Beginning to bake #4: Bread in an hour

We’re on to post four of my baking mission – read the original rationale here. In this Lent project, we’ve gone from pancakes to muffins to scones. And now we’re starting bread.

But not scary yeasted bread – that comes later. A soda bread that can be ready in an hour. And that’s an hour from walking in the door to eating it (I timed it in case you didn’t believe me, and you can see the timer running in the photos).

Bake 35-40 mins

Soda bread and scones are very closely related. Instead of yeast, soda bread again relies on baking powder or bicarbonate of soda for leavening. As the name suggests, soda bread is most often made with bicarbonate of soda (baking soda if you’re in North America) along with something acidic like buttermilk. And apart from flour and a bit of salt, that’s all you need. A little melted butter is often added to make it more tender. There are also recipes with more butter, some sugar and raisins that make something more like a tea cake or a scone – also very good, and see the Smitten Kitchen variation below, adapted from the New York Times, which suggests serving with some cheese and apples.

IMG_0083

Back with a more austere recipe, with so little in the way of ingredients, you really need good flour, and proper seasoning to get a good flavour from the bread. Wholemeal or a mix of plain and wholemeal flour gives you a wheaty flavour and a more interesting texture. Spelt flour is also good, and small parts of rye flour mixed in will give another flavour again. Stoneground flour has more flavour than regular flour – the grinding process will incorporate the germ and more of the oils into the flour, so you can often see a visible difference, and it looks creamier than steel-ground plain flour.

Like scones, this bread will also stale fast, so it is best made and eaten warm on the same day (although it will also make decent toast the following day). But it’s so quick that there’s no need to keep it hanging around. Just make it when you want it.

Equipment:

Nothing new here: scales and measuring spoons, plus:

  • Bowl
  • Wooden spoon
  • Baking tray

Basic recipe:

  • 200g plain flour
  • 200g wholemeal plain flour
  • 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt
  • 190g yoghurt + 140g milk (or 330ml buttermilk)
  • 1 tsp honey (optional)

Turn the oven on and set the temperature to 200C or 180C for a fan oven.

Weigh the flours into the bowl. Add the bicarbonate of soda and salt, and combine with a whisk.

Weigh flour and bicarb

Add the milk and yoghurt to the bowl. Add the honey on top if using, then use the spoon to mix everything together until you have a sticky ball of dough.

Mixed dough

Sprinkle plenty of flour on a board or the counter. Scrape the dough out onto it.
Turn onto floured counter

Sprinkle the top with more flour, and flour your hands. Fold each edge over into the centre to make it into a ball. It will be very sticky. Use plenty of flour, and don’t handle it too much. Just get it into a rough ball shape.

Fold into a ball
Lift the ball gently onto the floured baking sheet. Pat it out to about 3cm thick, just flattening it a bit.

Flour the handle of your wooden spoon, and press it into the surface of the dough to make a cross. This will give the dough room to expand in the oven, and help the loaf to rise a little, giving a lighter crumb.
Mark cross with a spoon handle

Put the tray into the oven and set the time for 35 minutes. After that time, check the loaf. It should be a dark golden brown. If you’re not sure, bake for another 5 or 10 minutes. I baked for 40 minutes at 180C in my fan oven. An oven without a fan will take longer.
Bake 35-40 mins

Leave to cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes, and then slice and enjoy warm with butter.

Serve warm

Variations:

Lorraine Pascale Soda Bread

Lorraine Pascale has a lovely recipe which makes a large loaf. She uses treacle to give the loaf flavour and a little sweetness.

Smitten Kitchen – Skillet Irish Soda Bread

Smitten Kitchen adapted a New York TImes recipe to make a much sweeter, more cake-like loaf, that is still incredibly good. I like to bake this one in my deep oven-proof cast-iron pan, lined with baking parchment, but it will work on a baking sheet as well.

Richard Corrigan – Whole poached wild salmon with wheaten bread

In Northern Ireland, soda bread is often known as wheaten bread. Here Richard Corrigan of Lindsay House and Bentley’s Oyster Bar in London, gives his wheaten bread recipe.

Beginning to bake #3: Scones for tea

Baked scones

Scones are easy to make at home, but so hard to buy. If you’ve never had a homemade scone, the chances are you’ve never had a good one.

Scones also keep very badly. Even the next day they become dry and crumbly. So the solution is to bake them the day you want to eat them, and if necessary, freeze any leftovers that day. They are the sort of thing the fifties domestic goddess would start to make because someone had dropped around unexpectedly – quick, and best eaten fresh from the oven.

Why are scones next on the ‘how to bake’ list? Like pancakes and muffins, the ingredients for scones are pretty simple, and rely principally on baking powder to make them rise. You just need flour, butter, milk, baking powder and maybe a little sugar to to put them together. Some add eggs to the recipe, but I’m sceptical – that seems to make a much cakier thing, and not a proper cream-and-jam scone.

