Sourdough, the Bread Pet

By now, and all the great travel posts that David has recently blogged, you have probably surmised that we are back in England. Still stressful to travel but we made it safe and sound to our sweet little 400 square foot flat. It was also so wonderful to once again see our grandchildren our son Kenny, who is now back from deployment, and our lovely daughter in-law Kim.

So, Kenny and Kim have been experimenting with sourdough. This is a great skill to have for baking. It will allow baking without yeast and is better for the digestive system. I have been meaning to learn this myself but as of yet have not done so. The first day of our arrival, I am handed a jar of doughy goo, aka a sourdough starter. I was told to feed it and take care of it. In return, I was promised yummy baked goods. How sneaky of them. I didn't know it at the time, probably due to jetlag, but they had too much and felt bad just throwing some away. 

Sourdough Starter

Let's be straight. I know quite a few tricks with baking. I feel like I know my way around the kitchen but I really didn't know anything about sourdough other than it made bread more sour and some people had starters that went back generations. I also vaguely remember as a child, my mom was given a starter. I believe my mom also made some bread but mostly I remember it living in the back of the fridge only coming out for feeding. Kenny did explain that I could keep it in the fridge and I needed to feed it once a week. Really, that is all the training I got. Maybe he said more but I had been traveling for almost 24 hours and I don't remember much.

After some sleep, I started researching how to keep my new pet alive. I started with Pinterest. I figured I would just look for a recipe and follow the instructions. I found a honey wheat bread that strongly resembled one of  my favorite breads, except it had no  yeast in this recipe. 

Again, let me say, I make bread all the time. I understand that it can take time but a normal loaf of bread, with yeast, takes somewhere between 3 to 4 hours. Sourdough takes anywhere from 3 to 4 days. You don't wake up on morning and say, I think I want homemade bread today. Also, there are all these strange terms like, autolyse, feeding, discarding, bulk fermentation. Still, I was determined. Kenny and Kim had already done the hard part of getting a healthy sourdough starter.

Day 1. Take the starter out of the fridge and feed. This all sounds easy. I vaguely remember Kenny saying add 150 grams of flour and water and then let it double. What I didn't completely process was that when you feed a starter, you need to have equal amount of starter, flour and water. Any leftover starter should be used or discarded. I didn't do this so I got some rise in my starter but probably not enough. 

Day 2. Make the dough. This was an elaborate process of mixing, kneading, stretching and finally proofing for about 4 hours at room temperature. The dough is then placed in the fridge overnight for a long cold fermentation.

Day 3. Shape the dough, proof again and bake. Of course by now I am dreaming about this bread that I have been working on for two days. I get up early to get the dough shaped and proofing only to remember that although I own several loaf pans back in Washington, I do not actually own a loaf pan in England. Too late to back out, I decide to make this loaf a boule shape, or free range bread. After proofing for at least 3 hours I put it in the oven to bake.

Free-form sourdough ball and ingredients

I still consider myself a novice baker in my new kitchen and I don't feel completely at home with my new oven. There are so many choices on the knob for baking. I have the owners manual handy and have referred to it often but I still feel like I am guessing on which mode to bake on. Anyway, after baking for almost an hour, which was longer than the recipe said, I decided it was done baking.

Mode selector control of the oven

 Unfortunately, the bread was a bit of disaster. I was still under-cooked inside. Whether this was from the starter not being fully risen, no loaf pan, not enough rising time or a combination of all three. It had a good taste, that is the edges that were cooked but so many other problems. This was discouraging since it took so many days but not giving up I decided to try again.

Free-form Sourdough Loaf  #1

Attempt number 2 was much better. I ordered a loaf pan, tried to be very patient with the proof time and cooked it longer but something still just seemed not quite right. I decided to go back and do more research before attempt number 3. 

