Bread and Cheese

Reverse engineering a loaf

April 18, 2011

My breadchum Joanne took off for New York a couple of weeks ago, and before she left I persuaded her to lend me Hamelman’s Bread to plunder. the first thing I did from it was a Semolina Bread with a soaker and fennel seed, made with commercial yeast. It was really good, and I planned [...]

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A bread maker remembered

April 17, 2011

Odd how some things make us reassess other things. A little notice on The Fresh Loaf informed me that Bernard Clayton Jr had died, and I realised I knew absolutely nothing about the person who wrote the book that first gave me a real idea of how interesting and varied bread and bread-making could be. [...]

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Food made of pressed curds

March 21, 2011

This past couple of weeks I sipped from the well of erudition. Professor Leonard Barkan, of Princeton University, gave the 2011 Jerome Lectures at the American Academy in Rome, and his topic was Unswept floor: food culture and high culture, antiquity and renaissance. At this point, having been to all of Professor Barkan’s lectures, any [...]

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Time to take stock of commodity supplies

February 9, 2011

I just opened my second 10kg bag of Bongiovanni type 0 high protein organic bread flour. Total cost of flour plus some other goodies, almost 34.75. I decided that the bread stash could reimburse me for its raw materials, which it now has without too much pain. Not enough dough to give up the day [...]

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Pride goeth before a fallen loaf

January 27, 2011

No, not fallen. Never-risen. I should have known better than to trumpet the satisfaction my bread-making gives me; yesterday’s experiment was a colossal failure. Bad inventory management left me with any white bread flour and an excess of yummy durum flour. I don’t normally bake 100% durum anything, so I cast about for recipes and [...]

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On food and writing

January 23, 2011

These two loaves came out of the oven yesterday about an hour before lunchtime. Sometimes, I just want a plain, white bread; no seeds or other goodies, no interesting flour mix, no glaze. That’s what I got, and it provides a focus for a post inspired by GOOD’s Food for Thinkers series. That smorgasbord is [...]

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Two kinds of messing about come together

January 16, 2011

This morning on Facebook I leaked that I had “two kinds of messing about commingling to produce … something rather wonderful”. And finally, the results are in. Not wonderful, but not bad either. Messing about number 1: making Dan Lepard’s Black Pepper Rye bread, in quantity. There’s not a lot I have to add to [...]

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A for abundance, B for bread, J for joy

January 1, 2011

Invited to a New Year’s Eve party, and told to bring something to eat, no hesitation: breads. Left to right, they are black pepper rye from Dan Lepard, 50% durum:manitoba sourdough, and peanut chilli, a new one from Dan Lepard. Absolutely no hesitation in making this the first post of 2011 either. Baking better breads [...]

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Some leavening thoughts

November 16, 2010

A lot of my loaves are raised with natural leavens, rather than store-bought yeast. There’s a lot one could say about natural yeasts, wild yeasts, sourdough starters, levain, leaven, what have you. I’m not going to say much. You can read elsewhere about how a good natural leaven is a symbiotic mixture of different sorts [...]

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Colour me butter

October 14, 2010

I don’t really miss it, and yet … Consider butter | Life and style | guardian.co.uk.

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No more no knead?

September 8, 2010

It’s fair to say that I was an early and enthusiastic adopter of Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread, hymning its pleasures a week or so after the original article appeared in the New York Times. It is also fair to say that since I re-applied myself to serious bread-baking, which I suppose was about three years [...]

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Coming to the rye, part I

August 1, 2010
Thumbnail image for Coming to the rye, part I

Hey, it’s Lammas Day, time to celebrate with a loaf of the season’s freshly-milled wheat. Failing that, and ignoring all the woo-hoo that nowadays seems to surround even the simplest expression of gratitude, I’m going to mix traditions and post about my soul’s search for a good Jewish rye recipe. I’ve been hunting for a [...]

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Cities that live on thin air

April 13, 2010

Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time had a pair of episodes on the history of cities that were packed with fascinating ideas, any one of which could probably have spun off into a programme of its own. And of course I shouldn’t criticise for what wasn’t there. But really, to spend 80 minutes discussing the history [...]

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Autonomy, mastery, purpose … and bagels

April 5, 2010

True job satisfaction, according to Dan Pink, comes from autonomy, mastery and purpose according, and I agree. In search of satisfaction, I therefore set out to do something I’d never done before. Bake bagels for brunch. I used to live in the same road as one of the great remaining bagel bakeries in East London, [...]

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A food community

March 30, 2010

I bake more bread than we can eat. Even though homemade bread, especially naturally leavened bread, is much more resistant to mould than store-bought, occasionally a piece needs its green and furry bits removed. Even more occasionally, a chunk gets dumped. I could happily bake even more; but what to do with the surplus? I’ve [...]

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A Swedish Rye with raisins

March 21, 2010

Swedish friends invited us for a casual supper and a movie, and I was arrogant enough to think that I could make them a Swedish-style rye bread. I’d already established, with the same Swedes, that the term limpa, which I had always understood to mean a type of bread, a recipe, in fact described a [...]

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The Fornacalia breads

March 6, 2010

Life outside of Life has been hectic lately, which is why I am only just getting round to writing up the breads I made for a dinner on the first Saturday after Fornacalia. The meal was chilli with all the fixins, and three breads. First off, to keep the wolf from the door, thin slices [...]

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Happy Fornacalia everyone

February 17, 2010

I can’t actually be sure that today is the day, because the Curio Maximus hasn’t actually announced it. But today is the last day it could possibly be. So I’m celebrating in the simplest possible way, by baking bread with only three ingredients: flour, water and salt. Oh, and the squillions of things that bestir [...]

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An Oz view of natural leavens

February 14, 2010

What to call sourdough breads, given that they’re not always sour? There is a variety of alternatives. The French levain is popular, but somewhat poncy and effete. We do have the perfectly good English word leaven, but for some obscure reason, while the poncy levain is always taken first to mean a natural leaven, or [...]

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Hamelman’s Semolina with a whole-grain soaker

January 31, 2010

I’d been longing to try one of those whole-grain soaker recipes for ages, but had to wait for the time to visit the whole foods shop to score some millet seeds; never seen them anywhere else. And then I had to wait another few days for a baking day. And a final delay of a [...]

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Pandoro, Pan d’oro, let’s call the whole thing off.

December 17, 2009

Susan lays it on the line: Like its cousin panettone, pandoro is an involved bread. It requires a carefully-planned schedule, some ingredients and equipment you might not have on hand (but are readily available), and close attention during the final mixing process. That said, I would not discourage beginning bakers from attempting this. If you [...]

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Sesame oatmeal bread

December 15, 2009

One of my favourite recipes in Bernard Clayton Jr’s Complete Book of Breads is Oatmeal Sesame Bread. The crumb is delicious and moist, from the oatmeal, and great for sandwiches. So I decided to convert it to weights and to use a sourdough starter. 100 gm white flour starter at 100% hydration 120 gm rolled [...]

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Everything old is new again: cold-start cloche baking

December 3, 2009

I was reading Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery in search of the straight dope on Lardy Cake, which I’ve promised expat friends for a forthcoming English Tea. Having found what I needed, I decided to treat myself to rereading her consummate explanation of the perfect English Cottage Loaf, and how to make it. [...]

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Food News (new series) 16: Inventive

November 24, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 88.9 This week: 87.3 My grand scheme to end world hunger using modern technology seems to have fallen on stony ground. Fortunately I can still eat. When I joined the secret confraternity of home bread bakers back in the summer, the restaurant Necci 1924 fed us a remarkable lunch to tide [...]

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