The differences are that you use cold butter, and you rub the butter into the flour, creating crumbs. ‘Rubbing in’ the butter is something you also do with shortcrust pastry. It involves cutting the cold butter up into pieces about the size of peas. Then you use your fingertips to rub the lumps of butter into the flour. This distributes the butter through the flour, coating some of the flour with fat, and waterproofing it to restrict the development of the gluten when the milk is added. You want soft and tender scones – too much gluten would make them tough and chewy.

For the same reason, you want to play with the scone dough as little as possible – don’t knead it or smush it around. Use a spoon to mix the dough together, then your hands very briefly to make sure all the floury bits are incorporated. You need to make sure it forms a single lump of dough, but no more than that.

To make the scones, you can flatten the dough with a rolling pin or just use your hands. It just needs to be patted out to about 2cm high. The thicker the dough at this point, the taller your final scones will be.

You can use a cutter or a glass for round scones. For minimum waste, just cut the dough into wedges or squares with a sharp knife.

Glazing the scones is optional, but it will give you a beautiful shiny golden top. The ideal is a beaten egg, or a yolk beaten with a little egg or cream. Some milk or cream on it’s own will also do, but won’t be as golden. Try not to drip glaze down the sides – it can limit the rising in the oven.

Equipment:

  • Bowl
  • Spoon
  • Knife
  • Pastry brush
  • A solid baking sheet. That means thick sheets of metal, probably aluminium. Can be non-stick, anodised or plain. You need it thick and heavy so it won’t warp and twist in a hot oven.
  • A round cutter (optional: the end of a water glass will also work, or use a knife to cut squares.

Basic recipe:

Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s ‘How to be a domestic goddess’:

  • 250g plain flour
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 3 tsp baking powder
  • 70g cold butter
  • 2 tbsp / 30g caster sugar
  • 130ml milk (full fat if you can)
  • 50g sultanas or raisins for fruit scones
  • 1 egg plus 1 tbsp milk for the glaze

Method:

Put the flour, salt and baking powder in a bowl and mix togther with a whisk.Slice or cube the cold butter and put it into the flour.

Flour and butter

Use a butter knife to slice through the butter, reducing it to small pieces in the flour.

Once you’ve sliced it up as much as you can, use your fingers to rub the butter and flour together. The movement you want is something like the ‘money, money, money’ gesture – rubbing your thumb along the fingers of the same hand and back again. The trick is to get the bits of butter and flour in there so that as you rub your fingers together, the butter and flour get pushed together. Using your fingertips keeps everything from warming up too much – your fingertips are cooler than your palms.

Butter rubbed into crumbs

Once the butter has almost disappeared, and the mixture looks sandy without any big lumps, add the sugar, and raisins or sultanas if you want to use them.

Add the milk and stir everything with a spoon or a knife to make a dough.

Mixing into dough

Once it’s almost all mixed, use your hands to push and squash it until there are no more floury parts and the whole thing comes together in a single ball, leaving the bowl virtually clean.

Ball of dough

Take a small handful of flour and scatter it over a counter. Tip out the ball, and if there are any big fissure or cracks, push them together. Push the ball out to flatten it to a roughly rectangular piece about 2cm thick. Use a cutter to cut round scones, or a knife to cut into 6 square ones.

Cutting scones

Cut scones

Put the scones carefully on a baking sheet.

Scones on the tray

Beat the egg with a little milk (or just use milk on its own) and use a pastry brush to glaze just the top of the scones. This will make sure they get a golden colour in the oven.
Bake for 10-15 minutes at 200C until risen and brown on the top.
Cool on a rack and eat as soon as possible (or freeze).

Baked scones

Variations:

The Guardian: as part of a series, Felicity Cloake investigates the recipe for the perfect scone

Baker Paul Hollywood was featured on BBC2’s the Great British Bake-off. He says his scone recipe is perfect.

Delia has a step-by-step on how to make scones on her website.

Beginning to bake #2: Raspberry muffins

This is the second in my series of Lent posts on simple baking. After pancakes we move on to muffins, and the first item that is actually baked.

The word muffins is used for all sorts of things, including split and toasted English muffins, made with yeast, and those cakey things sold in plastic wrappers with a spookily long shelf life. We’re not talking about either of those here. What we’re aiming for is a not-too-sweet bun, with some pieces of nuts or fruit adding texture, that’s moist and quite good with breakfast or a cup of tea. The classic would be a blueberry muffin, the firm berries providing little pockets of purple juice, but in this case, I’m doing raspberries, because that’s what I had in the freezer. And I like raspberries better.

The logic for moving from pancakes to muffins is that the mixture is made in a similar way: you mix dry ingredients, including flour and baking powder, and add wet ingredients, including milk and egg, and mix together very briefly. This is a thicker mix, so it is baked in a muffin tin in the oven instead of being cooked in a pan.

