Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

If Salvador Dali baked bread

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Panmarino

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

For a while I have had Carol Field’s ‘The Italian baker’ standing in my bookcase without it seeing any much use at all. There are two primary reasons for this. First, the breads from Jeffrey Hamelman’s ‘Bread’ are simply so good it’s hard to motivate myself to bake from another book, and secondly, the recipes in Field’s book are simply annoying in their measurements. Who in their right mind measures ‘a cup of olive oil less a tablespoon’?

Like most people, I have a tendency to get stuck in just making the same few recipes over and over and over and… again, and I must admit that the pain rustique and french bread recipes are superb. However, it does nicely to experiment with what you eat once in a while. So, I forced myself to put Hamelman’s book back on the shelf and take a look at some breads from Field’s book, diligently trying to convert the measurements to metric weights before starting on them.

My first try was panmarino, or rosemary bread, where finely chopped rosemary is mixed into the dough.

Distinctive to this bread is the way that it is scored, namely in the shape of an asterisk, and the incisions are then lightly drizzled with coarse flakes of sea salt, but I only had fine flakes so they had to make do. After a good long bake the crust turns out lovely crisp.

When I think italian bread my foremost thought is usually a solid crust and a crumb with lots of holes, but this bread is nothing like that. On the contrary, it has a fairly dense, soft crumb, but with the rosemary aroma in the bread it goes very nicely with lamb.

Ciao!

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Rabbit stew

Sunday, November 9th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

There are a number of dishes that you do not get to try out terribly often in this region, and while some might get you to wrinkle your nose in trepidation, like brain or snake, others may intrigue you as to their taste. So, it was with great anticipation that we prepared a rabbit stew. After digging around for a recipe for a while, we found one that marinated the rabbit in red wine overnight and cooked it in the oven for a good long while.

With a bit too much flash due to the late-night lighting conditions, this is the outcome of quite a few hours of cooking. Served with oven baked potatoes and ratatouille.

As to the taste, I will probably not return to rabbit in the near future. In my opinion, it tastes much like chicken without any overly distinguishing qualities.