack is just as big as the plate, so it has risen nicely after being folded.

The bread’s crumb is slightly elastic and with a moist freshness to it that one can also find in the country breads in our local bakeries. This is very much a bread I might make again.

Now for something much, much, much more serious… the Danish rye bread, rugbrød.

This cultural psychosis…

Let me try again. These traditional breads are much adored in many Danish homes due to their high richness in fibre, their solid texture and their slightly bitter taste that goes well with some of the Danish traditional foods, liver paté (with jelly and salted meat, or with beetroots), or any kind of weirdly mixed herring. I am not a great fan of rye breads, much preferring the delectable white breads of Italy and Spain, but I digress.

My wife had run out of commercial rye bread yesterday, so since I was baking anyway, I offered to try to put together a sunflower seed rye bread (which she is rather partial to). So without further ado, I present to you a good, Danish rye bread.

The bread is a tad darker once the excess flour has been brushed away, but this is basically the gist of it. Now, those of you who are from Denmark or have visited Denmark and are used to the much, much darker rye bread that you can buy in grocery stores and bakeries, might ask why mine has turned out so light. This is what rye bread looks like without (artificial) browning. Granted, there are some rye breads that are darker than this as they use less wheat flour, but I have never seen a bread baked without browning that comes anywhere near what you can buy commercially.

Now I just have to make up with myself whether I want to taste it to verify my wife’s assertion that it tastes well, but that would mean abandoning one of my childhood vows to never eat Danish rye bread again unless I was served it while dining out. Such predicaments.

Tags: baking, bread, rye bread, whole grain bread

Ciabatta and Swiss country bread

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 | Cooking | 2 Comments

So these past few weeks I have mainly been baking wheat breads without any coarser cereals, but to ramp up our fibre intake, I found a recipe for a brown bread, the Swiss country bread, which is about one third rye flour and two thirds wheat flour (no reason to go overboard with a full rye bread). It is a fairly easy bread to make, but its dough is extremely sticky and it took quite a while to clean up the kitchen utensils.

The other bread I baked today is a long-time favourite of mine, although this is the first time I have tried to bake it, the ciabatta bread. It is made on a preferment that sits on the kitchen counter for about twelve hours, to that you mix Italian tipo 00 wheat flour, salt, olive oil, and water, and presto, a few hours later you have some delicious ciabatta breads. The recipe I followed gives a slightly crispy crust and a firm crumb. Very delicious with salmon. It is another ciabatta bread and a Swiss country bread that, more or less, can be made out in the background.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread, whole grain bread

Why is the rum gone?

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

So it has been a bit since I have posted any lovely baked goods that I have produced (mainly because I have been busy with other things and mostly just have baked the same breads I have already shown). One of the things you get to miss a lot when you are allergic to milk (and have had some time where this wasn’t the case) is wienerbrød or in English, danishes. This is mainly due to the fact that the sweet dough is very hard to make without butter, but not being shy for a baking challenge, I took on the dough this morning and… it was incredibly difficult to do with the much softer milk-free margarine. So much so that I wound up using a lot more flour than the recipe calls for just to make it possible to roll it flat.

One of the local wienerbrød (there are of course many, many kinds when you are in a sugar-loving nation like Denmark) is the romsnegl, or directly translated, the rum snail. It is made from the sweetened dough that you roll out flat on a flour-covered table, then you smear a mix of sugar, margarine and some other ingredients on there (it varies a bit from recipe to recipe), you then roll up the dough and cut it into thin slices that sort of look like snail houses (hence the name). Once these things are baked, you add a mix of icing sugar and rum on top of them and it tastes just awesome. However, we did not have any rum (why is all the rum gone?), so I had to improvise a bit and use water instead. It does not quite give the same flavour, but it was still pretty good.

Tags: baking, danish, dessert, pastry