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.

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.

Hot Cross Buns

Before I started writing this I was wondering why I made hot cross buns.  Obviously Easter played a huge part in it but there was another reason, a lot of involved cooking I do is always destined for the blog and the blog played a big part in my decision to make these.  Easter aside the reason I wanted to make these was so I had something sweet to photograph on top of the lovely antique cake stand my girlfriend got for her birthday recently.  Alas it's only just dawned on me that that was the reason and so the photographs are without the lovely cake stand.

Looking around at recipes they went from the very plain to the quite rich looking.  I settled upon one from the richer end of the spectrum - from Nigella's Feast book.  This differed from most by using a combination of milk and melted butter for the liquid along with the addition of some cardamom and ginger.

Mince and Peas

Mince dishes, well specifically mince in sauce, do very little for me.  Recipes that many hold in high regard, old favourites like spag bol, cottage pie or lasagne, send shivers down my spine. This is all down to my mum's cooking.  My mum is by no means a bad cook, pretty much everything was cooked from scratch and there was always lots of veg, and her willingness for foreign foods has played a big part in my broadness of taste now.  She loved cooking with mince though and she would happily serve lasagne, spag bol and chili in the same week, and the week after, and the week after, and so on and so forth.  And so whilst the stir fries, fajitas and kebabs have left me loving all foods foreign I've got no time for mince.

Mince and peas holds fond memories for me though.  I've only had it a couple of times too, at about age 15 when working as a labourer on a Wolverhampton high rise council estate.  I was doing a couple of weeks work for a friend of my dad and every morning I'd leave my house in the Buckinghamshire countryside and make the hour journey up the motorway to the kind of estate I'd never seen before.  I'd spend a morning lifting and cutting blocks for block paving and then at lunch head to the chip shop where, alongside the various battered delicacies, you could pay 70p for a polystyrene plate of chips with a ladle of rich, beefy, salty mince and peas poured on top.  Whether it was the chips or the flavour enhancer laden gravy, something about that mince and peas didn't have the usual effect.