News from Nowhere

Ten days ago, the Guardian submitted supermarket croissants to a taste test. The highest scoring (8/10) were from Waitrose, which surprised me, as I had bought a pack of croissants from Waitrose and been very disappointed: light and flaky is good, but so flaky and insubstantial that you end up with a plateful of crumbs and nothing else. I'd preferred Lidl. Then I realised that my Waitrose croissants had been a pack of four, I forget the exact brand but something indicating 'Waitrose superior'; the Guardian's were 'Waitrose 1' brand, and a pack of two cost £1.50, which the Guardian thought was pricey.

That sent me off on a happy wild goose chase across the internet. I'm sure that when I spent a year in France, the price of croissants, like the price of the baguette, was regulated. Evidently that's no longer the case, and what's more, people seem more interested in the price of a pain au chocolat than of a croissant (pause in which I reflect on the depravity of modern tastes). The best I can do is this piece in Le Figaro about the popular entertainment of quizzing politicians about the price of everyday items. Last October, Jean-François Copé (of whom I have never heard) was asked how much a pain au chocolat cost, and guessed "Aux alentours de 10 ou 15 centimes d'euros, non?" The correct answer, says Le Figaro, is that you'd pay about ten times that much at the baker's. Which makes Waitrose's £1.50 for two croissants look about right. One of the comments below the article points out that in the local supermarket, a pack of right costs €1.89 € (24 cents each), but in the bakery section of the same shop they are 95 cents each - and in the café across the road, &euro4 each. From all of which I conclude that you make your choice and you get what you pay for, and, to come back to that 'taste test', which supermarket you buy from matters less than where in the supermarket. Despite which, I have a highest opinion of Lidl's bakery.

However.

This had set me thinking about croissants, and the obvious next move was to have another go at baking my own. I took down Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery - no, I know this isn't exactly English cookery, but that wasn't the problem. First, Mrs David says, "I have only limited tolerance towards all the rolling and folding and turning involved in puff pastry..." and since for croissants you submit a yeasted dough to exactly the same process, she doesn't often bother. Secondly, she says, on those rare occasions when she does bake croissants, she uses Julia Child's recipe, and instructs the reader to do likewise. She relents only to the extent of giving what is evidently a professional's recipe for baking industrial quantities of croissants, with some hints about how to modify it for home use. Well, that's OK - she doesn't give an exact recipe, but since I adapt for my sourdough bread, an exact recipe would be wasted on me. What's more, I added a further random factor by carefully measuring out and adding too much water to my dough (no, I don't know what I was thinking either; these things happen). So the usefulness of this post as a reminder of what I did is as much awful warning as model to follow. Well, that's useful, too.

I used all wheat flour, in order to get the highest possible gluten content, but I couldn't bring myself to use all white flour, because that's not a thing I do. So I used five oz wholemeal flour, and since I had inadvertently added too much water, I had to keep adding white flour until I could handle it. Which was so much higher a proportion than usual that it might be worth nerving myself to use all white next time, just to see what happens. Made the dough, knocked it back, adding more flour rather than oil - and again. Next time, I added butter. The recipe says 450g butter to a kilo of flour, so I aimed for half a pound to my (notional, actually substantially more) of flour; the recipe says spread butter on half the dough and fold in half, but I sliced butter from the fridge over two thirds of the dough, then folded in thirds (the unbuttered third over, and then the unfolded third over that). Leave in a cool place, and repeat twice more. Then rolls out, cut into triangles and shape the croissants. Brush with beaten egg, leave to prove again, brush with more egg (this took one whole egg altogether) and bake, in the top of the over, mark 6 for 20 minutes.

Here's the thing I need to remember: it was not actually all that hard work. And the results were - well, I have had worse. They were chewy rather than flaky, and quite dense, and the layers were - vestigial. But worth it, I think. Certainly all the folding is just another thing to find time for, and I think the results would be better if I'd found more time, not for the process but for letting the dough rest between rounds. Start earlier, and steal time from the initial proving, maybe? It might actually be worth buying salted butter, which I don't usually do, and not salting the dough. And that two-stage egg wash is certainly worth the fuss.

The instructions desperance gave me, when he gave me my sourdough starter, tell me to put a bowl of water in the oven with the loaf: this is said to improve the rise. Every now and then I think yes, I really should try that..., but I am lazy, and clumsy with bowls of boiling water. and one way and another I never do.

But yesterday I was cooking haggis (of course) and the instructions for this required it, too, to be placed in in the oven, in a bowl containing an inch of water. Which gave me an overlap: not entirely by chance, but not entirely by planning, either, the bread spent its first quarter hour in an oven which also contained a bowl of water.

