Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Cinnamon loaves

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | Cooking | 3 Comments

One of the glorious things from my childhood was the sunday trip to the bakery where we got to pick our Sunday morning treat. Normally this treat was to be a single item like a rum snail, a croissant, or the like, but just once in a while I managed to sweet-talk (read: emotionally bribe) my parents into buying a cinnamon loaf. For those unfortunate enough that they haven’t come across this wonderful bread before, it is a butter and egg enriched dough that is rolled around a cinnamon-enriched remonce cream (mix of butter and sugar). For quite a few years now, I have had to pass these things by in the bakery, along with most their other treats, since I’ve been ‘fortunate’ enough to pick up lactose intolerance on the course of my life. Furthermore, we have egg allergists in the family as well, so what else was there to do than replace the butter with milk-free shortening and replace the eggs with a mix of water, oil, flour and baking powder? (We have also prepared these loaves with the egg, but there is practically no difference between replacing the egg as well).

The first part is rolling the dough into a fairly thin square, however, I can never, ever, manage a square when rolling dough like that, so it gets to be square-ish. We smear the remonce over this and roll it up nicely.

For those of you who aren’t experienced remonce-smearers, this is what too much remonce looks like (you will see why in a bit).

These three rolls are then used to carefully braid the loaf (in most home-made versions of cinnamon loaves it is just rolled into a single roll, but that does not get the authentic bakery braid).

After some careful braining and a graceful finish at each end of the braid, you get this.

Now it just needs to be placed in a form and proofed until it’s nice and wiggly.

And after being baked for half an hour, this is the oozing goodness that meets the eye (ok, normally it doesn’t ooze quite that much, but we brought it upon ourselves by using a larger portion of remonce).

Or seen in a bit larger perspective.

Now comes the time to turn out the loaves from the forms.

This was also the time I suddenly realised that I was supposed to have greased the forms.

It’s not all bad, though, as it is still great to eat out of the form, but the loaf in the background, above, is collapsed a bit due to this.

Now we only need to add the final touch to complete the masterpiece: icing.

The best part is, you do not have to wait for these loaves to cool, you can eat them warm, oozing and savor their delectable creamy consistency that is punctuated by the sugary cinnamon and the crisp and sweet crust on the top of the loaf.

It’s still as good as I remember it from my childhood.

Tags: baking, bread, dessert, pastry, sweets

Pain rustique rolls

Monday, December 15th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Pain rustique is a wonderful savory bread that not only tastes great, but is also relatively fast to make (including the poolish it only takes like 15–18 hours from start to baked loaf). They are prepared much like regular pain rustique, just divided into smaller amounts of dough. Here I have prepared what would usually be four small loaves and each of these I have divided in four to create rolls. So, one or two rolls should be plenty to fill your appetite for a meal.

Since the buns are somewhat smaller than the regular loaves they don’t require entirely as long in the oven.

They look just like small pain rustique loaves.

The crust is crisp, thin and lovely, but the crumb is a bit denser than the regular pain rustique, but that is most likely due to me shaping the rolls a wee bit tighter than I normally shape the loaves (pain rustique requires no shaping, much like ciabatta, but I never get rectangular slices of dough, so I tend to tug in the odds and ends to make it appear rectangular).

This is, of course, not where the story usually ends when I bake, but it is usually where I stop depicting the process. However, my wife got inspired by the rolls and prepared extremely delicious sandwiches using them. In their full glory, I present to you a cucumber, tomato, salmon and avocado sandwich. Lovely.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Potato garlic bread

Thursday, December 11th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

While I really love and adore the French and Italian white breads, I was brought up on Danish rye bread, which, usually, uses more or less 100% rye. Now, I’m not really ready to consume rye bread again after having sworn it off once I moved away from my parents, however, I’m usually coaxed into trying different kinds of breads with whole meat wheat, maize, or in this instance, potatoes and garlic.

We oven-roasted the potatoes as per Hamelman’s directions for optimum taste in his book Bread. Now, if you make the usual metric-based recipe from Hamelman’s book, you’d wind up with 27 loaves of about 600 grams each, and while it sounds tempting I neither have space enough in my oven, nor am I able to eat all that bread before it goes stale. Now, if you did create 27 loaves, you’d be needing about 30 grams of oven roasted garlic, but when you create what corresponds to 2 loaves of 600 grams each (in reality I made 4, each being about 300 grams), you would only need 3 grams of garlic, which is about a single clove. That is just overkill to ovenroast! So I fried it in a generous amount of oil instead.

Furthermore, Hamelman makes the suggestion not to remove the peel from the potatoes when you mash them to add some colour to the consistency of the bread. I am much too lazy to hand-mash potatoes, so I tossed them into my blender along with the 3 grams of garlic and let it run for a bit. It is an extremely efficient blender, really, as there was no hint of the roughness of the peel once it had mashed everything up for a bit.

The dough is somewhat denser than for instance ciabatta dough, which is due both to the wholemeal wheat used in it, but certainly also the potatoes that don’t release their moisture until later in the process. It is, at least, a lot easier to work with than the ciabatta dough that has a tendency to try to escape from my grasp at all times.

The potatoes add a nice bit of colouring to the bread and the crumb is somewhat denser than the loose, airy crumbs that I usually prefer, but I will have to agree with Hamelman, it’s got a nice, comfy taste, and the garlic adds a nice bit of ‘kick’ to it.

