Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

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

Maize bread

Saturday, August 16th, 2008 | Cooking | 2 Comments

During the last month and some of writing my thesis I spent almost all my waking hours doing just that. No baking whatsoever. One of the last things I had time to bake before going into crunch mode was a maize bread, or corn bread as it is known in many places.

As evident in the photo, the yellow colour of the maize imparts on the dough rather starkly as opposed to the normal white wheat flour. Once baked the pale yellow colour turns to a more golden glow.

The crumb, however, is fairly tough, and a tad more dry than its wheat only counterparts. The maize flavour adds a nice taste, though.

Tags: baking, bread, maize bread

Rehabilitating from thesis writing

Thursday, August 14th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

There has been a lot of silence on this blog during the past two months. Too much silence, really. However, all has not been lost as I have now finished my master’s thesis and handed it in. Only the defense remains. However, after scarcely having had time to bake, let alone writing about it, there is only one solution for rehabilitation: bake a lot of bread and make some awesome food. So I did just that, or, rather, I provided the bread, my wife provided the awesome food.

What we did was take a bunch of very lovely and delicate chantarelle mushrooms…

and we throw them on a frying pan together with a few regular champignons, some thyme, a bit of parsley and some thinly sliced garlic. They make for a very lovely photo if I have to say so myself.

To this we add a bit of oat-based cream (since I am lactose intolerant) that the mushrooms absorb fairly quickly.

Now all we need is a bit of my freshly baked french bread…

and the fried mushrooms are placed on the bread…

et voilà. Delicious as an appetiser or a night snack.

Tags: appetisers, baking, bread, food, mushroom, white bread

Pain rustique

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 | Cooking | 1 Comment

While baking alone has a certain meditative quality, baking with others can be a lot of fun as you talk over the ingredients, help each other measure and fold and generally just have a good time creating food. So I took the chance when I had my sisters visiting to help my youngest sister try out one of the breads from Hamelman’s book, Pain Rustique. This bread, which requires a poolish, is very easy to make, and you do not have to wait 5 or 6 hours until it is completed (ignoring the activation time of the poolish, of course, which we left to sit overnight), but only require short 25 minute breaks, which is a lot nicer to have when you are focused on cooking. And lastly, it does not require any shaping, just like the ciabatta bread, making it very easy to handle for kids.

We did not get to take a lot of photos as we were making the poolish and folding the bread (there’s too much sticky dough everywhere when you’re two about baking the same bread), we did take some photos before loading the breads into the oven and after they were completely baked.

And once these beauties have finished baking, we get some nice, lovely breads.

The general consensus between my sisters, my wife and I: mmmmmmmmmmm.

The bread has a lovely, subtle taste without any overpowering sensations. It’s a good bread to be used as the basis for any food, and it is about as good as my straight dough French bread (the first poolish bread that has really succeeded for me). If you do not have the time to wait the seven or so hours for the French bread, this is a good choice. I will most likely be utilising this more heavily once we have a child.

Photography and great taste, courtesy of my youngest sister (with a bit of aid).

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Feeling peckish

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 | Cooking | 2 Comments

I have so far gotten the hang of creating bread for our daily consumption by baking four .5 kg loaves once a week, freezing two of the loaves and taking them out of the freezer as needed. It’s a nice, relaxing routine to bake Hamelman’s straight dough French breads, and they have such a lovely taste. So as part of the celebrations of my oldest sister’s rite of confirmation, I offered to bake some bread and cakes to remove some of the stress from my parents as they were having the house filled with guests.

Being a fairly small family, I just had to bake for about 16 people, but then it started to nag at me… what if there isn’t enough food? So I cleaned out the kitchen tables and got ready to bake some cake.

The recipe I chose for the cakes was Fudgy Brownies from the most awesome chocolate book Crave by Maureen McKeon. This is the book for chocolate lovers. As I have remarked before I really do not like underbaked cake, so I usually give the cake a wee bit more in the oven than is given in the recipes (enough so that there is no batter left on a fork when I put it all the way through the cake and lift it up again). To liven it up a bit, I went to a specialty store and got candied violet leaves to decorate the cake.

I made a quadruple portion of the cakes, you know, just for good measure. Over a kg of sugar, over a kg of chocolate and lots and lots and lots of oat-based cream to avoid any fun moments with us lactose intolerant people. This is one heavy cake. The candied violet leaves worked wonders.

