Bread

The perfect Sunday treat is a fresh loaf of bread that is still oven warm smothered in butter. If you don’t believe me then you need to make this recipe. Yes, good bread does take time but it’s cheap and you know what’s in it. And yes real bread stales faster than shop bought but you can breadcrumb it by throwing it in a low oven and once dried out blitz it in a blender / food processor. Here I have used a mixer with a dough hook attachment but you can do it by hand just as easily. This is a good link to someone kneading by hand – http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/techniques/kneading (just ignore the pseudoscience in the text below the video); its only recently I have been using a mixer to knead the dough.

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  What you need:
  
  

  • 500 g of bread flour / high protein flour
  • 15 g flour of fresh yeast / 5 g dried
  • 10 g of sea salt
  • 350 ml of warm water

  
  How to make it:
  
  

  1. Weigh out the flour, salt and yeast into the mixing bowl. 
  2. Pour the water into the bowl – note that you may not need to add all of the water depending on the moisture levels of the flour you’re using, so add it in gradually, mixing slowly until the dough comes together into a smooth ball. Then mix on a higher speed for 6 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic. A great way to test that the dough is ready is to take a small piece and stretch it out into a thin ‘window pane’ (as shown in image IX), showing that the gluten has sufficiently developed. Cover the bowl with a tea towel and rest at room temp for 1 hour.
  3. When the dough has doubled in size scrape it out of the bowl onto a very lightly floured work surface. Gently knock some of the air out of the dough by flattening it with your hand. Grab the top of the dough and pull it into the centre. Repeat this process, working your way around the dough until you’ve formed a ball. Turn the dough over so that it is seam side down. Place your hands at either side of the dough with your palms facing inwards. Now rock the dough from hand to hand in a circular motion. This will create tension on the surface of the dough enabling it to hold its round shape when it is proofing and then baked, rather than flattening out. The best way to test that the dough is ready is by pressing it – if the dough springs back then it is ready, if not continue shaping until it does spring back. Place the dough onto a baking sheet lined with baking paper or dusted with ground semolina, cover with oiled cling film and leave to double in size (roughly 45 mins – 1 hour). 
  4. Turn the oven on to 220 °C about half an hour before the dough is ready. Put a deep sided baking tray in the bottom of the oven.
  5. When the dough has doubled in size, remove the cling film and use a serrated knife to cut three slashes into the surface. This will allow the dough to expand in a controlled way when exposed to the high oven temperature, rather than any unseemly cracks appearing at the sides. Place in the centre of the oven and pour a cup of water into the baking tray in the bottom of the oven, closing the door quickly. This will help stop a crust forming too quickly on the dough, allowing it to expand fully resulting in a less dense bread. Bake for 40 minutes until a deep golden brown crust has formed. Remove from the oven and place on a cooling rack. Wait until the bread is fully cool before slicing and smothering in butter and jam. 

  
  

  Thanks for the help @RuthDiskin

Chocolate and Coffee Madeleines

I have my kitchen back so it’s time to get blogging again. Kicking off we have madeleines - small cakes that usually get teamed with a lunch time coffee. Coffee is great on its own but every super hero needs a side kick, yeah biscuits are good but little chocolate cakes are better. Warm fresh madeleines are delicious and really easy to make and good coffee deserves something better than a Hobnob! This recipe is one of Ruth’s (@RuthDiskin) who is a baker @grazeleeds in Leeds - so blame her if you don’t like it :)

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  What you need:
  
  100 g caster sugar
  100 g plain flour
  100 g butter, melted and cooled slightly
  2 eggs
  ¾ teaspoon of baking powder
  30 g good quality chocolate, cut into tiny chunks 
  30 ml cold coffee
  Zest of a lemon
  A madeleine tin / a shallow Yorkshire pudding tin
  
  
  How to make it:
  
  

  1. Whisk the eggs and caster sugar together until light and frothy – if you’re doing this by hand it can take a while! 
  2. Add the rest of the ingredients and whisk until everything is incorporated into a smooth batter.
  3. Preheat your oven to 190°C. Brush your madeleine tin with butter and dust with flour. Lift the tin and tap the bottom edge against a work surface to get rid of any excess flour.  
  4. When the oven is at the right temperature, spoon the mixture into each section of the tin.  Only add enough batter to fill the sections about ¾ of the way up otherwise the cakes will rise above the mould and lose their distinctive shape. 
  5. Bake for 10 minutes until a light golden colour. Carefully move the madeleines onto a rack to cool. 
  6. If you have any batter left over you can refrigerate this to use the next day, or like me, just stick another batch in the oven!
     
     -Madeleines are best scoffed with a cup of tea or coffee fresh from the oven.