It certainly rose better than usual. This is not a scientific test: it was rising enthusiastically throughout the process, but nonetheless, for the record, oatmeal-raisin bread, bowl of water (surely the haggis is not an active ingredient?), completely satisfactory loaf.

... I tipped the last of a bag of nuts and raisins into the bread dough. Not cake exactly, but a festive Chazmas loaf.

Happy birthday, desperance!

I thought I was getting the hang of bread baking: the last few loaves have been well-behaved, rising as well as can be expected given my methods and choice of ingredients. So I was ready to experiment a little. It begins to feel like summer, and I wanted to make a lighter loaf - and it's a while since I've used saffron, which seemed appropriate, too.

I found a recipe in Elizabeth David's Bread Book - I found two, but opted for the (I think) first, the less cake-like of the two, for a variety of reasons, one of which was that it was to be baked in a loaf tin. I didn't follow it, exactly, but I took it as my starting point, and obeyed its instruction to steep the saffron in less milk than I would have anticipated, and then add more butter. This produced a dough which was almost, but not quite, too soft to handle, as long as my hands were well floured. After the usual pattern of rising and knocking back, the loaf that went into the oven was disconcertinly well-risen, standing proud above the tin.

After half an hour in the oven I could smell something - not burning, but definitely toasting. Too soon, surely! But I looked, and the top crust was well browned. Should I turn down the oven, oe move it down to a lower shelf? I gave the tin a shake, and the loaf moved freely, turned out without difficulty: this is usually a sign that it's done. I tapped the bottom, and it sounded hollow, which is usually conclusive.

But the following morning, when I tried to cut a slice for my breakfast, I discovered that the reason the loaf sounded hollow is that it was hollow. The outside is cooked (and makes perfectly acceptable, if rather fragile, toast), but there is a seam of undercooked dough and, running right through the middle of my golden beauty, a hole.

The next loaf will be one of my familiar, reliable bricks.

The last two loaves I made have both contained a proportion of buckwheat. I was a bit hesitant about this, as none of my bread recipes mention buckwheat, and the bag has been at the back of the drawer for quite a long time. In fact, "quite a long time" is several years: it must be, because I bought the flour in France, and when did I last have an opportunity to do that? I buy buckwheat flour (sarrasin or blé noir to make savoury pancakes, as they do in Brittany, and just had to check that buckwheat really is the English name. My French/English dictionary won't tell me the French for 'buckwheat', but it's willing to tell me the English for sarrasin, so that's all right. Books tell you that flour becomes rancid if you keep it too long, but I've never noticed any problems.

Proportions were: the usual starter, made with white flour, plus a third each of (wholemeal) spelt, buckwheat and the crunchy wholemeal from Lode Mill.

First time round, I used sunflour oil, and added sunflower seeds at the last kneading, so that most of them were on the crust, for added crunch. I ran out of time, so it didn't have as long for the final rise as I would have liked, but it wasn't too dense, and had a good nutty flavour. It made excellent toast, but it was too crumbly to make good sandwiches (they tasted fine, but tended to disintegrate).

Next time, having remembered to buy some sesame seeds, I used sesame oil, and I may have been too mean with it (it's quite strongly flavoured, and I didn't want to overdo it) as the resultant loaf had a rather cracked crust. It tasted fine, but bits fell off when I sliced it. I meant to give it longer to rise in the tin, but forgot to do this before we went out for tea with J., so this loaf, too, had a short final rise; despite which it rose very nicely in the oven, and the sesame seeds made a very tasty crust.

That was the end of the bag of flour; no more buckwheat loaves until I've been to France to stock up again.

And in other culinary news, dinner was a gammon joint with Jersey new potatoes, asparagus and Provençal rosé, with raspberries to follow. Despite the grey clouds, I am trying to will it to be summer - we head north on Thursday.

I returned to the Guardian's recipe for 'Hot pink beetroot and spelt flour bread' (one of the submissions for 'best pink recipe'). The description is "This is light and fluffy with a sharp, tangy taste from the beetroot. It's perfect toasted and spread with homemade chutney," and I had some beetroot and wanted a loaf which would make good cheese sandwiches. I'd made it before, and it wasn't particularly pink, and it wasn't particularly tangy - but maybe this time I'd do better.

On the second attempt, the result was a light and fluffy loaf, with chunks of beetroot in it. It wasn't hot or pink - should I have used the cooking liquid from the beetroot? should I have grated it? the recipe didn't call for either of these things - and it still wasn't particularly tangy: I wonder whether you're supposed to use pickled beetroot? It made perfectly acceptable cheese sandwiches. I thought the thyme (and I'd been quite generous with the thyme) might make it over-savoury for breakfast, and that I'd do better to butter it and skip the sweet spreads - but then I tried it with the ginger curd I'd brought home from the market, and that was a great combination, especially as I've now reached the bottom of the jar where the pieces of ginger were all lurking.

