Toasted bread and marmite

Finally I had the bread for breakfast today even though the ulster fry was a strong temptation.

So I toasted two slices and made a tea. In one of the slices I spread butter and in the other marmite (yeast extract). I never tried it before but last week I saw a documentary in BBC where they tried to make home made yeast extract: basically they kill the yeast with salt (one thing that bread makers try to avoid religiously every time they make the dough) and to help the process they heat up the mix, so the result is a dark brown and very (very) salty sticky paste, with umami qualities. It is usually eaten as a savoury spread in bread and toasts or to give flavour to stews as a vegetarian alternative to beef extract.

It was delicious with the butter, and interesting with the marmite, as even very thin layer was enough to give a very strong and salty flavour to the bread.

Lilmu Bread

Finally a day off in Belfast after a couple of weeks. Very cold, all the city is cover in snow and ice, but it looks lovely. So I woke up early, had my bran flakes breakfast and hit the town. All morning and part of the afternoon doing some shopping and walking, what it means lot of money spent. But I enjoyed the day and I bought nice things, including some bread ingredients. And finally, after such a long time and missing it, I made some bread, first one in Belfast. Iunpacked my scale, the bowls and spray bottles and some flours I brought from Cork. The restof the ingredients I bought them locally.

I wanted to make a classic one, like my favorite pain a l'ancienne but as I had a creative day and after the last post of Lidia and Almudena, I decided to risk and be brave: loved the idea of apple and oaks bread, but at the same Almudena's cheddar cheese and mustard scones were very tempting, so, why not mix them both? And you have the result. I had to modify the recipe to make a bread, and as I didn't have to make some sourdough, I used dried yeast. Another modification was the mustard: instead of powder I bought yellow mustard seeds in Marks & Spencer. Here is the recipe:

50 g porridge oats

100 g boiling water

200 g irish apples

100 g water at 20 C

10 g dried yeast

350 g strong white flour

5 g salt

3 tsp yellow mustard seeds

50 g mild white cheddar cheese

some extra oaks for decoration

The process is the same Lidia used for her oats and apple bread. but I baked it for 15 min at 220 and then 25 at 190. the color outside was very dark I guess because of the cheese. And because all the ingredients, I think it didn't grow much but I am quite happy with the result: not big alveolus but very soft breadcrumbs, main flavour coming from the cheese but some sweatiness from the apple and a crunchy and very particular from the mustard seeds.

I tried it tonight but I want to see how is tomorrow morning forbreakfast, although it might have to wait as I

planned a ulster fry for tomorrow. looking forward to all that grease lol.

now let me know what you think about the combination but more important try to do it, maybe next time a little bit less of cheddar so we can appreciate more the flavour of the rest of the ingredients but despite of that the I think it is a nice bread.

and now my turn: pain a l'ancienne

Finally I made my own pain a l'ancienne...and I loved it! Everything was by the book and that made me very happy and proud of me. I understood all that things that bread makers say about the feeling of baking your own home made bread, especially the first ones. I watched it, touched, smelled, showed it to everybody and of course ate, but sharing with friends and family. All is gone by now and I think this is a good sign. Now I can't wait to bake more, have to have a little bit of patience or I will spend all my free time (and some of my work too) kneading, mixing and baking. I wouldn't mind thou ;-)

So the bread I decided to make today it was pain a l'ancienne, very interesting and I was looking forward because Lidia was telling lots of things about it: a primitive bread, not need to knead just mainly mix well to have a good consistency. But the long rest in the fridge over night it will bring loads and amazing flavors. Outside it is very crunchy and the inside soft with big alveolus.



Lidia posted here a recipe that she adapted from a spanish blog about bread called madrid tiene miga (madrid has cramb) to used with sourdough instead of dried yeast. press here to check the recipe in this blog, as it is the one I used for my bread. As I said before here in the blog, I had a small accident with my sourdough and I am now in the second day of making another.

So this is the recipe I used:

380g of organic strong white wheat flour (from doves farm)
7g of salt
2.5g of dried yeast
300ml of iced cold water

I mixed the water with the water with 300g of flour using my scraper and leave it resting for 30 min as they said that the autolysis helps to work with the dough and you get a better result. After that time, I added the rest 80g of flour, the yeast and the salt, mix it well and leave it resting in the fridge for another 30 min, after that mixed it again with the scrapr and put it in the fridge all the night to slow the fermentation. This will make the bread more crunchy outside and with lauds of flavors (that's why we use iced cold water, to slow as much as possible the fermentation).

