Farmhouse Breakfast Week #4

 Last week's barm bread was such a roaring success that the family have been clamouring for more, so yesterday I had a day pottering about in the kitchen baking bread and making marmalade (again). I've just finished a big job, so it's quite a luxury to have a few days stretching out that I can fill with kneading and chopping and bubbling and baking. I thought that for breakfast today I'd finish off the bread, toasted, with some of the pink grapefruit marmalade that I also made yesterday. Both bread making and marmalade-making are jobs that require a bit of coming and going over a day, so getting all the timings right and fitting it in with the school run reminded me why I am not running my own artisan bakery. Especially when I discovered that MrB had snaffled the beer I needed for the bread and replaced it with a smaller bottle that wasn't enough for the recipe. Gnash.

Anyway, that particular crisis resolved, I was ready for the off. This time I chose an organic ale from the Black Isle - keeping things local (well, Scottish, anyway) and the results were equally lovely.

The beery flavour was a bit less pronounced this time, but the crust was beautifully soft and chewy. I really recommend having a bash at this - it's fantastic.

The pink grapefruit marmalade is something I've been meaning to try for ages. I have a bit of a thing for orangy-pinks (see yesterday's rhubarb smoothie), and the colour of the skin and the juice of pink grapefruit fit in nicely with that particular fetish, so I was hoping the colour of the finished marmalade would too.

When I made the Seville marmalade a couple of weeks ago, I used the whole fruit method, but this time I decided to used the sliced fruit method, which is also very straightforward. I wanted slightly more refined chunks in this, and I figured it would be easier to achieve this way. You also get a slightly clearer set by doing it this way - with the dark marmalade I usually make it doesn't matter, but I wanted to try and get something of the colour of the fruit this time. I based this recipe on one from Pam Corbin's River Cottage Preserves Handbook.

Pink Grapefruit Marmalade 

(makes about 8 jars)

1kg pink grapefruit
1 kg jam sugar
1 kg demerara sugar
100ml lemon juice

1. Wash the grapefruit, then halve and squeeze them. Put the juice in a big bowl
2. Slice the grapefruit into chunks of whichever size you prefer. and add to the bowl, with all the pithy gubbins.
3. Add 2.5l of water, cover and leave overnight.

4. Put the lot into a pan, bring to the boil and simmer for about 2.5 hours, until the peel is tender and the liquid has reduced by about a third.
5. Add the sugar and lemon juice. Dissolve the sugar completely, then bring to the boil and boil hard until you get a set (104 degrees C, or a wrinkle on a cold plate).
6. Remove from heat and leave for 10 minutes. If there's a lot of scum on the top, stir in a small knob of butter to disperse it.
7. Stir gently then put in sterilised jars and seal immediately.

The result was a lovely orange colour. I think we're talking winter sunset, as compared to yesterday's winter morning sky in a rhubarb smoothie. And it has a nice grapefruity bitterness that suits my marmalade tastes just fine.

Barmy bread

You may remember that one of my publicly stated new year's resolutions was to bake more bread. Well, I've been seeing a lot of recipes lately for barm bread; that is, bread made using beer, and I thought I'd have a go at one. There's a long historical connection between brewing and baking, as breweries were the traditional source of leaven for bakers. So the marriage of beer and bread has something very 'right' about it in my mind - ploughman's lunches, good Welsh rarebit with ale in the cheesy topping, you get the picture.

MrB and I, pre-kids, once had a blissful October week of wall-to-wall sunshine on Harris, where we bought fish straight off the boat in Leverburgh, visited Harris tweed sheds at Luskentyre, climbed Clisham and swam in the blue blue sea. MrB paid in part for the rent of the beautiful old blackhouse we were staying in by doing some dry stone walling for the owner (MrB was a dyker in a previous life), and we sat in a field, the three of us, eating cheese and fresh bread and oatcakes, washed down with bottles of Red Cuillin ale from Skye, looking out across the Atlantic. Life seemed pretty perfect.

Enough nostalgia. I  used a recipe from Blackbird Bread's blog - they're a micro-bakery in Twickenham, and bake all their bread from home. Local bread for local people - great stuff. Their blog is definitely worth a look if you're interested in things bread and dough related.

I must confess that I usually resort to the breadmaker, but as I work from home, I thought I could punctuate the day quite easily with a bit of kneading and knocking back. And it was very therapeutic. I'm just finishing off a very fiddly job in my real life book world, so it was good to be able to get away from the  screen from time to time and bash the dough about a bit in between bursts of work. The only thing that I changed in the ingredients was that I used a golden ale (Cambridgeshire Golden Ale from M&S), rather than the dark ale specified in the recipe, because that's what I had in the house. I also left the first rise rather longer than the 45 mins specified in the recipe because I had to fit in the timings with the school run. I was a bit alarmed that my poolish didn't look anything like theirs - my scales seem to be a bit temperamental at the moment, and I suspect there was a bit too much flour in mine, because it bore a strong resemblance to wallpaper paste, but anyway. As you can see from the picture, it all worked out just fine in the end.

Oh. My. Goodness, I cannot tell you how thrilled I am with this loaf. It came out of the oven looking so splendid, and I thought the taste couldn't possibly match up to how good it looked. But it did! As the liquid is entirely beer, it has a lovely hoppy tang, and it was soft and toothsome. The crust is almost bagelly, because of the steam, I guess, and it was just delicious. It got a unanimous thumbs up from the family (though not Mr Horseradish, Blackbird Bread; he wasn't around at the time ;-)). I am hoping that all the alcohol had cooked off and that my children were not just approving of it in a drunken 'No listen, you know, I really love you, honesht' sort of a way.

Remarkably, we managed not to wolf the whole lot in one sitting, so I had more toasted this morning with marmite, and both breakfastboys demanded a packed lunch made with it for school. So, every last scrap eaten up. I'm just hoping it won't make the children smell of beer all afternoon.

I'm a convert back to kneading my own. Next thing you know it'll be sourdough starters...

PS Dictionary corner: barmy (adj) slang insane [c16 originally: full of BARM, hence frothing, excited, flighty etc]  (Collins English Dictionary)