  
  

  
  

Spiced Pumpkin Pie

It’s that time of year again where we go sugar and pumpkin crazy and rightly so. However rather than butchering a perfectly edible pumpkin, with the traditional triangle eyes and jiggered teeth, cook with it. This pie is spiced with flavours I associate with Halloween and bonfire night; I’m talking about the dark brown sugar, ginger and cinnamon associated with parkin, the caramel surrounding a toffee apple and the autumnal smell of the roasted pumpkin seeds. Using the short crust I prepared earlier on the blog, the pie has a crumbly texture with smooth filling topped with a crunchy, nutty top. You need to stop reading this dragged out prologue and get the oven on and start making this pie!

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  What you need:

  • 500 g of pumpkin
  • 200 ml of cream
  • 75 g of dark brown sugar
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1tsp of ground cinnamon 
  • 2 inch of stem ginger in syrup
  • ¼ of nutmeg
  • 300 g of pre made short crust pastry
  • 100 g of caster sugar

  
  

  How to make it:

  1. Chop up your pumpkin into large chunks and place in a 180^oC oven for 20 - 30 minutes until it starts taking on some golden colours.  Meanwhile start work on your pumpkin seed praline by scooping out the pumpkin seeds and washing them to separate them from the fibrous flesh. Pat dry and place the seeds in the oven for 20 minutes, until they start smelling nutty and just begin to take on a golden colour. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool.
  2. While various components of the pumpkin are roasting away roll out your pastry –you want it to be 1-1.5 cm thick so you might have to let it warm up slightly so you can roll it out. Place the pastry in a 22 cm flan tin (one where the bottom pushes out is best) pricking the pastry with a fork all over. Once pricked place some tin foil /greaseproof paper on top and then some baking beans / dry rice / lentils to ensure the pastry stays flat when blind baking. Place the pastry in a 180 ^oC oven for 20 minutes.
  3. While the pastry is cooking make the pie filling. In a saucepan bring all the spices, dark brown sugar and cream to a simmer and remove from the heat and let that cool. Once cooled to an ambient temperature whisk together 3 beaten eggs and add to the cream spiced mixture. Finally using a blender blitz the cooled roasted pumpkin and creamy egg mixture together. Once smooth pour into your cooled pastry case and cook for 30 - 40 minutes at 170^oC. The top of the pie should have a golden colour while still retaining a wobble in the centre.
  4. Finish the pie by making a caramel, heating the caster sugar with 5 tbsp of water in a non-stick frying pan – do not stir the sugar ever! Stirring will prevent a caramel from forming and you’ll just end up with a pan full of crystallised sugar. Simply swirl the pan so all the sugar eventually dissolves and melts. Once a golden caramel has formed throw in your roasted seeds and mix them in quickly with a spatula. After all the seeds have been coated with caramel pour the molten mix onto some greaseproof paper and allow the caramel to cool and harden. Once the caramel has set break it up into small pieces and scatter them on your pie.

  -As with all sweet pies pour some cream on and stuff it in your face. Also sprinkle some sea salt on your molten caramel for an extra hit of contrasting flavour. 

Shortcrust Pastry

As the famous expression goes “winter is coming…” well in the UK at least, so the recipe that we need to equip ourselves with is one of pastry. While puff is massively delicious and crisp it is a bit of a pain to make when you're in a rush. To combat this shortcrust is your man, ready in half the time with a more grown up crumbly and substantial texture. The health conscious can also breathe a sigh of relief because it’s got half the fat of puff pastry too! With your weapon of pastry against the war on the cold winter weather the world is your oyster - literally when combined in a beef and oyster pie or a sweet tart. The prospect of winter without a pie is like summer without a BBQ so what are you waiting for? Start putting delicious things in/on/below homemade short crust pastry now!

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  What you need:
  

  200 g of flour
  100 g of unsalted butter
  50 ml of water
  A big-ish pinch of salt
  
  
  

  How to make it:
  

  There are two ways to make this pastry; by hand or with a fancy food processor. I don’t have a food processor primarily due to a lack of funds and secondly a lack of space. I will initially talk through how I made it by hand then I will discuss how I could have made it by machine.
  
  By hand- 
  
  

  1. Have your butter very cold, ideally frozen, and using a cheese grater grate it coarsely. Once grated cover with cling film and freeze once more.
  2. While the butter is freezing place 50 ml of water into the fridge to cool.
  3. After 15 -20 minutes in the freezer take out the butter and add it to bowl with your flour and combined salt. Quickly using your fingers “rub in” the butter to the flour. You do not want the butter to melt into the flour – this will ruin its crumbly texture and make it more flexible and cardboard like. (Through initially grating the butter and refreezing it we have increased the surface area of the butter so that it “rubs into the flour” a lot quicker.)
     What do I mean by “rub in the butter”? Using your thumb and forefingers pick up small amounts of flour and butter and rub them together until the butter in incorporated into the flour and the mix looks like breadcrumbs –see images VI and VII. We use our thumb and forefingers rather than our whole hands because the extremities are colder (due to the high surface area of our fingers) making it less likely for the all-important butter to melt.
  4. Working quickly add just under the 50 ml of cold water and mix the dough with your hands making sure all of the mixture comes into contact with the water. The dough now should be sticking together and you should be able to form a loose ball. If you cannot form a ball add the rest of the cold water and mix again. 
  5. Once you have formed a ball knead it gently for 30 seconds then wrap in cling film and refrigerate, for a minimum of 30 minutes before use.