Next day, in my case 8 hours, I took the dough out of the fridge and brought it to work, so I left it outside for around 2.5 hours, so it doubled its size. I put the dough on a greaseproof paper and cut it with the scratcher in three part, giving them a baguette-ish size, not easy as the dough is very soft and you can really work with it. You have to put flour underneath and on top. I pre-heated the oven at 260ºC and put the doughs into it for 10 min at 250ºC and 20% of steam. I work in a restaurant and we have a good combi oven so you can play with temperatures and % of steam (from 10% to 100%) so I decided to try with 20%. After this 10 min I took out the steam and baked them for another 8 min with just 250ºC.

The result was a very good and crunchy breads, with bigs alveolus inside and an amazing flavor. Maybe the color was a little big dark for me, but it wasn't at all burn.



I can tell you that the bread is perfect for dipping, we ate most of them just dipping in olive oil. Perfect. Looking forward to bake more pain a l'ancienne, and use lidia's one with the sourdough.

One last thing. On july it was my birthday but as I spent 4 weeks working in dublin in a new restaurant opening I couldn't see some of my friends, so this weekend, Philippe, Gianmaria and Alessandro gave me a present: as they know I am baking bread now (and really enjoying it) they bought for me a book about breads and baking, bread matters, by Andrew Whitley. I took a look to the book last night before I went to bed, it seems to be very interesting, as it is not only about baking, recipes and techniques but it has a big first part about why to bake your own bread and not to buy industrial ones; then of course it has a very good selection of all types of breads and recipes. Thanks guys, I appreciate and be sure I will use it and bake some bread for you.

Bertinet and Stevens

All day raining in dublin, summer is over in Ireland and autumn and winter is ideal to stay at home reading and making breads. After work I spent some time in a bookshop near the restaurant in city center and of course I bought two books: temptation is too big inside there. One of the books is a well know but I didn't have it: Dough - Simple Contemporary Bread by Richard Bertinet , nice book with very good pictures and a good introduction about how to make bread. Then a quite few recipes. Very interesting with simple explanations. There is a dvd enclose with the book where bertinet explains in a 30 min video how to make bread. Very useful specially for those, like me, who are very visual.





The second one I bought today is Bread by Daniel Stevens, from the River Cottage. I have to confess that I had no idea about this book, the author or the River Cottage, but they very interesting. River Cottage have different projects, courses, a local produce store of food and drinks, books and dvd, a canteen, all with a philosophy of self-sufficiency, food integrity, and consumption of local, seasonal produce.Take a look at their website. The book is impregnated with these principles. It has a good and big introduction about how to make bread, lots of practical information, including how to make a clay oven and a good selection of different recipes. All in a beautiful and very handy handbook.


Looking forward to read the books and practice some of the recipes but as I said before, now it's the time to do it as the cold and rainy seasons are coming.

lidia bread

lidia was here in cork for a week with eva and paula. we had a great time, visiting the island, lovely places like cobh, kinsale, killarney, etc, but we had time to cook and bake and to create this blog. So our main aim was and is to share recipe in the distance as we three live in different cities and myself in a different country, so we can put here attempts and doubts and discoveries and questions mainly about bread but also you will find some baking. And while sharing between us we can share with everybody else and enrich this blog with people who want to participate too. so do not be shy.

we made my sourdough, starting with strong wholemeal flour, and after 2 days the sourdough was crazy: double every 12 hours, millions of bubbles and overflowing the glass jar. So we decided to made a white sourdough so we fed it with strong organic white flour. i think this change didn't like it, didn't die but its activity is very slow since then. i m going to feed it today with strong wholemeal flour and put it finally in the fridge. and let's pray it is ok.

so as we said before, while waiting for the sourdough we made a couple of breads, using fresh yeast. the first one, the one i called lidia bread, was a strong flavour wholemeal bread. here is the recipe:

500g organic spelt flour
150g organic wholemeal rye flour
150 strong wholemeal flour
30g fresh yeast
17g salt
400g water

the bread has two fermentation of around 3 hours and then oven for 50 min, first 15 min at maximum temperature (in my oven it's around 140 celsius degrees) and the at 190 degrees. we put some water in a tray underneath the bread, and we wasn't able to spray the bread with water basically because we forgot to buy the spray bottle :-) but it came finally crispy enough.



so the result was a lovely and rich brown bread, during the fermentation the dough grew quiet well but in the oven we didn't get many alveolus, maybe because of the yeast, maybe because it has a high proportion of wholemeal flour or even because of the oven, as it was too close to the top inside of it. Nevertheless the texture and the flavour was unique. lidia promised she is going to try to make it again using this time her sourdough so i am really looking forward for her to make it and share with us. i am sure she will improve it.



and as the bread has only one destiny to fulfill, we all had dinner with it that night, and our food was enhanced with this powerful homemade bread. here you can see a sample with tapenade, semi sun dry tomatoes and feta cheese. it s true as well as lidia said the this bread get even better if you toast it. i m getting hungry again ;-)