My preferred recipe for muffins uses mashed bananas as part of the wet ingredients. I think this gives a great flavour, and it helps to use up the over ripe bananas that I always seem to have. However, I’m trying to make these recipes as straightforward as possible, and you don’t always have bananas just lying around. So this is a plain version. But if you find yourself with bananas on the turn, I urge you to try one of the recipes in the Variations section below.

This version can be used with other berries instead – blueberries would work very well (it’s originally adapted from Nigella Lawson’s blueberry muffin recipe). Frozen berries can be easier to work with, as they don’t smush when you stir them in. Or you can use other fruit, chopped nuts, citrus zest or chocolate chips as the flavouring instead. As these muffins are quite plain, it’s also nice to add something crunchy to the top – crunchy sugar, and chopped nuts or flaked almonds are good. But all these things are optional and flexible. Start with something straightforward and go from there.

Equipment:

In addition to scales and measuring cups:

  • Bowl
  • Wooden spoon / silicone spatula
  • Jug or small bowl for wet ingredients
  • Muffin tin (can be pretty cheap, doesn’t need to be non stick if you’re using cases)
  • Muffin paper cases
  • Spring-loaded ice cream scoop (entirely optional, but really good for dividing muffin batter into cases. If you get addicted to muffins, get one).

Basic recipe:

Wet ingredients:

  • 100ml/g milk (as before, milliliters and grams are the same thing for milk and water)
  • 100g yoghurt
  • 1 large egg
  • 75ml vegetable oil (near enough 75g)

Dry ingredients:

  • 200g plain flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
  • pinch of salt
  • 75g caster sugar

Flavourings:

  • 200g raspberries – fresh or frozen

Topping (optional):

  • flaked almonds
  • demerara sugar – a couple of tablespoons of each

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200C / 180C if it’s a fan oven.

Measure the dry ingredients into a large bowl. Use a whisk to combine them, and make sure the baking powder and bicarbonate are distributed through the flour.

Measure the wet ingredients into a large jug or a small bowl. Use a whisk or a fork to break up the egg and combine it all together.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry. Mix the two together gently. Once they are most of the way combined, but still with dry patches, add the raspberries. Frozen berries are easier to mix in, but fresh are good too.

Divide the mixture between the muffin cases. Sprinkle a few flaked almonds and half a teaspoon of sugar onto each muffin. Bake for 20 minutes at 180C.

Once they are golden brown on top, and they spring back if you press the top gently with your finger. Leave the muffins to cool for five minutes in the tin, then lift them out using the cases and set to cool on a wire rack (a grill pan will also work).

Muffins are best eaten on the same day, or the day after. If you want to keep them longer, the best thing to do is put them in a plastic box or a ziplock bag and freeze soon after baking.

Variations:

Banana muffin variations: Cherry and almond, Coffee ginger walnut

Dan Lepard has a recipe for mocha fig muffins that are both dairy and egg free.

Marmalade makes a good muffin – it adds moisture from the pectin in the marmalade.

Beginning to bake #1: the pancake plan

As I explained in my previous post, the challenge I have set myself is to set out a series of steps to help someone to learn to bake. The idea is to build each step on a platform of existing knowledge.

Thinking through possible starting points, I’ve decided to assume only the skills needed to fry things. If you can make a basic stir fry, or cook up some bacon and eggs then you should be able to make pancakes.

Although cooked on top of the stove, and therefore not strictly baking, pancakes have many things in common with baked goods. They are made of flour, eggs and milk, and in the case of these puffy Scotch pancakes, leavened with baking powder.

Cooking them on a pan also allows you to easily tell when they are cooked, one of the harder things for novice bakers.

A word about equipment: I am going to try and keep equipment needs to a minimum, and to increase what is needed by only one or two pieces each time. However, there are a couple of things that I think are essential for baking of any sort. One is a set of digital scales – I really wouldn’t want to ever bake without them, although American cooks seem to have avoided them for decades. Because you can zero them out with a bowl on there, you can often measure everything into one bowl. You can also more or less get away without a measuring jug for liquids, because they can be weighed too (remember that 100ml of water weighs 100g, and that goes for milk too). So, get a good set of digital scales, with a flat top and a zero button – they should be about £20. You will also need measuring spoons – at least 1 tablespoon, 1 teaspoon and a half teaspoon. Don’t use cutlery – it’s very unlikely to give you the same measure.

Apart from those two baking essentials, for these pancakes, you will also need a frying pan, a bowl or large jug, a whisk and a large spoon or a ladle (to pour the batter into the pan).

Basic recipe:

  • 120 grams plain flour
  • 2 teaspoons (tsp) baking powder
  • Pinch of salt
  • 150 millileters / grams milk
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 teaspoon sugar

This is a fairly simple ingredients list, so you may find you have everything on hand anyway.

If your baking powder has been untouched for years, it’s probably worth getting a new pot. Baking powder is just a mixture of a powdered acid and a powdered alkali. When you add liquid, the two react, producing bubbles of carbon dioxide that make baked goods light and fluffy. Modern baking powders are often ‘double-acting’, releasing gas when the liquid is added, and then again when heat is applied in the oven.