  
  Using a food processor-
  
  

  1. Place the cold butter and flour with the salt into the food processor and pulse the blade until you get a breadcrumb texture. 
  2. Add your “breadcrumbs” to a big bowl and add in just under 50 ml of cold water and repeat the process as described above in stages 4 and 5.

  
  My advice is to get practising now for a few pie and tart recipes that are likely to be uploaded over the coming winter months.
  

  
  

Cherry and Sailor Jerry Rum Jam

While it may not seem the season to eat jam on toast and jam related puddings it is the season to make jam. All the excess fruit that we cannot eat right now can be preserved, allowing us to enjoy the last summers bounty all the way through until next summer. Making jam is easier than you think and it allows you to select British local fruit at it’s best to make the finest tasting jam! This recipe is also to mark the start of Talking Pork’s fundraiser, a BBQ food van that will only use the best local produce for seasonal traditional BBQ, but I will talk more about this project later. 

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  What you need:

  • 500g Cherries, stones removed
  • 500g High pectin jam sugar
  • 1 lemon, juice and zest
  • 50ml Sailor Jerry rum (or any spiced rum - I like the vanilla flavour in Sailor J’s)
  • 4 Clean jars with lids

  
  

  How to make it:

  1. Start by removing the stems and stones from the cherries – I found the easiest way to do this was to don a pair of rubber gloves, remove the stem and squeeze the cherry until the stone pops out. You may find this works better on riper fruit, so an alternative is to slice around the cherry, twist until it separates into two halves and remove the stone this way. The gloves are necessary if you are doing a larger batch as the cherries stain your hands.
  2. When you have completed this arduous task quarter the cherries and put them into a large saucepan. Add the zest and juice of the lemon and simmer for about 10 minutes until the cherries soften.
  3. Meanwhile, wash the jars in soapy water, rinse away any suds and place on a baking tray. Put these into a pre-heated oven at around 150°C and keep them in the oven until all moisture has evaporated, leaving the jars sterile (this will take around 10 minutes).
  4. Once the cherries have softened add the jam sugar and stir until you can no longer see the white granules. Turn the heat up and bring to a boil – if you have a sugar thermometer boil until the jam reaches 105°C. You can also check if the jam is at the setting point by spooning a little onto a cold plate (see image VIII) – if it is ready it should set quickly and have a wrinkled surface when pushed with a spoon.
  5. At this point you can throw the rum in – the alcohol will evaporate instantly because of the high temperature (boiling point of ethanol 78 ^oC), leaving a wonderful spiced vanilla smell and flavour. Remove from the heat.
  6. Bring your jars out of the oven and fill a jug with jam. Holding a jar with a tea towel so as not to burn yourself, pour the hot jam into the jar and tightly screw the lid on. Repeat this process until you run out of jam – this amount should roughly fill about 3-4 jam jars, depending on their size. Turn the jars over when you have put the lids on to create a vacuum and thus seal the jars correctly. Let them cool completely.
     
     -Store the sealed jars of jam in a cool dark place. Once opened keep refrigerated.

  
  

Red Velvet Cake (Not so Red)

The keen eyed among you will have noticed that this cake is not red. My full intension was to create a burgundy coloured cake a shade not too distant from the wine. However in place of this I made a regular brown cake reminiscently looking like a chocolate cake. This was simply because I didn’t add enough red food colouring in – if you do want a very red red velvet cake add 40 ml of red food colouring. While the colouring of the cake was admittedly a bit of a disaster the flavour was nothing but a success, with a complementing soft texture while retaining a denseness expected from a chocolate flavoured batter i.e. its blummin’ lovely!

