I was banging on about baking and bread the other week, yet I haven’t made any for a while. I make a brown yeast bread this morning to start off my day. I’ve made it before - it’s pretty straightforward. I also begin a starter so I can make sourdough. There are stories of bakers having the same starter for years. The deal is you mix 2ozs flour with 2 ozs water. You add the same quantities every day for a week. The dough absorbs natural yeast in the air which enables it to rise, and gives it that wonderful sourness. When you bake a loaf, you keep back some of the dough to start your next one with, and so the cycle begins again. I wonder how long this one will last…
I superset the brown yeast bread with the Gingerbread I have to make today for dessert. I’m not 100% sure about the recipe, as it seems to have too much black treacle in it. But another resolution is to stop fucking around with their recipes, so I follow my orders. I am making one half times the recipe, which will fill one loaf tin. This is a slight pain in the ass, since it means some fiddly measurements. A level teaspoon of bread sods become ¼ teaspoon. 1½ teaspoons of ground ginger becomes ¾, which is an especial ball ache. One egg becomes half an egg. Having got all my dry stuff together, I weigh up half the quantities of butter, sugar and treacle in a saucepan and gently heat them through.
Once they have all melted (the sweet smell given off by the pan is almost intoxicating) you take it off the heat and pour in half a pint of milk. I let that cool a while, before adding it to the dry, stirring in my half a beaten egg. Just before I mix the wet and dry together I have a quick scan down the recipe to make sure I have everything in there. 3/4lb black treacle became 6oz: check. 6oz butter 3oz: check. 8oz sugar 4oz: check. Half a pint of milk became aaaarrrrggh. Fuck it. Whilst this is not the end of the world, it is a real bloody nuisance. I have no choice but to make one times the recipe now, which means going back and repeating all those poxy little measurements and weigh ups again.
Having finally got the bloody gingerbread in the oven I progress to my next dish, poached plums. Nothing too exciting here, I get them on and all is good. We also have to all plate up a dish of Irish Shellfish. I get a Dublin Bay prawn, a handful of shrimps, a couple of mussels and clams and an oyster. There’s not a great deal can go wrong with this, unless you don’t check any open molluscs before cooking them or stab yourself with an oyster knife, so it is really about presentation. I can’t help myself. My Dublin Bay prawn has massive pincers and is just crying out to be made the centre of attention. I manage to curl his tail under and have him sort of rearing up like some crazy horse, with his head hovering above the mayonnaise. I apologise for this ridiculous arrangement, but my teacher - another wonderful lady, called Rosie - thinks it’s great. Hilarious. Maybe it will catch on.
So we’re all done and dusted. My bread came out really well. I don’t want to tempt fate but I haven’t made a bad bread yet, with the exception of one white yeast where I used the wrong flour. The gingerbreads were also good, though a little treacly but we knew that anyway. Maybe molasses or a bit of golden syrup in place of some of the treacle next time. The plums were delicious. I poached them just until the skins burst then left them in the liquid. The great thing about them is you can drain off the poaching syrup, add some gelatine and you get two awesome desserts for the price of one.
Apart from dropping and smashing a Pyrex bowl then, a pretty successful morning, just when I really needed one most. The irony is of course that on a day of trying to do things properly, by the book and with fastidious care and attention, the only real mistake I made was when I had to do something by half I ended up doing the whole thing. I reckon I can live with that.
there's a french sourdough you can buy at borough market that's made from a starter that's 180 years old!
ReplyDeletelinds and I tried to make a starter a couple of years ago. we were using crushed muscat grapes to create the natural yeast. unfortunately the muslin bag they were in must have been poking out a little over the top of the dough, and when we took the lid off a week later we had succeeded only in creating a big bowl of mould.