If it’s old, it can lose it’s potency.

Method:

Measure the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl.

Add the sugar. Use a whisk to combine them together, making sure the baking powder is evenly distributed in the flour. If you have a sieve, you can put that on top of the bowl before you zero the scales and sieve them all together, but the whisk does a pretty good job. Watch out for lumps in the baking powder – those are harder to remove with a whisk.

Add the milk and the egg to the centre of the bowl, and use the whisk to combine everything together.

You need to mix the liquid and flour completely, but you don’t need to beat it hard and remove all the lumps. Whenever you add water to flour, you will start to develop gluten, the stretchy protein thy gives bread it’s texture. If you beat this batter hard, you will develop the gluten more, and the pancakes may end up chewy.

Heat a frying pan over a medium heat.  Non-stick pans are very helpful, I used a cast iron pan, but use whatever you have. Add a little butter, allow it to melt, and then wipe the pan with a paper towel to coat the pan with fat, and remove the excess.

Use the spoon or ladle to add about a tablespoon of batter to the hot pan. Spread it a little to form a circle, then leave it to cook.

You’ll know it’s ready to turn over when you have little bubbles over the surface, and the top of the pancake has almost all set, with virtually no liquid left. Turn over with a spatula, and cook the other side for a few minutes. You’ll know you have the heat right if the pancake is a perfect shade of golden brown when the top is set. If it looks too pale or too dark, adjust the heat.

Continue cooking the pancake like this, on batches. Get as many as you can in the pan, without them flowing into each other. If they do touch, use the spatula once they are set to separate them, then continue.

Keep the cooked pancakes warm on a plate or baking tray in a low oven (about 120C), covered with a tea towel.

Serve hot with maple syrup and crispy bacon. Or make then for afternoon tea, and serve with jam.

You can also freeze the pancakes after they have cooled. Interleaved them with greaseproof paper or baking parchment if you want to remove them individually, and freeze in a sealed box or freezer bag. Reheat frozen pancakes a few at a time in the toaster, or wrap a larger stack in foil and warm in the oven.

Variations:

Not giving up, but getting started for lent

Lent is supposed to be a time for fasting. I’m not Catholic, and I don’t subscribe to the idea of good and bad foods, so giving up something for lent isn’t something I do. But this year I wanted to use the idea of doing something different, challenging myself to do something for a fixed period of time, to achieve something concrete.

I have lots of ideas for projects, but seldom put them into action. I recognise myself as a ‘scanner’, a term the writer Barbara Sher coined, and a quality shared with John Williams, the author of Screw Work, Let’s Play, who organises a monthly Scanners night in London.

I also heard on the twitters that Matt Cutts did a great talk at this year’s TED conference on his 30 day challenges. (The videos from this year’s TED aren’t online yet, so I’m just going by the tweets and blog posts of those who attended). He has written on his blog about these – he challenges himself to do somethig new for 30 days, and tries a new thing each month.

I went to my first Scanners night this week, and inspired by that, Lent and Matt Cutts, I’m going to try a new project on the blog until Easter.

Starting with this diagram that I drew a few weeks ago, I want to see if you can teach people to bake with a series of connected steps, each one building on the last. Explaining this at Scanners night, someone asked ‘well, I know how to make a stir-fry, but how does that help me to connect with anything on the diagram?’ That made me ask myself, where would you start if you had never baked before? If you’re happy making a stir fry, how do you take those skills to help you get started baking?

So that’s the challenge: can you go from making a stir fry to making a cake? Can I link the skills and knowledge you need to take you from one to the next? And can I do it in just 10 steps?

I’m going to see if I can cover all 10 steps on the blog before Easter, as well as putting together some of the ideas and resources on a separate site.

I hope it will challenge me to blog more, to write more, and to think about some of these baking challenges a bit more deeply. I hope you will follow this project, and that even if you’re an experienced baker, you will find something new to try.

Lemon yoghurt cake

Last Sunday, the rain came down, there was nowhere in my house that wasn’t covered in dust, and I was hiding in the bedroom. Sometimes, the only way to get yourself out of this sort of slump is to bake. So I surfed around to find a regular, plain and everyday cake that I could make. The first place to look was Smitten Kitchen, a great resource for friendly home baking as well as weeknight dinners and birthday cakes.

One of the elegant things about this cake is that it requires no butter, only oil and yoghurt, so you don’t need softened butter on hand, or a mixer to put it together.

What I ended up with was a version of Smitten Kitchen’s lime yoghurt cake with blackberry sauce, which is itself a version of a traditional french yoghurt cake. Having zested part of a lemon earlier in the day, I decided to make this a lemon cake, using up the rest of the lemon zest and the juice.