Bear in mind that although I was following the recipe, I was following it at some difference, since I was adapting it for my sourdough process. Even so, it was a useful demonstration of factors that result in a lighter loaf: don't add too much flour (keep it on the soft-and-sticky side), use a higher proportion of white flour (or don't - lightness isn't everything). The use of butter rather than oil, and more of it than usual, may have had something to do with it, too. Since I had put butter in the load, I greased the tin with butter, and the loaf jumped out of the tin so sweetly, you'd never guess it's sometimes a problem - I'll be doing that again.

The other thing I learned is that if you add chopped beetroot to your bread, what you get is a loaf of bread with beetroot in it. I never seem to learn this lesson permanently. How often have I seen something on a menu and thought "Interesting combination - I wouldn't have thought that would work"? And then I order it, and it doesn't. The components are not magically transformed by being combined (except when they are, of course, but don't count on it).

There's nothing wrong with bread with beetroot in it, but I can think of any number of things I'd rather find in my breakfast toast. Which is why today's loaf has walnuts in it. The fat content is walnut oil, but I greased the tin with a butter wrapper, and a couple of shakes made the loaf jump out so sweetly...

Final verdict after breakfast tomorrow, but it's looking good...

EtA: Talking to the Bread Lady at the market this morning - she makes her beetroot sourdough with organic beetroot juice, not actual beetroot. Even so, it isn't all that pink. It might be interesting to try that approach, but with walnuts instead of chunks of beetroot, and maybe a little orange zest.

And I bought a loaf of her carrot sourdough (made with carrot juice) to try, because it's such a pretty colour, and I wanted some bread to accompany a Greek salad for tomorrow's first course.

Back in the dark days of December, I made Lussekatter.

A sequence of loaves had been, for one reason or another (one reason being a tendency to leave them too long in the oven, but another is a bit of a mystery) particularly crusty and / or dense. An oatmeal loaf, in particular, had refused to rise, and although the flavour was still good, and my breakfast toast still put me in a good mood for the day, it was a challenge to the teeth, and to the breadknife. I was ready to bake something completely different.

Then someone mentioned that it was nearly St Lucy's Day, and there must be Lussekatter. "Yes!" I thought. "I can do that." I had, of course, read mrissa's definitive post on the subject, and I knew this wasn't going to be easy: but baking with saffron, baking to bring back the sun, this sounded like what I needed.

So I selected a recipe from the many offered by the internet, and on the Thursday I baked; on the Friday we went to Richard's funeral, and on Saturday which was St Lucy's Day, there were golden saffron squiggles, just as there should be. They were good enough that I'd gladly do it again, so here's my version of the recipe:

Sourdough starter
300 ml milk
generous pinch saffron - reaally generous
3 oz sugar
4 oz butter
15oz plain flour
1 egg
salt
dried cranberries

1. Warm, don't boil, the milk in a pan and add the butter and the saffron. Mix in a big bowl with the sourdough starter.


2. Add the flour and mix into a smooth dough.


3. Let it rise, knock it back, knead it a bit.


4. Do it again. Kneading it was not as hard work as I had expected, and it really did do that thing the recipes promise where if you only keep kneading long enough the sticky mess will transform into a silky and coherent dough. That's never happened to me before.


5. Divide the dough into 24 pieces, and knead each one lightly into a little bun (I saw that the recipe said '24 servings', and disbelieved; but it really did make 24 neat little cakes, smaller than I had pictured them but not ridiculously fiddly to handle).


6. Let the buns rest for a few minutes, covered by a piece of cloth. Then form each bun into a string, 15-20 cm long (mine weren't as long as this - next time, try harder), then arrange the string in a suitable shape, e.g. an S or double S. Regardless of the shape, the ends of the string should meet.


7. Press a few raisins into the dough - I tried to add my dried cranberries earlier, to give them a chance to plump up in the dough, but they made the dough harder to hanfle, and kept falling out. Cover the "Lucia cats" with a piece of cloth and let them rise for 40 minutes.