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  What you need:

  
  Cake batter:
  

  • 150 g of unsalted butter 
  • 150 of caster sugar
  • 3 eggs 
  • 1 egg yolk
  • 1 tbsp vanilla extract (not essence!)
  • 150 g of plain flour
  • 50 g of cocoa powder
  • 1 tsp of baking soda
  • 1 tsp of baking powder
  • a pinch of salt
  • 100 ml of butter milk

  
  

  Topping and filling:

  • 300 g of icing sugar
  • 200 g cream cheese
  • 100 g of unsalted butter
  • a squeeze of lemon juice

  
  

  How to make it:

  
  

  1. Start by taking room temperature butter and mashing it up until its soft. Now cream the butter with the sugar, adding the sugar gradually. Creaming means vigorously bash the sugar into the butter; by doing this the sugar creates air pockets in the butter which will only get bigger as the cake cooks making the cake softer in texture. –It’s best using a machine to do this because after 10 minutes your arm is going to hurt, and it’s quicker.-
  2. Beat the eggs and yolk gradually into the butter- you really want the eggs to be well incorporated. Add in the vanilla extract at this point.
  3. Mix together all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Now we are going to follow the 3:2 method; add in one third of the dry ingredients and mix them in, then half of the butter milk mixing well and repeat; (another third of the dry, half the wet, and third of the dry) DO NOT OVER MIX THE BATTER. Batter done, line a cake tin with grease proof paper and butter it well.  Pour in the batter and cook in a pre-heated 180 ^oC oven for 20 – 30 minutes depending on your oven type (fan assisted etc.). To test whether the cake is cooked slide in a metal skewer and when you pull it out there should be no raw batter on the skewer. Let the cake cool a bit then take it out and place it on a wire cooling rack. If like me you do not have a cooling rack I placed the cake on top of 4 ramekins allowing cold air to circulate around the cake cooling it.
  4. While the cake is in the oven make up the topping / filling. Start by quickly cleaning out your mixing bowl, and as before take room temperature butter and bash it up by hand or in the machine. Throw in the cream cheese icing sugar and a quick squeeze of lemon and mix until the frosting is thick and homogeneous (well mixed up). If you want a more lemony taste finely grate in some of the lemon zest.
  5. Once the cake has cooled chop off the ballooning that might have risen in the centre of the cake, you want to make the top of the cake flat.  Slice the cake through the middle of the circumference and lather the bottom bit of the cake with the frosting. Then put the top of the cake back on but “upside down” (this gives you a flatter top to your cake) and spread on the rest of the topping (keeping a rough looking top.) Finally just for a bit of decoration use the bit of cake you cut off initially and crumble it on top of the frosting.-I served it with double cream but that was pretty naughty- 

  
  

Puff Pastry

People say bought puff pastry is as good home-made, they are wrong, they are not your friend, try this recipe it’s so delicious!

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  What you need:

  
  

  • 250 g of cold unsalted butter
  • 100 g of bread flour
  • 200 g of regular pain flour
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 120 ml of cold water

  
  

  How to make it:

  
  

  1.     You want to start by making a dough. Sift the both flours together to blend them, crack the egg in the flour and season with the salt. The salt is important it enhances flavour and it enhances gluten network formation. For those interested: the salt shields charges present of the gluten molecules which if unshielded allow the gluten molecules to repel one another like magnets. The shielding   therefore allows gluten molecules to come close to one another and knot together, making a strong network (think of the gluten network being like fishing net which will trap in steam when the butter melts making the pastry rise).

  2.     Add the cold water to the dry ingredients (you could put the water in the fridge for a while to cool it), bring the dough together and start to knead it (or you can use a dough hook like I did, I do think that using the machine is better because the dough stays colder than if you used your hands and it lets you make the pastry a bit quicker). In the machine knead for 5 mins or if you’re doing by hand like a boss ~10 mins, either way the dough should be smooth and elastic. Then roll it up into a ball and fridge it for 20 mins. –If you used the machine the dough should stay a cold from the cold water, so leave it 10 mins­.-

  3.     While the dough is cooling take out your cold butter and bash it out so it’s in a 1 cm thick rectangle. -You should bash it rather than roll it, rolling will result in the butter sticking to the surface.- Cover the butter and put it in the fridge.

  4.     After 20 mins place the dough on a floured surface, using a rolling pin create a rectangle shape 1 cm thick. The size of the rectangle should be 1/3 bigger in length than the bashed out butter. 

  5.     Put the butter on the rolled out dough, and fold over the uncovered 1/3 of the dough over 1/3 of the butter. The butter still visible (the 1/3 of butter poking out of the folded dough) should be cut it off and placed it on top of the folded flap of dough.  Now finally use the bottom flap of dough and cover the top layer of butter. Wrap up the crude pastry and fridge it for 20 mins. If like me you overestimated the width your dough needed to be you can trim it off.

  6.     Take out the dough and place it with the roll pattern (the bit that looks like the side of a Swiss roll) in front of you. Roll out the dough length ways and fold it in 3rds back on itself again (reforming the Swiss roll pattern). Turn the dough 90^o and roll the dough out once again length ways and refold. Repeat this procedure so you perform 3 total refolds. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours before using, 24 hours is the best.  You can freeze it if you want, it keeps pretty well.

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