  • 240g plain yoghurt
  • 80g sunflower oil
  • 230g caster sugar
  • zest and juice of one lemon
  • 2 eggs

–> whisked together

  • 190g plain flour (I used about 1/2 cup wholewheat self-raising)
  • 1 tsp baking powder (1.5 if flour is all plain)
  • 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 1/8 tsp salt

–> into a sieve above the wet ingredients, sifted in, and stirred together until just combined, just until the streaks of flour are gone and no more.

Pour half of the batter into a 22cm/9 inch springform tin. Put small dollops raspberry jam onto the batter – entirely optional, but really very good. The only disappointing thing is that the jam sank to the bottom of the cake. Cover with the other half of the batter.

Bake for 40 minutes at 160C until the top springs back, and it’s very slightly browned.

Food magazines

You wait all month and then three come along at once.

Delicious, Waitrose Kitchen and Bon Appetit food magazines

My food magazines all turned up together this month. I try not to overindulge in these things – too often they are full of recipes I don’t want to make, and concerns I don’t care about – feeding children, losing weight. Not that there’s anything wrong with those, they’re just not my concern. But sometimes I get a lot out of them, and more so when I mark up the interesting things so I can go back later when I need inspiration. So here are the things I’ve marked to try and make sometime soon.

Bon Appetit, March 2011

I subscribe to Bon Appetit, so it’s delivered to me from the US – otherwise it is pretty hard to find in the UK. It’s not as good as the discontinued Gourmet was, but I still enjoy hearing about things on the other side of the Atlantic, and it has a good mix of columns and recipes.

  • Clotilde Dusoulier (of Paris blog Chocolate and Zucchini) has a ‘snob-free’ guide to Paris in this issue. I’m planning a trip there soon – it’s been ages since I last went and it’s just 2 and a half hours away from the centre of London. It takes longer to get to Yorkshire.
  • Lemongrass bars with coconut shortbread crust sound like an interesting twist on classic lemon bars.
  • In a Baked pasta special, the best sounding is ‘Rigatoni with eggplant and pine nut crunch’. Roasted vegetables are mixed with pasta and tomato sauce, topped with a rough pesto and lots of cheese, and baked. Yum.
  • Sticky Toffee Banana pudding, in a section on desserts from the pantry. I’ve been thinking about warm desserts that you could freeze in individual portions and reheat, and this would fit the bill.

Waitrose Kitchen, March 2011

What used to be Waitrose Food Illustrated has become Waitrose Kitchen. Unfortunately, this has reduced the number of longer articles and more complicated recipes, with more ’30 minute meals’ content in there instead. Still, it’s a cut above most in-store magazines, and free if you have a John Lewis credit card.

  • Tamasin Day-Lewis, author of one of my favourite books, The Art Of The Tart, has a lovely looking meal of gammon, borlotti beans, potato cake and cabbage with Cashel Blue cheese. Although I probably won’t recreate the whole thing, the potato cake and beans may get used as side dishes.
  • Lamb, aubergine and tomato gratin – one of a pair of dishes, this is the rainy day counterpart to a ‘sunny day’ lamb koftas (kebab) recipe. Sounds like a less heavy version of moussaka, with a crisp topping of breadcrumbs, parsley and lemon. Perfect when spring starts to appear, but hasn’t quite got here yet.

Delicious, April 2011

I don’t often buy Delicious, but when I’m in the mood for a food magazine that isn’t one of the above, it’s the preferred one. I saw @meemalee tweet about the cover article, a beautiful pyramid of marshmallows by @beas_bloomsbury, so thought this would be a good one, and it’s definitely the best of the bunch.

  • Nigella’s weekend menu – Duck, potatoes and butternut squash salad – loved the look of this, and made something similar on Sunday, but followed Mark Bittman’s directions for crisp braised duck legs.
  • A lovely looking Easter menu of rhubarb cocktails, salad of salmon, cucumber and avocado; slow-cooked shoulder of lamb with rice, salad; pavlova with passion fruit. Keen to try making the rhubarb syrup used for the cocktails, and trying to recreate the rhubarb gin and tonics they serve at the restaurant Bob Bob Ricard.
  • There’s a good food blogging article, featuring such illustrious names as Edd Kimber, blogging at he eats and Pim Techamuanvivit of Chez Pim. Nice to see a bit of mainstream coverage.
  • Amazing looking marshmallows in white, pink and green from Bea Vo of Bea’s of Bloomsbury tearooms. It’s not often that I encounter a recipe I’ve never seen before, but I had never come across a marshmallow recipe that didn’t feature egg whites. I am not a marshmallow-lover, but the description of these is tempting even me.

The larder in the freezer

I go through periods where I don’t really want to cook very much, as everyone does. I don’t really enjoy takeaway food that much, so I like to keep stocked with some shortcut ingredients that help me make things quickly, and means I can avoid a lot of processed foods. I would call this a larder, except that these mostly live in the freezer. I have developed something of a rhythm with these things over time, and although (like everything else I do) my commitment to this waxes and wanes, here is the list of things I continue to return to.