I took the time to read what it took to make a good starter and it was then that I realized that I had been feeding my starter incorrectly. I now understood that I had to measure out 150 grams of starter and then feed it equal amounts of water and flour. The extra was then discarded or used immediately, which is another topic. For some reason, I had this silly notion that people discarded starter because it was outgrowing its home but apparently, there is some real science behind the amount of starter and feeding.

Attempt number 3! Same recipe, I did have one hiccup at the very end. My dough was shaped, in the loaf pan and almost ready to bake when I was needed to help watch the grandkids. My son picked us up in the car, so I could carefully take the rising loaf to his house to bake. That was an interesting car ride to his house. I was trying so hard to protect this rising dough. I had spent 3 days getting it ready to bake and I was not going to lose it now. I held this loaf like a mother protects a child. Anyway, the bread made it, was baked and tasted delicious. 

What next? I have already "pinned" several recipes that I would like to try. Waffles, breadsticks, even donuts but first I have to figure out what to do with all discard! I can't just throw it out.

-Becky

Bagels and Boredom

 We are now in the final week before traveling back to England and since we have to take a Covid test before we can travel, we decided not to take any chances of getting sick. We have therefore decided to do a self imposed self isolation for the last week. This might sound fun to most people but to David and I, who are type A personalities, and always need a project, this is difficult. Sure we have things to wrap up around the house but not a whole weeks worth of things. What to do when I am bored? Bake!

Years ago I was given the cookbook, "Baking with Julia". The Julia being Julia Child who in my mind is one of the Mozarts of cooking and baking. This cookbook is a bit different than other cookbooks by Julia Child. It is full of recipes from guest chefs that visited her show and was printed in 1996. One of these recipes is bagels by guest chef, Lauren Groveman. I tried this recipe years and years ago, like 20 years ago and had some success. I remembered it being  a recipe that had several steps but was worth the effort. So in my boredom decided to try bagels again.

Step one, reread the recipe and research who is Lauren Groveman. This lead me to a Google search and also to the original episode with Julia Child. I watched in fascination at the amazing hairstyles from the 90's but also at Julia and how even in her later years she commanded the screen. I also decided that I could do bagels, which by now I was craving. It was also mentioned that Lauren was from New York which clinched the deal.

Original Episode on YouTube

The recipe is pretty direct. The only ingredient that gave me pause was, 3 Tablespoons of solid vegetable shortening. This ingredient clearly dates it to the 90's but secret fact about me. I have shortening and occasionally use it but it did seem like a unusual ingredient to use. 

The technique was to make the dough the day before. Allow it to proof once for an hour, punch it down and let it do the final proofing in the fridge overnight. The next morning was the shaping, boiling and baking. This allows us to enjoy the bagel in the morning with breakfast. At least that is the idea but it did take me about 2 1/2 hours to heat the oven, shape, boil, bake and then cool. So unless you are going to start at 6 a.m. then it is a second breakfast food.

After watching the original episode, I decide to put the Kitchenaid aside so I could mix and knead by hand. There is one technique in the recipe that I don't think I will repeat. In the early stages, after softening the yeast in warm water, you add the yeast, salt, 2 more cups of water and shortening in a bowl. I immediately heard Paul Hollywood in my head reminding me that salt kills yeast but I decided to give Lauren the benefit of the doubt and followed the step as printed in the recipe. I am not sure if this is the cause, but I felt the bagels did not rise as they should. The first proof took longer than printed and the final result was a bit flatter than I hoped. I think next time I will follow my gut, and Paul, and not add the salt right in with the yeast.

Shaping the Bagels

Shaping the bagels was fun. No, you do not use a donut cutout on bagels. After dividing the dough into balls, it is then flattened and poked with a finger until it comes out the other side. Then there is this magical twirling motion to get the bagel to open up to a huge hole. I would have thought the hole was too big but after letting it sit and the boiling process it looked like the correct size.

