Photos

Yesterday a kind colleague lent me his spare digital SLR (it's alright for some!) so I could play with it and see if I was really interested in purchasing one myself. The upshot of this is that I was able to take some photos of the Focaccia I baked last night, and these are the subject of this post.

After having mixed the appropriate ingredients and allowed them to rise for an hour or so, I transferred them to their tins for proving:

Then, after a half an hour's rest in the fridge, I poked them all over with floured fingers to make a dimpled surface:

Drizzling olive oil on them prior to baking improves the quality of the crust and, as the oil soaks into the holes, adds to the flavour of the crumb too:

20 minutes in the oven at 200C produces a deliciously soft loaf with a loose crumb permeated by olive oil:

Salt

I didn't post or bake yesterday as I was entertaining guests, and this left me with a cake-less lunch box this morning. I did have a short lie-in as a consequence, but I would have preferred cake. So this evening I baked another sponge, but this time there was thankfully some oranges on hand to grate the rind from, so I made my sponge of preference; the chocolate orange. This is simple and just requires adding some orange rind and cocoa to the normal sponge recipe, as mentioned at the end of the previous post.

While I was starting my bread for tomorrow I thought about salt, which is a compound that has come in for a bit of scientific and media scrutiny recently. In the recipes that I have given I have usually reduced the amount of salt from the original recipes or popular proportions. Salt is required to prevent the bread from tasting very bland, as anyone who has accidentally left the salt out will know (though my wife quite likes this), but it is surprising how little one needs to achieve this. Bringing the salt content down over time is also effective in making the change less obvious to the palate, and I often use half the quantity of salt stated in even my adapted recipes. In these times of careful diets, and especially for those on low salt diets, this is worth considering and experimenting with.

I'm off to eat cake.

Another Natural Leaven

Over the last couple of days I have been following another method of making and using a natural leaven. This process comes from French bakers and is known there as a chef, but the principle is much the same as that described earlier. The main difference in this method is that the entire leaven is used to make the dough and then a small amount of the dough is saved before baking to start the next one. The advantage of this method is that, if you are not baking every day, the leaven will store well in the fridge without attention; you only refresh it when you make a new dough. I have seen examples of this method where it is instucted not to leave it more than three days, but I have successfully restarted it after up to three weeks (if you are going to do this make sure it is in a clean, sealed container and that the resulting bread is cooked at high temperature for a relatively long time).

As this is a natural leaven it is slow to get going and very varaiable from place to place, so you may have to adapt the recipe yourself to suit the culture, but the results I get here are a deliciously tangy bread (the taste develops over successive use) with a very firm crust. To encourage the formation of this crust I often increase the humidity of the oven by putting a heat-proof dish with a small amount of water in the bottom both before and during baking. This recipe also benefits from being one that can be left for its second rise, or proving, out of the fridge overnight, so it is ready to just pop in the oven in the morning and doesn't take up fridge space.

I hope you experience similar results to myself, this recipe (or rather its product) has been appreciated by all who have tried it, including the French friend I was helping to move house today, so give it a go.

Be busy baking.

PS In case anyone is keeping track of my baking schedule; I posted on Thursday, baked the above bread on Friday morning, pizza for five on Friday evening (2 Englishmen, 3 Italians), and the above bread again this morning as well as Ciabatta which, as I'm sure you all well know, follows pizza every time.

Still Baking: Morning Muffins

The lack of posts about my baking this time are actually because I haven't been doing any. I've been requalifying as a First Aider and it has meant me getting up very early in the morning, leaving the house before dawn and eating from my stock.

However today I was once again able to make the most of my time, natural leaven and a simple roll recipe (mentioned in the previous link), to make my lunch and, while the oven was on and because I had eaten all that chocolate cake already, I made some muffins to take to work with me.

If you have never made these before they really are the easiest, and probably quickest, cake to make. They suffer from over mixing, so it is better to mix less, and they only take about ten minutes to cook and they cool quickly (a must when morning baking). I have severely adapted this recipe, which is for chocolate chip muffins (is there any other kind?!), from others that I found and through experimentation. I usually just hack up half a bar of dark chocolate for the chips (can you believe how expensive pre-chipped chocolate is?) and I always buy fairtrade both for chocolate and cocoa (as well as bananas, coffee etc.), I suggest you do too, it will taste all the sweeter for it.

Mmm, chocolate.

Cake

From my posts it may look as if I haven't been doing any baking recently, but don't let that fool you. On Thursday I baked the focaccia mentioned in my previous post, Friday is pizza day like last week, closely followed by Saturday's ciabatta. These all kept me busy, but as I had already posted on them there wasn't much point duplicating them.

While I had the oven on baking ciabatta on Saturday morning I thought I should get some cake in. The ginger cake mentioned previously had all but disappeared into the black hole known as my stomach and so I set my hands to a chocolate sponge to see me through at least the start of the working week.

I have recently adapted my sponge recipe since I found a way to make it even more moist and delicious than it used to be. The trick is in weighing the eggs and making them up to the same weight as the other ingredients with milk (or more egg if you can split it). This makes for a good sponge and adding 25g / 1oz cocoa (not drinking chocolate! Look at the ingredients if you're not sure, cocoa only has one: cocoa) in place of the equivalent of the flour makes it chocolatey and, if I'd had some oranges, the grated rind of one added with the marge and sugar makes my favourite yet: chocolate orange, mmmmmmmm.

Treat your taste-buds.