DAILY BREAD
Bread truly is a wonderful thing. By a simple chemical process involving flour, water and a 'leaven' (yeast or a fermented "starter") is achieved something that is tasty and nutritious.
When I stopped full-time work 21 years ago to have my son, I decided I would teach myself how to make bread properly. Fed up with commercial bread which I found generally tasteless and expensive (except for breads like Poilane sourdough which is tasty and very expensive!), through a process of trial and error, different types of flour, hot stones in the oven and other "tricks", I learnt how to make a decent focaccia-style white bread using a mixture of strong white bread flour and semolina flour. Since this is our family "daily bread", I don't usually bother with the traditional toppings for focaccia of rosemary, olive oil and salt. With its lighter texture it toasts really well and is easy to freeze. It is rare for us not to have homemade bread in the house.
From a basic white bread mix you can experiment with different flours - wholemeal, rye and spelt all make delicious bread - and fillings such as nuts and seeds, fruit, olives or herbs. I have even made a focaccia with pieces of chopped chorizo. There are 100s of recipe books on bread-making - I have recently purchased Richard Bertinet's Crumb (book of the month for the Great British Chefs Cookbook Club to which I belong) which is chock full of basic recipes and more exotic breads such as salted caramel brioche, leopard bread and the Bretagne Kouign-amman. You don't need specialist equipment either; I make the dough in my Kitchenaid food mixer, but a large bowl and a wooden spoon - and of course your hands for kneading the dough - are more than sufficient.
Friends who come for dinner regularly always look forward to "Fran bread" as it is called, and I quite often take a slab of homemade focaccia as a gift if we are invited to supper. I have even given a loaf of my focaccia as a gift to the pianist Leon McCawley after a lunchtime concert at Wigmore Hall (I kept the bread wrapped in brown paper and took it to Leon in the green room afterwards).
People think bread is time-consuming to make but it isn't really. Making the dough takes about 10 mins and the rest of the time is spent proving, shaping and baking the bread. It does, however, take patience: the flavour of the dough deepens over time and knocking back and proving the dough several times breaks down the gluten in the flour to produce a more open texture or "crumb". Sourdough, which I am just learning how to make, takes even longer because one needs to prepare the leaven or starter in advance. Proper sourdough is made without yeast; instead a fermented leaven is flour and water is used. It needs to be "fed" for several days and allowed to mature, but after that you simply take a portion of the leaven and mix it with flour and water. The remaining leaven can be kept "alive" by regular feeding. (I know people who have been using the same sourdough starter for years.) Sourdough has a more acidic flavour and a delicious open, chewy texture. It also makes fantastic toast, crisp on the outside and chewy in the middle.
The best thing about homemade bread is that it's cheap to make (a 750g loaf of focaccia costs me about 50p) and unlike commercial bread, it's not full of raising agents or preservatives. And when it's cooking, the house is filled with the most wonderful comforting, homely aroma.
When I stopped full-time work 21 years ago to have my son, I decided I would teach myself how to make bread properly. Fed up with commercial bread which I found generally tasteless and expensive (except for breads like Poilane sourdough which is tasty and very expensive!), through a process of trial and error, different types of flour, hot stones in the oven and other "tricks", I learnt how to make a decent focaccia-style white bread using a mixture of strong white bread flour and semolina flour. Since this is our family "daily bread", I don't usually bother with the traditional toppings for focaccia of rosemary, olive oil and salt. With its lighter texture it toasts really well and is easy to freeze. It is rare for us not to have homemade bread in the house.
From a basic white bread mix you can experiment with different flours - wholemeal, rye and spelt all make delicious bread - and fillings such as nuts and seeds, fruit, olives or herbs. I have even made a focaccia with pieces of chopped chorizo. There are 100s of recipe books on bread-making - I have recently purchased Richard Bertinet's Crumb (book of the month for the Great British Chefs Cookbook Club to which I belong) which is chock full of basic recipes and more exotic breads such as salted caramel brioche, leopard bread and the Bretagne Kouign-amman. You don't need specialist equipment either; I make the dough in my Kitchenaid food mixer, but a large bowl and a wooden spoon - and of course your hands for kneading the dough - are more than sufficient.
Friends who come for dinner regularly always look forward to "Fran bread" as it is called, and I quite often take a slab of homemade focaccia as a gift if we are invited to supper. I have even given a loaf of my focaccia as a gift to the pianist Leon McCawley after a lunchtime concert at Wigmore Hall (I kept the bread wrapped in brown paper and took it to Leon in the green room afterwards).
 |
| Sourdough starter fermenting |
People think bread is time-consuming to make but it isn't really. Making the dough takes about 10 mins and the rest of the time is spent proving, shaping and baking the bread. It does, however, take patience: the flavour of the dough deepens over time and knocking back and proving the dough several times breaks down the gluten in the flour to produce a more open texture or "crumb". Sourdough, which I am just learning how to make, takes even longer because one needs to prepare the leaven or starter in advance. Proper sourdough is made without yeast; instead a fermented leaven is flour and water is used. It needs to be "fed" for several days and allowed to mature, but after that you simply take a portion of the leaven and mix it with flour and water. The remaining leaven can be kept "alive" by regular feeding. (I know people who have been using the same sourdough starter for years.) Sourdough has a more acidic flavour and a delicious open, chewy texture. It also makes fantastic toast, crisp on the outside and chewy in the middle.
The best thing about homemade bread is that it's cheap to make (a 750g loaf of focaccia costs me about 50p) and unlike commercial bread, it's not full of raising agents or preservatives. And when it's cooking, the house is filled with the most wonderful comforting, homely aroma.
Comments
Post a Comment