Blackcurrants, apples, snowdrops, and spring in the air

Having been given a wee packet of sourdough starter last weekend, and having already made a wheat flour starter the week before, I thought I'd use my Redbournbury starter to make a rye leaven. I'm thinking of calling it Rye [sic] Cooder, with thanks to Betamother, who suggested that I call the other one Ray. Ray and Rye. The Sourdough Twins (cue slide guitars). Anyway, I got it going before I managed to kill it off, so by this weekend, I was itching to get baking, and I decided on Dan Lepard's Currant and Cassis loaf from The Handmade Loaf. I've had the book for ages, and had always been drawn to that recipe, due in large part to the fact that I love fruited bread of any kind, but until now I never had the requisite rye starter.

MrB was duly dispatched to the supermarket in search of Cassis and came home with an extremely handsome bottle, which took me whooshing straight back to my teens. The town where I went to school was twinned with a famous vine-growing town in Burgundy, and being a keen student of French, I went on several French exchange trips in my teens. We (patently underage) participants were invariably sent home weighed down with bottles of fine Burgundy for our parents, and also a bottle of Creme de Cassis, which was also made in the town, and whose factory we visited as part of the trip. The smell of Cassis always takes me back to that trip (isn't smell the most powerful sense for that? I certainly find it so), and this label is just like the ones on the bottles we used to bring home. I'm afraid that my home counties town offered little in the way of reciprocal gift-giving opportunities, being famous for very little other than roses and a tenuous connection with Bob Hope. Which may go some way to explaining the penchant for shoplifting trips to Oxford Street among the French teen contingent.

Anyway, I digress. The currants are soaked in the cassis and some water overnight, resulting in a juicily plump pile of currants to add to the dough the next day. The dough is a mixture of rye, wheat and wholemeal flours and I ended up with two lovely loaves. They look a bit burned in the photo, but in fact they aren't, it's just my crap photography. Dan Lepard told me (gasp, yes, really him) on Twitter that sugar in the cassis makes the crust browner than a reglular loaf and I am not to worry. I was a teeny bit disappointed that the finished loaf isn't purple, actually, but it tastes lovely, and is great toasted, like all sourdoughs.

The breakfastboys had all headed off to the swimming pool, so finding myself at a loose end, and clearly with too little else to do, I decided to make another loaf with my wheat starter, the oat and apple loaf, also from the Handmade Loaf. This uses apples to keep the loaf moist and it apparently keeps well for a few days.

Not that it gets much of a chance round here. Today was the most beautiful day, with a definite sniff of spring in the air so, with MrB out on his new bike, the breakfastboys and I sliced up the loaf for sandwiches and took ourselves off for a day in the Trossachs, where the  breakfastboys pootled about in the river and invented a game called 'dirty dusty rocks', which, as its name implies, appears to consist of picking up a big rock and carrying it along. It's true what they say about bought toys being a waste of money.

A day of baking and a day of spring sunshine in the hills. That's a pretty good weekend there.

My micro baker

The oldest breakfastboy is 7 and has declared his intention to become an artisan baker when he grows up. He has picked out his delivery van (the most important feature of his bakery, natch) and spends hours poring over his recipe books. He is very fond of recipe books. So fond, in fact, that when I donated some of my old ones to a fair at his school, he promptly spent the money I'd given him on buying one of them back. It's a shame he doesn't extend the same enthusiasm to actually eating any of the recipes he is reading out to me. Not the ones with vegetables in them anyway.

He has recently taken to writing his own recipes. Unfortunately, he hasn't quite grasped the principle of recipe writing, so they consist of spur-of-the-moment quantities of whatever he thinks is likely to be in a cookie or whatever it is, which he then presents to me with a 'right, can we make them now?'. I'm reluctant to squash his creative urges, and I suppose that making them to his invented recipe might teach him to analyse what goes wrong and make them better next time, but I'm equally reluctant to waste 1kg of chocolate chips on what is clearly destined to not work, recipe-wise. Any advice gratefully received.

In line with my current bread fetish, I suggested this morning that we make a raisin and cinnamon loaf together. I really love a raisiny breakfast and I think we're now far enough from the surfeit of dried fruit that is December to contemplate a spicy, fruity loaf, perhaps toasted with a scraping of butter for breakfast. Yum. This one is Dan Lepard's recipe from Short and Sweet, which involves making a sponge of flour, water, yeast and raisins, leaving it for a few hours, then adding more flour, sugar, cinnamon and butter to create a dough. You then give it a few kneads and leave it to prove before baking. The recipe is given in his Guardian column here (look at the bottom of the article for the raisin-cinnamon variation of the main recipe). So, it's one of those most-of-a-day-long loaves, and I thought it would be good for teaching him a little about patience in baking and about how yeast works in dough, seeing as how he wants to be a baker and all. So, we set to with great enthusiasm making our sponge, which bubbled up nicely and we were all ready for the second stage. But I turned around to find him pulling on his wellies and heading off out with his brother and MrB, leaving yours truly with the rest of the loaf to make.  I suppose he's showing excellent promise as a manager of staff and delegator of tasks, also amply demonstrated in the 'tidying up the toys' department *clutches straws*. Still, there are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than in the company of GQT and a big lump of raisiny dough.