So when your weeknight cooking degenerates to pasta with tomato sauce, fried rice and curry, as mine often does, having these things in stock will keep you going with cheap, good food until you can get back into the kitchen properly.

Muffins

I have a snacking problem. A serious need to nibble while at my desk. I have recently re-subscribed to Graze, which is helping somewhat. I also like to have some muffins in the freezer. The recipe is based on a Gordon Ramsay one, and uses mashed bananas, a little oil and wholewheat flour for a wholesome and not too sweet muffin. I don’t think I’ve made the same flavour twice with these. Ones I have tried include: raspberry and white chocolate; espresso banana; ginger coffee walnut banana; chocolate and cherry; cherry and almond; apple and walnut – I could go on.

I can get one out of the freezer in the morning, pop it into a ziplock bag and into my handbag and take it to work. By the time the munchies kick in about 10:30 (OK, sometimes it’s 9:30), it has part defrosted. A minute in the work microwave and I have a warm, fresh muffin to have with a cup of tea.

Breadcrumbs

I know, you don’t need a recipe for breadcrumbs. It’s great to have fresh breadcrumbs in the freezer, and that helps assuage my guilt about all the times I buy bread and let it dry out in the bread bin. I use them occasionally for baking, but mostly I toast them to put on pasta, or use them on top of a gratin or pasta bake. But the real revelation came from Ruth Reichl’s website. She suggested making and freezing toasted breadcrumbs, and even giving them as a gift. Pre-toasting them means they can be put right onto the pasta, and speeds up the creation of a crisp topping on a baked dish. And there are times when it’s good to have yet another shortcut.

Stock

I became a stock convert with Nigella’s How To Eat, and haven’t looked back. It does sound like the sort of thing only absurd housewives do, and I don’t often admit to it in public. But I like doing it. There are endless recipes and tutorial on proper stock, and it will be better if you do it really carefully, but a simple method will still be good. I generally freeze chicken bones from roast chicken as they appear. When I have two or three in the freezer, I put them in a pot, cover with cold water and bring to the boil. Barely simmer for 2 hours then add roughly chopped carrots, celery, onions and/or leeks, bay leaves and some peppercorns. Cook another hour, then strain. Chill overnight in its bucket, remove the fat from the top, and then boil hard to reduce it a bit. Freeze in small containers.

You can use the stock for risotto, soup, to moisten curries and sauces, and importantly for gravy. And if all else fails, when your heating breaks down, nothing heats the kitchen quite like a big pot of stock on the stove.

Tomato sauce

Tomato sauce is incredibly useful. A really good tomato sauce is the best thing to have with pasta. You can also use it for baked beans and grains, curries and chilli. It shortcuts that long simmering period you need to get the sweetness out of tinned tomatoes and onions. The easiest and best version is Marcella Hazan’s (and others agree). It needs only tinned tomatoes, an onion, butter and salt. I also use some passata, and you can add herbs if you want to make it fancy.

Bread

There are three basic bread recipes that I’ve been making semi-regularly. All are minimal effort recipes. I generally slice and eat whatever we want immediately, and then slice and freeze the rest.

The first is the original no-knead bread recipe from Jim Leahey in the New York Times. Although this is low effort, it is a long project, needing about 24 hours start to finish, so I more often make:

A Michael Ruhlman-style 5:3 ratio recipe: 400g flour, 240g water, dried yeast, a tablespoon or so of oil and a teaspoon of salt. This makes a smallish loaf that can be made either in a loaf tin, or freeform on a baking sheet. It can also be baked in a pot like the no-knead bread. After reading Azelia’s incredibly helpful post on how she makes bread, I often don’t knead this at all,

Finally, if I want bread in short-order, such as for Saturday lunch when I’m starting from not-very-early on a Saturday morning, I make soda bread. I like Deb’s soda bread, which is a little sweet with raisins, and so a nice thing to have with cheese or with butter and tea. I also like Lorraine Pascale’s soda bread recipe, which uses wholewheat flour and treacle to make a rich-tasting loaf that is particularly good with soup.

We Should Cocoa: Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf

As a fan of Katie’s chocolates at Matcha Chocolat, and especially her masala chai caramels, I knew I should enter this month’s We Should Cocoa, the monthly chocolate challenge co-ordinated by Choclette. This month’s challenge was tea with chocolate, a great combination. Unfortunately, I was on holiday for most of this month (I was in Mexico – so not *that* unfortunate), so I needed something I could do at short notice to get in before the deadline.

I would have loved to spend some time on different tea infusions for this, but with limited time, and the need to do this after work, I needed something more straightforward. This tea loaf is a recipe I had bookmarked some time back when going through Paul A Young’s stunning book ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘. It sounded like a potentially overwhelming set of flavours, but also one that really appealed. The recipe calls for a huge amount of crystallised ginger, no fat and lots of ground cardamom. The tea is there to moisten the loaf, and also provide a malted, caramel background to these other flavours.

[Update: Choclette also made this recipe as part of the challenge – read about hers here.]