Boiling the Bagels

The baking process also had several steps. First set the oven to 500 degrees, with a pizza stone. When the bagels are placed in the oven the temperature is lowered to 450. After baking for 25 minutes the oven is then turned off and the bagels bake for 5 more minutes. The oven door is then open for 5 minutes, with the bagels still in the oven. Then the bagels are taken out for the cooling. All the while I am smelling bagels baking wondering how they will taste.

Bagels in the Oven

Final result? It was delicious. I will try the salt/yeast technique different next time but it really was not too difficult. The hardest part of making bagels.....the wait.

-Becky

Baking in UK: Part 3 - Staffordshire Oak Cakes

It has been a long month of no new baking. In my defense, my kitchen looked like this for a good part of the time!. Notice no oven, cooktop and no sink so that meant no cooking. I hope you have taken time to read David's posts about the remodel and have seen my beautiful new kitchen. So on to cooking.

Kitchen chaos

 As a reminder, I am taking my recipes from, "Paul Hollywood's British Baking" cookbook. Todays recipe is Staffordshire Oatcakes. Staffordshire is from the Midlands, in the area of Birmingham. Again, one of those areas I would love to explore more when life returns to normal.

This recipe caught my eye from the very beginning and was recommended by one of David's friends as a a local food we should try while we are here. It is a griddle cake using relatively simple ingredients with the addition of yeast as the leavening agent. The only preplanning necessary was the ingredient, "fine oatmeal". I was not sure what this meant. I figured that it was like oat flour but when I looked in the grocery store I couldn't find anything that was called fine oatmeal. I did hear that some of the porridge oats are pretty fine but I decided to take matters into my own hands and make some oat flour. This did require the use of my daughter in law's blender. After a few whirs in the blender I had fine oatmeal. If you are looking at the picture of the ingredients, that is what is in the glass jar and the oats I used are behind the jar.

Ingredients

Also notice that I switched to salted butter but since the recipe called for salt I used a bit less that the amount of salt that was called for in the recipe. The other thing to notice is the fact there is no sugar in this recipe. If you are like me, you think pancake when I say it is a griddle cake but these are more like a crepe than a fluffy pancake, with the exception that this recipe has no eggs.

Batter

This was an easy recipe. It did require some planning ahead. After mixing all the ingredients, with the exception of the melted butter, it needs to sit for 1 1/2 hours for the yeast to do its thing. This wait period gave me time to think about what fillings to roll into my griddlecake. Paul recommends crispy bacon and cheese. I am not sure where Paul shops but I have yet to find anything that resembles "crispy" bacon. There is a bacon here called 'streaky bacon" which I suppose is the closest a person can find to American bacon but I would not really call it crispy. I also looked at the photograph in the cookbook and to me it looked like traditional English bacon, more like Canadian bacon, so that is what I used.

Cooking

In keeping with the tradition of crepes, the first attempt at cooking one was not pretty and was used to tear apart and sample and while none of them came our perfectly round, they were acceptable with the last one being the best of them all. (This picture is of attempt number 3).

Take a minute to listen to the bacon frying in the pan. After years of innkeeping, I can't smell and hear bacon cooking without thinking of one thing.....eggs. So while I did eat my first oatcake with Paul's suggestion of ham and cheese, (as pictured below), I also added eggs to my second and it was also delightful. David, not forgetting they are like crepes, rolled Nutella and jam into one. I am pretty sure he liked it by how fast he ate it. 

All in all, I would definitely make these fun oatcakes again. They were a light, slightly fluffy way to wrap up food and eat. Thanks Paul for another great bake. (Can I call it a bake when no oven was used?)

With bacon and aged English Cheddar Cheese

Becky

Baking in UK, Part 2: "Goosnargh Cakes"

 Time again for British baking with Becky. Today I will show you my attempt to make Goosnargh Cakes. This recipe originates from the village of Goosnargh, in Lancashire, which happens to be the first area I visited over 30 years ago. It is a particularly beautiful area in England and hopefully after the world opens again, I can return for a visit and see several friends still living up North.