Of course, this was the easy part. The fun part was to bake ten .4 kg loaves so no one would leave the party hungry. Not taking any chances I went with my tried and tested straight dough French bread from Hamelman’s Bread.

Is it just me or does this make you want to go ‘Ferment, my babies, ferment!’ in a good, classical cheap television production Frankenstein voice too?

Baking the French bread involves a lot of times where you need to fold the bread, it needs to be divided, shaped, scored, and baked, and the bread better not overproof or everything might be ruined! Three doughs meant that I had run out of alarm clocks to signal when I needed to do what! Fortunately, salvation was only 60 lines of Python away, and my laptop sat happily on the kitchen table, reminding me to do all the things in the correct order, at the correct intervals, and fortunately I timed everything so that none of the foldings, shapings or bakings got in the way of each other. I would feel daunted by trying to run a bakery and having to interleave not only three doughs, but thirty or fourty doughs!

So, feeling peckish?

Tags: baking, cake, chocolate, white bread

French bread with pâte fermentée

Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

After having read through several bread baking books and websites there is one common thing I keep hearing, namely that breads baked with sourdough is the epiphany of breads, giving it a delectable, nutty taste. I must admit I have tried a bit of this and that, be it a poolish or a biga, and this time I have tried the pâte fermentée sourdough.

The pâte ferments for about 12 to 16 hours before it needs to be used in the ‘actual’ dough. And while the bread that comes out of this dough is good, I still think the taste of my french bread has it beat with some margin. The bread is still airy, though, but a slight bit more dense than the straight dough french bread.

I guess I will just have to keep experimenting with the preferment breads until I come up with those delectable breads everyone is talking about, but until then, I will most likely keep making the straight dough french bread as my daily bread. Yummy.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Molten chocolate cake

Friday, April 25th, 2008 | Cooking | 1 Comment

I have to admit that we are cake lovers. In particular chocolate cakes seem to vanish almost as quickly as they are baked. Really, one would not have guessed from looking at this blog, right? So I was immediately hooked when I was browsing food blogs and saw that the Tuesdays with Dorie food blogger group was baking Molten chocolate cake. Once I actually found this, the week had passed and everyone had posted their molten chocolate cake results, and a couple of them including the recipe, so I had my wife pick up some fancy muffin forms for baking, and off I went.

The recipe is actually very straightforward and the cake is basically an underbaked cake. With that in mind I used pasteurised eggs to avoid any fun moments due to salmonella. The cake came out exactly as I had intended:

As to the taste… what a disappointment. Even with the light, slightly acidic and fresh taste of pineapple, I will be no fan of this underbaked, pasty cake anytime soon.

Tags: baking, cake, chocolate

Pizza ai funghi e prosciutto

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Pizza is, without a doubt, one of the most forgiving meals to make. Almost no matter what you put on it, people simply love this piece of dough. Of course, there are a few people who misunderstands the whole pizza concept and put bananas and stuff on them. That is just a plain frightening concept. Now, at its core, the pizza is ‘just’ another yeast dough, much like bread, although it is a somewhat more dense dough than most bread doughs I usually bake. In fact, a single pizza, normally serving four (but in our family 1½), is made of just that little ball of dough. This is what it looks after a good three hours of fermentation.

After beating the dough down and rolling it out, we get the much loved round pizza napolitana shape.

Ok, so perhaps my shaping skills are not the best, but it came out round-ish. This is our able foundation for anything pizza, whether it be napolitana or calzone, and it is ready to receive our chosen filling. For my dinner I had chosen a traditional mushroom pizza, pizza ai funghi, and this mean a nicely cooked tomato sauce with mushrooms, garlic (I went a bit overboard here since I am down with a nasty virus) and onions. This you, of course, smear across the pizza prior to baking it. It is very important to have let the tomato sauce mixture cook for a while so you get a lot of the excess water out of it as you’ll have a wet dough mess once you take your pizza out of the oven otherwise.

And presto, after a good bake you get a lovely pizza. Now, as I was rather short on mushrooms (we had used quite a few more than I had anticipated for our mushroom risotto the day before), I added some lovely prosciutto to the pizza after it had baked. Adding prosciutto after the bake ensures that the ham does not get as hard and rubbery as sole leather.

Those Italians really hit it well on figuring out a good all-purpose dinner subject that works with pretty much anything you’ve got left over in your cupboards. Amazing.