8. Whip the egg together with a few grains of salt, and paint the "Lucia cats" with the mixture.


9. Bake them for 5-10 minutes in the oven at 250°C / 475°F /Mark 6 until golden brownish yellow.

Last weekend was Open Studios time in Newcastle's Ouseburn, and S. invited us to join her for Sunday brunch and to visit some studios thereafter. So we didn't spend as much time for hitting the studios or walking around the Ouseburn as we have done in some previous years, but on the plus side we had a delicious brunch with S., with the full cooked breakfast and ricotta pancakes and blueberries, and bread - well, OK, the bread was of my baking, and I think I have finally cracked Emily Dickinson's rye/cornmeal loaf - and conversation. And durham_rambler and I managed to visit the Mushroom Works before breakfast, where I bought some Christmas presents. I was interested to chat with Jane Frazer: her website shows some of the pieces I liked, her woven mesh and photo pieces, but not the long, loosely knitted strips holding a sequence of tiny pebbles. You could do something similar with my collection of fragments of blue-and-white pottery, I said, and yes, she said, she could...



After breakfast we went back to the other end of the Ouseburn - the river runs in a culvert under the monument in the photograph - and wandered through the various studios, and it was all agreeable enough but nothing particularly exciting. The things I liked were by people whose work I already knew I liked, there were no new discoveries.

On Tuesday we went into Newcastle again, for the North East Labour History Society's 'First Tuesday' talk, because it was about William Morris's visit to the North East during the Northumberland Miners' Strike. The speaker said that Morris had only visited Newcastle upon two occasions, and I could nit-pick and say that he travelled through Newcastle on his way to Iceland. But I won't, because it was a good talk, setting one small event in context, in Morris's life and thought, and in the history of the North East, and opening up to lively discussion afterwards.

It took place at the Newcastle Irish Centre, which is on the border of Chinatown, so afterwards we went down Stowell Street in search of Chinese food. We chose the Royal Emperor very nearly at random, and were well pleased. The charming young waiters looked after us, and took pains to serve us quickly so that we could reclaim our car from the car park before it closed. We had both chosen the a stir fry of scallops and broccoli for the main course, and briefly I regretted this - but once I tasted it, I knew I wouldn't have wanted to share it: the broccoli green and crunchy, the scallops milky sweet, the fresh heat of the slivers of ginger.

And since it is now December, we had Christmas music throughout.

- not one LJ post, but two rolled into one.

For one thing, there are the last three loaves of my own baking. Of which the first was a particularly brick-like rye loaf. Lightness is not what I look for in a rye loaf, and the flavour was good, but oh, it was solid! Maybe this was my fault: my timing was off, and I may have fudged the process (leaving it to rise for just as long, but missing out one of the knocking back stages). Not certain, but I may have.

The next time I baked, I added some left-over basmati rice (I don't deliberately boil too much rice, but when I check my scales they seem accurate enough, and since I like the effect of mixing an ounce or so of cooked rice into the bread, I'm pretty relaxed about it). The resulting dough was on the wet side, though I thought I had held back on the water to balance the moistness of the rice, and a bit sticky, but a little oil made it easy enough to handle, and the outcome was a - by my standards - spectacularly light loaf.

It was at this point that I came across desperance and mrissa talking about rye dough: nasty sticky stuff, they said, hard work but yes, pretty much rises. This was a challenge, so my next loaf was another rye loaf (actually one part spelt / one rye / one white flour, plus the white flour of the sourdough starter: this may be less rye than last time round). From the start, it was rising cheerfully, and it was hideous to handle (desperance says that his favourite joke is "What's brown and sticky?" but "sourdough rye" is not the canonical answer). It swallowed as much oil as I was prepared to give it, and then a little more, so in the end I missed out a knocking back stage this time too, because I couln't bear the prospect of having to scrape it out of the bowl again, so I put it straight into the tin. And then left it to rise for longer than I meant to, because I had to be out of the kitchen at a crucial point. It doesn't seem to have suffered at all, and is light and crusty and delicious.

Next time I will follow mrissa's method: let the dough rest ten minutes after the flour goes in, then knead for forever and a year. And we'll see what happens.

Last night sunspiral and roozle came to dinner, and there were another two loaves in that meal, though both of those were bought. The pesto loaf which accompanied the tomato salad was at least artisan work, provided by the Bread Lady from the market. The oaten sliced loaf which I had bought in M & S because it was reduced and I thought it would freeze and be handy for sandwiches was - on second thoughts - ideal for making summer pudding, the dessert that I only decided on when we reached the greengrocer.

What stands out about the evening wasn't the food, though, but the talk. We hadn't met sunspiral or roozle before, though we'd heard a lot about them from weegoddess. on reflection, perhaps we shouldn't have started our acquaintance by trying to drown them, but it seemed like a good idea at the time: durham_rambler Roger met them at their hotel and walked them here by the scenic route, but unfortunately the heavens opened, and they arrived drenched and dripping, and were extremely forebearing about it. The forecast had been for occasional showers, but this was torrential, and it went on and on... We talked about WorldCon and panel moderation and malt whisky and comics and family and...

And look forward to talking more on the other side of the Atlantic.