So, on a side note, I should take this time to explain that any baking attempted right now is difficult. We are currently in the middle of a kitchen remodel, that I am sure will be its own blog. When we made this recipe, I knew that in just days I would be having the oven pulled out and not replaced for several weeks. The kitchen is also in a state of flux with dishes, pans and utensils being constantly moved around as a cabinet is removed and another installed. I am not saying this to complain because I am excited about the remodel, but as a reminder that my love of baking will overcome a few inconveniences. 

As a reminder, this recipe is from "Paul Hollywood's British Baking", cookbook. I will once again be relying on him as my mentor.  I would classify the Goosnargh Cakes as a biscuit or cookie in the fact that they are round and flat. 

As you can see from the picture, the ingredients are relatively simple with the addition of caraway seeds to add a unique flavor to the cakes. It is also worth noting that there are no eggs or salt in the recipe. This is still mind boggling to me since I consider salt to be the one ingredient that must be in every recipe. Because of this, I have spent time reconsidering my butter choice. In the U.S. I have always used unsalted butter. I have been taught that the best cream is used in unsalted butter since impurities cannot be hidden behind salt but here I have greater faith in their butter. So after this butter is used up, I plan to switch to salted butter. 

So these cakes are basically flour, sugar and butter. Sounds simple enough! They are basically a shortbread with the butter being incorporated with my fingers instead of being creamed into the sugar with a blender. This might be because there is only 1 Tablespoon of sugar in the dough. Don't worry, these are a sweet cookie because the rest of the sugar is sprinkled on the top before baking and again after they are taken out of the oven.

The only struggle we had was the caraway. Paul suggests, "Add a little at first, grinding the seeds with a pestle and mortar to give it a more subtle flavour". (See the last word, "flavour", my computer just tried to auto-correct it to "flavor," but that is how it is printed in the book). Anyway, we don't own a mortar and pestle. I guess that is not true, I own two but they are in Washington so we tried various methods to try and get the right consistency. I first tried my rolling pin in a measuring cup. David noticed me struggling and grabbed the hammer, which he had laying nearby for the kitchen remodel, and gave it an attempt. Both had the same effect so I went with the the rolling pin method. It felt more appropriate for baking.

The recipe calls for lots of butter so the dough came together easily. After a quick chill in the fridge, I rolled, cut and baked them. While still warm, the last addition of powdered sugar is sprinkled on top. How do they taste? Delicious! I loved the caraway giving a subtle flavor. I ate a couple while warm but I also enjoyed them after they had cooled with a cup of tea. That sounds pretty British doesn't it.

-Becky

Baking in UK, Part 1: "Chocolate Heavies"

We have been in England now for over 4 months and being self proclaimed "Foodies", we are feeling a bit sad that we are on the downward side of our trip and we have had little chance to explore and eat the local cuisine. It has also been particularly tough on me since my passion is baking and making people happy through food so we decided to do something about this, Bake!

Step one, find a good mentor through a British cookbook. I decided on, "Paul Hollywood's British Baking." Paul Hollywood seemed like a good choice because he doesn't use fancy equipment for his recipes. This is really important because I have limited resources. Now I know those of you who know me well, know that I have almost every baking tool one could hope for. I have a couple of Kitchenaid Mixers, (going to give them a big hug when I get home to Washington), several sets of measuring cups, knives, cutters, scrapers, baking pans, well you get the idea. Anyway, here I have 400 square feet of living space and the biggest kitchen appliance I own is a hand mixer. This is an excellent opportunity to get back to my baking roots and bake like I was taught as a child.....be creative! 

Step two, assemble ingredients. This sounds easy enough but they use different terms here than back home in the U.S.A. Is cornflour cornstarch or cornmeal? Which sugar is caster sugar? Is Fan 180 C. a real temperature? After several questions posed to our Echo, "Alexa" we set off to the store to get the final ingredients needed. One thing I have to say about Britain, the dairy products are amazing and fresh. I have been known to sample the butter before spreading on toast. If I could bring one thing, or several small things, back to Washington with me it would be a suitcase of butter. 