That’s all there is to making a lovely pizza from the contents of your cupboard. I hereby name this Pizza ai funghi e prosciutto. (That does sound quite a lot better than pizza with mushrooms and ham, does it not?) Buon appetito.

Tags: baking, pizza

Parisian daily bread and pear-marzipan tart

Sunday, April 6th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Today it happened again. I was out of bread by breakfast and rapidly growing hungry, so things needed to move rapidly in order to get lunch at a time that might just serve as a probable time for lunch. Fear not, the day before I had been skimming through Daniel Leader’s Local Breads and had seen the recipe for Parisian daily bread, in which he states that ‘There’s nothing like tearing into a warm baguette, fresh from your oven, just a couple of hours after you decide to bake.’ Now that sounds great, I can shave off several hours from Hamelman’s French bread recipe, I thought!

So, today comes around and I start reading the recipe… rest for 20 minutes, mix for 10 minutes, ferment for 45 minutes, ferment again for 45 minutes, proof for 40 minutes, bake for 20 minutes… this seems oddly above a couple of hours to me, but it still saves me a couple of hours to Hamelman’s recipe. After kneading the dough on the machine, it is supposed to receive a bit of more kneading on an unfloured desk, but even after kneading it for a bit more than 10 minutes on my mixer, it was extremely sticky and nowhere near ‘springy’. It took quite a bit more flour than the recipe called for to get it even remotely possibly to knead by hand.

So after a good three hour preparation and bake, and twenty minutes of cooling to settle everything in the bread, I was well past lunch time (oops), but nevertheless, fresh bread from the oven is good pretty much no matter what. It is quite a decent bread, but if you have two or three extra hours, the French bread recipe from Hamelman’s book beats this hands-down. Hamelman’s bread is much more of a savory bread that you can use for any kind of meat or vegetable, whereas Leader’s Parisian daily bread is more comfort food-ish—going nicely with butter, jam or cheese, but not so well with meat or vegetables. Its crumb is also a lot more dense than Hamelman’s French bread, and a bit too much on the salty side for my tastes.

As an afternoon cake, my wife wanted to surprise me with a lovely pear and marzipan tart (I simply adore marzipan in any shape and kind. I can eat it by the kilo in its raw form!), but once the alarm sounded for it to be done and it was being taken out of the oven, I hear a large crash, which mean I should rush into the kitchen, usually. Suffice to say, the cake did not really look like the lovely cake with pears lined up symmetrically and the batter spread carefully. It looked rather much like this…

It was quite decent, despite this accident, though.

Tags: baking, bread, cake, dessert, marzipan, white bread

French bread, take two

Friday, April 4th, 2008 | Cooking | 1 Comment

It is one thing to make a good bread once, but making it consistently is the goal here. Of course, my old statistics professor would tell me that two samples is a horrible basis for any form of statistic, but let us ignore that for a bit (I used to doze off in her classes anyway, not the most riveting topic).

I attempted Hamelman’s straight dough French bread recipe again yesterday, but got started a bit late due to work. The dough is a bit on the sticky side and my mixer has a bit of strouble actually kneading it properly so I have to after-knead it a bit more, which tends to be a bit annoying since it means that you have to use slightly too much flour when you shape the breads, leaving flour residue on the bread once you bake it, and this residue will generate some grayish streaks on the bread. It does not detract from the flavour, it just isn’t so pretty.

I would have shot some photos of the crumb as well, but once the bread was ready and had cooled just the slightest bit it was past 8 pm. Word of advice: Never get between a pregnant woman and her dinner. Ever. It’s scary!

The crumb was somewhat denser than the last time I made it, a fact that I attribute to my somewhat failed attempt at making steam in the oven. The ice cubes did not even remotely fizzle when I threw them in a pan with hot water. Also a baking hearth would probably aid tremendously, but I think I get decent results from the metal baking pans I have now. I will have to do some more trial and error, but the breads rose nicely, even after being put in the oven, however they did not develop the hallmark very crispy crust that the French bread in our local bakeries have. It was still an extremely tasty bread, though.

To serve for dinner we made a series of bruschetta-inspired breads, although we might have aberrated a bit from the traditional Italian recipes. A slice of bread with fried mushroom and parsley, with hard-boiled eggs and tomatos, with coarsely chopped tomatos, finely chopped garlic, whole leaves of basil and a bit of extra virgin olive oil served with a slice of serrano ham (we did not have any prosciutto handy to stay in the Italian cuisine). Gorgeous dinner if I have to say so myself.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread