Cooking The Books

70%

I've come to the conclusion that 70% is perfect.  Not 70% cocoa content in chocolate (although that is my favourite) but 70% water content for dough when using bakers percentages.  Bakers percentages take the weight of flour as being 100% and then the rest of the ingredients are given as a percentage of that, so the fougasse recipe here could be stated as flour 100%, water 70%, easy-blend yeast 1.5% and salt 2%.

Really simple and it allows the recipe to be scaled up or down easily.  I've made bread with maybe 50% water all the way up to in the 80s but I've decided 70% is my favourite.  It leaves a sticky dough to start with but if you persevere with the kneading, resisting the urge to add more flour, in the end you're left with a lovely soft dough that rises like a dream.

Last night I repeated the fougasse recipe but after the first hour rise, instead of shaping into fougasse, I patted it out, rolled it into a tight sausage and put it into a well floured loaf tin.  I left it to rise till doubled (about 50 minutes), dusted the top with semolina, put a big slash in the top then stuck it in a 200 deg oven.  After 30 minutes I removed it from the tin and gave it 10 more.

I think it turned out pretty well.  It flew out the top of the tin in the first ten minutes of cooking splitting nice and evenly down the slash I'd put in the top.  The crumb was even and the crust nice and chewy.  It could probably have handled another 5 minutes in the oven as the middle was slightly moist but as tin loaves are far from my speciality I'll let myself off.  It seems to toast pretty well too.

A little tahnk you to Kavey too for the photo processing tips, that looks much better.

Overdone

Looking at it now it looks a wee bit overdone, burnt one could say even, but at the time I didn't notice, it just had a nice charred taste.

I saw chicory in the supermarket recently and thought it was about time I gave it try again.  I can't remember eating it since I was a child and those memories aren't ones of liking it.  Tastes change though so in the basket it went.  I had thoughts of cooking it on the ridged grill pan and the internet suggested this combination.

A Return To Cooking

Although I ate pretty well at Glastonbury by the time I got home I was really fancying some greens.  So on Monday I popped to Sainos and grabbed peas and broad beans in their pods along with some little gem lettuces and spring onions.  I'd seen HFW do a griddled salad of similar ingredients and thought I'd do something similar, adding a little feta and mint then serving it alongside some lamb chops.  I went ahead as planned but for some reason it didn't do it for me massively.  I loved the griddled lettuce and spring onions and the fresh peas and broad beans were great but I don't think I liked the feta and mint so much.  I should have stuck with HFW's ingredients.

Come Tuesday this meant I had some peas, feta and mint left and the first thing that sprang to mind was a frittata.  I'd never made one before but I had an inkling that I'd heard of such a combination and Google proved me correct with this recipe.

Glastonbury 2008

As mentioned last post I spent the weekend at Glastonbury and amongst the music and alcohol there was also a requirement to eat occasionally.  Glastonbury is large, to say the least, and along with the nice stuff there's pretty dire food there so I thought if I blogged my experiences I may help people wade through the choice in the future.  Alas by the time I decided to do this I'd already eaten one meal (a rather tasty falafel from by the Park Stage) and so it's not quite a complete list of everything I ate.  Late one night I also had a couple of spring rolls and a sweet and sour chicken on rice but I forgot to snap them too.

To help you in future years hold your mouse over the notes button of the below pictobrowser and it will tell you about the food and where it came from, at the end I was give my top three and the dish that gets the wooden spoon.

So onto the finishing rostrum.

Fougasse

I've spent the last few days at Glastonbury and took a few snaps of the great and not so great food available there.  They're stuck on my phone at the minute though and so today's installment comes from my own kitchen and a rare Monday not in the office.

I like to bake bread but don't do it anywhere near enough so recently grabbed Richard Betinet's Dough book for some inspiration.  I own Dan Lepard's books and whilst I find it really interesting the recipes tend to require masses of time which is something I don't seem to have at the minute.  Richard seems to be at the other end of the scale with his base white dough being part of about half the recipes in the book.  The fougasse caught my eye and so that's where I began.  The fougasse is simply the plain white dough recipe cut into interesting shapes and given a short bake at a high temp.

The main difference between the instructions in this book and most bread books I've read is his use of high water contents in his dough, for this recipe 350 grams of water for 500 grams of flour.  This leaves you with a very wet and sticky dough but with stretching, folding and slapping (his word not mine) it comes together into a lovely soft dough.  For the recipe read on.