The recipe is unusual for a cake, as it includes just the tea-soaked fruit, sugar, eggs and flour – no butter or oil is used. However, this is the traditional tea loaf recipe. Tea loaves are an old traditional recipe, and can be called Tea Brack in Ireland, and similar to the Welsh Bara Brith. Irish Tea Brack recipes date from the 1800s, and would seem to be somewhat similar to soda bread, with the leavening from baking powder.

I made very few changes to the original recipe, even though the amount of ginger – 250g – seemed potentially overwhelming. Given the strong flavours, I wanted to try the recipe on its own terms before making changes. I baked this in two small loaf tins rather than one large one, so I could freeze one. I also swapped wholemeal self-raising for white self-raising, as that’s what I had in the cupboard, and I thought it would fit well with the rustic idea of a tea loaf. As this calls for Assam tea, which is a major component of English Breakfast blends, you could probably substitute with your everyday teabag. I used loose leaf Assam to make sure I got the strong and malted flavours Paul described.

I used two different brands of crystallised ginger, because I already had a packet open, and needed to get more to make up the large amount. Both come in large chunks, and I decided to slice the chunks into fairly thin pieces, so that the final cake wouldn’t be overwhelming with chewy lumps of ginger. The softer of the two was Humdinger Traditional Stem Ginger, that came with large sugar crystals on. The Waitrose Cooks Ingredients ginger comes in a cute plastic jar, and is firmer and drier, and cut into more even cubes. That made it easier to slice into pieces, so might be worth bearing in mind if you need to chop ginger finely for another recipe.

The smell of the ginger and raisins soaking was incredibly aromatic, with both the orange and cardamom coming through clearly. Even when baking, you could smell this amazing perfume, along with the chocolate. I was right about the flavours – it’s a really intensely flavoured cake, which sets your mouth buzzing with the ginger. Having said that, I think it works really well – the chocolate comes through, the orange holds its own with the ginger, and the cardamom is just about there in the background. My teaspoons of cardamom were a bit scant, so I probably could have used the full measure. It reminds me a lot of Divine’s orange and ginger dark chocolate – that also has quite a bit of crystallised ginger embedded in the chocolate. So I’d definitely recommend making this, but it’s not for the faint-hearted!

Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf

barely adapted from Paul A Young’s ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘.

  • 250g crystallised stem ginger
  • 100g raisins
  • 75g light brown muscovado sugar
  • 2 tsp ground cardamom (about 1 tbsp green cardamom pods)
  • zest of 1 orange
  • 200ml strong assam tea
  • 1 large egg
  • 200ml wholemeal self-raising flour
  • 100g dark chocolate, chopped into chunks (I used Divine 70%)

Slice the ginger chunks into slices, and combine with the raisins and sugar in a heatproof bowl.

Warm the cardamom pods until fragrant in a dry pan, then cool. Pop the black and brown seeds out of the shells and grind into a powder in a pestle and mortar. (This step is optional – you can buy ready-ground cardamom, or grind the pods without toasting them, but this method will get you the most aromatic powder).

Brew 200ml strong assam tea (1tbsp of loose tea leaves, 200ml boiling water) for 4-5 minutes, and strain over the raisins and ginger. Cover and leave overnight or for about 8 hours. (I prepared the ingredients one evening, poured the tea over the following morning, then made the cake the second evening).

After soaking, the tea should almost all be absorbed, with some syrup where the sugar has dissolved. Don’t remove any liquid, but add 1 beaten egg directly to the fruit and mix in. Mix in the flour, then fold in the chocolate to combine. The texture is very similar to a traditional fruit cake at this stage, fairly stiff but still moist.

Put the mixture into two lined 1lb loaf tins (or one large loaf tin).

Bake for an hour at 160C. Check with a skewer that it is cooked through. Cool for 30 minutes in the tin, then remove and cool completely. Wrap in fresh paper and store in a tin for a day before cutting and eating, on its own or buttered slices.

Raspberry Truffles

Every year I make elaborate plans for all the biscuits, cakes and other food presents I will make for friends and family at Christmas. And every year, my ambition exceeds the time available, after I’ve accounted for time to buy presents, go to parties and travel to see family. I usually end up with some sort of cooking marathon or a couple of evenings where I’m in the kitchen until midnight, wrapping caramels or dipping orangettes or whatever I decided was a good idea this year.

For 2010, I made brownies (obviously), chocolate balsamic vinegar (which not everyone was wild about, but was worth it just for me), mini chocolate walnut cookies and … homemade chocolates. I made raspberry truffles, described below, but I also made Azelia’s caramel truffles, which were amazing and easier to work with (I increased the proportion of chocolate to make the centres a little easier to dip). I definitely recommend trying that recipe, and as a great side effect, you get to make Dulce de Leche.

As I noted in my 2010 review, this was something of a year of chocolate. I went to demos, tried tempering again, and generally immersed myself in the world of UK fine chocolate.