What has amazed me most about this bread is its keeping time. Normally the ciabatta becomes slightly stale after just two or three days, but the potato garlic bread is still good after 4 days. Sure, the crust is getting slightly chewy, but with some liver paté (in case you are wrinkling your nose at this, it’s a Danish tradition to eat it, and unlike the rye bread, I haven’t sworn this one off just yet), the bread still has a nice taste. Good for the times where you don’t have time to bake during the week.

Tags: baking, bread

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.

Retarded filone bread

Sunday, October 5th, 2008 | Cooking | 2 Comments

While the filone bread is a description of the shape of a traditional bread from Toscana (Tuscany) where it is made without salt due to an old salt feud, filone has come to mean a special kind of white, rustic bread here in Denmark, made slightly different from the ciabatta (another shape description for the saltless Toscana bread). In the Danish bakeries the filone is a rustic bread, with salt, that is slightly elongated, typically with pointy ends (which makes it fairly impractical to cut in regular slices, but nevermind that).

Now, most recipe books in Denmark are written by enthusiasts rather than professionals, and there is a tendency to an extreme overuse of fresh yeast (this is available in any store, really, whereas instant and dry yeast is slightly more rare). Thus, it was with ill-hid enthusiasm I threw myself at a recipe released from one of our bakery chains for retarded filone bread—it has been released as part of a yearly event that some people and stores are having in the fall break called The Great Baking Day, which is a moment for the busy families to pause and bake, father, mother, and children. It has been launched by a reknowned Danish chef and a child psychologist and seems to be a wild success (although the companies backing it seem to exploit it a tad by insinuating that you should use special brand flour for the optimal product, etc.).

Irrespective of it not being fall break just yet and that Hannah isn’t nearly old enough to participate, I wanted to give the retarded filone bread a try. The recipe calls for a 24 hour retarding, but I only gave it about 18 hours, fearing that it would have a too acidic taste otherwise. Shaping the cold dough is a whole lot easier than trying to shape some of the equal wet poolish-based doughs I usually make.

The shaped loaves are rolled in durum flour, and after proofing and a somewhat lengthy bake—almost 40 minutes—the breads have gained a lovely golden and rustic look.

Unlike the breads I usually bake, this method of making the breads yielded a somewhat denser crumb (which is consistent with the filone breads from most bakeries around these parts).

Its taste is markedly acidic, and I think having let it retard for another six hours would’ve been too much. It’s a solid bread that is good for a varied amount of toppings, particularly considering that it’s very easy to make. It’s basically made just by mixing the dough on a stand mixer, stuffing it in the fridge, waiting 18 hours, shaping, proofing, slashing, and baking the loaves. I still prefer the breads that require all the folding and other work—the crumb is simply better in those loaves. Still, an altogether decent bread.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Butter poppy seed rolls

Saturday, October 4th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

These rolls go by a couple of different names in Danish: tebirkes, smørbirkes or Københavnerbirkes, and it seems that no one really agrees on how to make them. They also have no official translation to English, so this was the closest I could dream up. In the traditional bakeries near Copenhagen, most kinds are filled with remonce, but most bakeries will also have savoury kinds without the remonce. The recipe I’ve found is a typical home-baking recipe from Denmark using a full package of fresh baker’s yeast (50 grams), which means that it’s quickly done, has little flavour and mostly only taste good warm out of the oven. However, the rich butter dough (which I’ve replaced with margarine) does taste awesome fresh out of the oven. The day after, however, it is hard to stomach.

It’s a very easy thing to make: basically you just throw together some flour, butter, egg, salt and yeast and presto, you have the dough after some kneading. Brush with eggs, fold twice and brush with eggs again and add some poppy seeds and this is what you have. The lighting sucks in the photos, I’m afraid, as I made them late in the evening and our artificial lighting in the kitchen is fairly lacking.

After a relatively quick proofing and bake they turn out a tad more voluminous. In the professional bakery versions the layers are usually somewhat more visible and there’s even a hole showing through the sides of it. No such thing here.

Cutting it up it shows a very dense crumb, which is heavy with butter and egg. Very good warm, otherwise… not.

Tags: baking, pastry

A small family

Sunday, September 28th, 2008 | Personal | 2 Comments

A few weeks ago our little daughter was born. She is healthy and doing very well and we are all very happy. In the image she is two days old.

This is also, if there should be any doubt, why I have been a tad quiet as of late.

Apple blackberry tart

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Starting as an experiment on creating whipped cream from an oat-based cream, the apple blackberry tart is a nice dessert, but since it is fairly dry it really needs whipped cream. The tart dough and fruits applied does look rather appetising.

The blackberries are fresh from our garden, so I think they deserve a closeup.

This is a closed tart receiving a lid of more shortcrust dough.

It is supposedly possible to whip the oat-based cream by adding some gelatine, but even after we threw it in the freezer for a while to strengthen the gelatine’s properties (they were not working without this step at all) the result was lumpy and disappointing, nowhere near the impressive tops and lightness of regular whipped cream. So we had to settle with a slightly thickened cream on the tart.

Darkness fell between the assembly of the tart and it finishing its bake, hence the bad lighting in the last photo.

Tags: baking, cake, dessert