Here's the loaf. It's a bit...erm...brown on the crust maybe, but it tastes delicious - we have all tested it and approved, ready for breakfast tomorrow. Can you smell the cinnamon? Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Meanwhile, in other news, I came into the kitchen this morning to find that my sourdough starter had escaped from its (closed!) kilner jar and was glooping down onto the counter. It's a lively little fellow for sure. Isn't it amazing that a mixture of flour and water can do that after a few days? Wow. no wonder people become addicted to making bread. I am reliably informed that some bakers name their sourdough cultures, in the manner of family pets, but I haven't thought of a suitable name for mine yet. I'll wait and see if my first sourdough loaf later this week gives me any inspiration.

Cider for breakfast

I've become a bit of a bread obsessive. I don't know whether it's the triumph of my barm loaf the other week or reading Jane Mason's All you Knead is Bread and Dan Lepard's The Handmade Loaf  just before I fall asleep at night, or simply that I've got a bit more time on my hands at the moment, but I've definitely got the bug. I'm even thinking of making a sourdough starter - yep, things are getting serious.

I've started stalking all sorts of artisan bakers on Twitter too. There seems to be something intrinsically lovely about a baker - they are all terribly generous with their comments and advice, and invariably make nice comments about my amateurish efforts. Many of them are also very inspirational - especially the people who are making good bread for people in their local area, or who are teaching others to make bread. People like Elizabeth Mahoney at One Mile Bakery in Wales, Blackbird Bread in London and Edesia's Kitchen in Derbyshire. I think they must get all the bad karma out with lots of serious kneading in the early hours, although I was disabused of the notion that they are all listening to soothing hippy music in the wee small hours by Blackbird Bread, who tells me that Leonard Cohen is too soporific for early morning kneading. My soundtrack is usually either screeching children or Eddie Mair - must find myself some other sounds to knead to - any suggestions gratefully received.

Anyway, this week's loaf is a cider loaf. I've read a few recipes for bread using apples and/or cider, so I thought to start with I'd simply substitute the beer in the barm loaf with cider and see how that went. Well the answer seems to be - fine! I only have one photo of the completed loaf as I seem to have managed to set my camera to take a movie of a loaf of bread, which is not that riveting, to be honest.

 
The poolish looks thinner than the one I made with beer, and the final loaf seems a little bigger. Inside it is soft and lovely. It tastes sweeter than the barm loaf made with beer - less of a beery tang, although it still has that lovely smell. Now, I am going to say something a bit heretical here. I made some cream of tomato soup to go with it  for dinner last night (that's not the heretical bit). When I was little, Heinz cream of tomato soup was our 'get well' meal when we'd been poorly, and we ate it, as one did in the 1970s, with white sliced bread. Well, my cider loaf with tomato soup gave me a complete flashback to that - something about the softness of the bread (what smallest breakfastboy would call 'bread that's soft like a mouse') and the sweetness of the flavour reminded me of being all comforted and cosied by my mum and a tin of soup. By this, I do not mean that the bread tasted like sunblest, heaven forbid. Just that it's a comforting sort of soft and squishy loaf. It  also makes fabulous toast.

I think next week I might try the apple and oat loaf from Dan Lepard's Handmade Loaf. But that requires a leaven, so I'm going to have to get a starter going first. Stay tuned!

My new beehive!

With super efficient speed, the BBKA sent my Adopt a Beehive pack (it arrived the very next day) and here are some of the goodies that came with it:

There's even a photo of the bees that I've 'adopted' (you can just about see it on the right of the picture) - I seem to have got a free beekeeper into the bargain - he's called Phil.

Now, you will also notice that I got a pot of honey in the pack, so I've been thinking of something I can make to spread the honey on. It's been a bit of a manic week, and next week's not looking much better, so I'm thinking soda bread.

We once spent a very exciting week in a cottage on a farm in Dumfries and Galloway. Exciting mostly because the farm caught fire on the first night we were there (yeah, see? Told you it was exciting), and MrB was forced to be all manly and go and help the farmer try to contain the fire until the emergency services arrived. You can probably imagine the bitter disappointment of two small boys waking up to discover that they had not only slept through a FIRE, but also through the arrival of a giant red fire engine. They've never quite forgiven us for not waking them up.

Anyway, the upshot of all this excitement was that the fire knocked out the electricity in our cottage for a couple of days, but the lovely farmer's wife kindly kept us supplied with fresh eggs, and soda bread which she'd baked in her Aga. I always associate soda bread with rural living (the Irish connection, I expect), so it seemed very fitting to be handed a lovely warm loaf all wrapped up in a clean tea towel each morning. It really needs to be eaten fresh, so supermarket soda bread is always horribly dry in my experience, and not worth buying. It is, however, an absolute cinch to make, because it doesn't contain yeast, so there's no sitting around waiting for the dough to prove. On the contrary, in fact. Because the bicarbonate of soda (which is what makes it rise) starts to react as soon as the wet ingredients are added, it's best to form the dough and get it into the oven as quickly as you can. So, if you have never made bread, then I urge you to try this.

I fancied a slight twist on a normal soda bread, so I used oats in mine. This is Dan Lepard's recipe from Short and Sweet, as featured in The Guardian. Just the thing for breakfast, with butter and honey, or for lunch with a big chunk of good cheese and a pint, or a bowl of soup, or some smoked fish. The possibilities are endless!

Oh, and by the way, and nothing at all to do with soda bread or honey, I've also just taken delivery of these two handsome fellows, beautifully packaged in little boxes (I'm coming over all Dr Seuss with the foxes and the boxes...) from Mrs Fox's. I can hardly wait to get the Christmas tree now! Their online Christmas shop on Folksy is just lovely - really worth a look.