Probably the most surprising chocolate recipe I came across was the raspberry ganache recipe I made at Divertimenti with William Curley. It is made only of raspberry puree and melted chocolate, but tastes creamy, and yet with such pure fruit flavour. It’s also so easy and impressive to make for other people.

About ganache

Ganache is usually described as an emulsion of chocolate and cream. This is used to make chocolate truffles, but also often used as a simple, sophisticated chocolate icing for cakes, a filling for a chocolate tart or a starting point for chocolate caramels.

However, a ganache can also be made with water or something water-based like a fruit puree (after all, cream is mostly water, even if the rest is fat).

Truffles

The simplest way to make a truffle that I know is to heat cream, pour it over finely chopped chocolate, stir until you get a smooth ganache, and then pour into a foil-lined square tin. Leave until set, preferably overnight, refrigerate (or freeze if it’s a very soft mixture) and then cut into 1 inch squares.

I saw this simple method demonstrated by Alice Medrich, and it was a revelation. She made mint chocolates, by infusing the cold cream overnight in the fridge with a bunch of chopped fresh mint, straining it out, then heating the cream. It avoids the need to scoop or roll little balls, and if you’re eating them fairly quickly, you can just set out the squares on a plate and hand them around.

I made some of the raspberry ganache this way in the summer, and just coated the squares lightly in cocoa, and then kept them in an airtight container in the fridge.

But for sending gifts, I needed something more robust and more long lasting – and that means a chocolate coating for the truffles.

Tempering

Tempering chocolate is a tricky enterprise and always, always ends up with you, the kitchen, and a range of utensils coated in a layer of chocolate. But it is what gives you that lovely shiny, snap on chocolate, that crisp crack as you bite into it.

Chocolate is a really complicated material. It consists of cocoa butter, cocoa solids (the cocoa powder) and sugar (or at least the good stuff does). But cocoa butter is a very complicated fat, having seven different types of crystals it can form. I’m not going to go into huge detail about the mechanism for tempering here, as Katie has done a much better job over on her blog, so go look there. She also has a great primer on truffles. And you can buy her lovely tea-flavoured chocolates here.

The short version of tempering is to heat the chocolate to melt all the fat crystals thoroughly, melting it quite hot, then cool it in a controlled way to the temperature where the ‘good’ fat crystals form, which is below body temperature, and when the chocolate is quite thick. FInally you heat it very slightly again, so it’s thin enough to work with, but not so hot that the crystals all melt out again.

Recipe: Raspberry truffles

  • 320g raspberry puree
  • 320g chocolate
  • 50g softened butter
  • 1 tbsp vodka

This makes a huge amount, enough to pour into an 8 inch square pan or even larger. You can certainly make half this quantity or even less. And this also gives you less work to do when dipping them.

I made the raspberry puree at the end of the summer, with fresh raspberries that were on special offer at the supermarket, close to their expiration date. It doesn’t matter if they are a bit soft and bruised, but they shouldn’t be mouldy. I heaped them in a pan with a tablespoon or two of water, and heated it with a lid on to break down the berries and release the juice a little bit, but didn’t bring it quite to the boil. I then pureed with a hand blender and passed it through a fine sieve to remove the seeds. I then froze the puree until Christmas.

To make the ganache, heat the raspberry puree until warm but not boiling. Taste it, and if it is very acidic, sweeten it a little with some icing sugar. You want the bright, fresh fruit flavour, but too much acid combined with the bitter of the chocolate may be too astringent. It’s up to you how much you sweeten it.

Melt the chocolate in the microwave, in short bursts, until it’s barely melted. Stir to melt the remaining pieces until it’s just smooth. Add the raspberry puree and stir until it is completely smooth.

Stir in the softened butter, and the vodka if using,  until completely combined. The vodka is optional, but helps to preserve the ganache a little longer.

Pour and scrape the ganache into a 7 inch or so square tin, lined with foil or baking parchment. Tap on the kitchen counter quite firmly to make sure that any air bubbles are expelled. Leave at room temperature to set, then put into the freezer. This is a very soft ganache, so you will need to freeze it in order to cut it easily. Alternatively, you can add more chocolate to the recipe to make it firmer and easier to handle.

Once you have cut the ganache into one inch squares, it is a good idea to leave them to cure for a while in the fridge. This seems to set the outside of the truffles, making them firmer and easier to dip.

You then need to take them one by one, dip them quickly in the tempered chocolate, and then tap to remove excess chocolate before putting onto parchment. As this is a very soft ganache, you need to do this fast, so that the ganache doesn’t start to melt into the chocolate or stick to your fingers too much.

Once the truffles are set, you should store them in a cool place in a sealed container. Storing them in the fridge will make them last longer, but you need to make sure they don’t get wet from the condensation, and allow them to come to room temperature before eating them. You can also wrap them in individual squares of foil, to make them look like Quality Street (as my sister described them)! I ordered mine from the Cakes Cookies & Crafts Shop.