Step three, choose a recipe and bake. I am starting with three recipes that resemble a cookie. By cookie I mean that they are round and somewhat flat.

 The first one we baked is called Chocolate Heavies. This recipe is from the area we are currently living in, Southeast England. It was from the Victorian times and originally had currents instead of chocolate chips. (sounds like a good change by Paul). Notice by the picture, chocolate chips are sold in these small packets that to me look like a snack size and sorry Paul, I added the whole packet, which was 100 g instead of the 75 g in the recipe. This recipe also has lard as ingredient which I have not used in cookies. 

The recipe came together relatively easy. The only issue I had was the instruction that said to "use up to 40ml of milk". I used the whole amount and it still was very crumbly. I didn't want to stray from the recipe so I just carried on. Eventually the dough did come together and I was able to roll it out after the prescribed chill time.

The Heavies, aka cookies, came out a beautiful golden brown thanks to the egg wash before baking. I was pleased at how they looked and I think that Paul would also, they might not be handshake worthy but certainly good enough. 

The last instruction in the book said, "These biscuits are best eaten fresh". I took this quite literally and ate two while they were still warm. All in all, I think they were great tasting. Pretty dry compared to what I am used to but they would be great with tea, or another hot drink.

-Becky

Food in UK, Part-4: English Granola

A few weeks after moving into our new flat, Becky wanted to make some of our homemade granola using our favorite recipe from the B&B. This was our "Coconut Cardamom Granola" (sorry that recipe never appeared in the Blue Goose Inn cookbook, for whatever reason.) Anyway, it's always been my personal favorite and we were both craving some.  So we set out to the stores with our shopping list of ingredients. It was nothing too unusual, but did include three ingredients that proved nearly impossible to find: ground black cardamom, dried coconut flakes and slivered almonds. This recipe also used pistachios and  Canadian organic maple syrup as sweetener and flavoring. While we could find pistachios and maple syrup here, they were both quite expensive and the maple syrup just didn't have the same flavor as the one we used back home.  

We struggled making a couple of batches of this granola using substitutes we could find including desiccated coconut, which was too fine in texture and grinding our own whole cardamom pods. Whole Cardamom pods are available at most larger groceries, but the only place we ever found the actual ground cardamon after lots of Googling was at a specialized Indian spice shop that had been closed due to the lockdowns.  After all the hard work, it just wasn't the same, so we had the idea, why not adapt the recipe to local ingredients we can actually find easily here and this can be our new "English Granola"?  

The first thing we wanted to change was the spices. We needed something that was more English and more readily available. We kept seeing something in the spice sections and baking isles of the grocery called "Mixed Spice". This turns out to be something very English yet very similar to what we might call "Pumpkin Pie Spice" in the USA. There are many variations on the recipe, but it usually is a special blend of such ingredients as cinnamon, allspice, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, mace, cloves and coriander - more or less depending upon the brand or recipe. It can be found everywhere and it seemed like a perfect candidate to spice up our English Granola. 

Mixed Spice blend

Next up was the sweetener. We decided we wanted to substitute Golden Syrup for the maple syrup, to make it more English. Golden Syrup is also something that is very English and very easy to find and much more economical than maple syrup. This specially refined cane sugar syrup was developed by chemists from the Lyle factory in London in 1883. It is quite unlike anything we have in the US and has a distinctive butterscotch-like flavor, reminiscent of Werther's Original butter candy. A perfect choice for our English Granola. 

Lyle's Golden Syrup

While the slivered almonds also proved nearly impossible to find locally and whole and sliced almonds were easy to find, we kept some almonds in the recipe  and we decided to substitute cashews for the pistachios, since they are more readily available here and we could even buy them in the bulk food section at the store for quite a bit less per pound than they might be in the USA.  

Of course all these substitutions set off the fine balance of the granola recipe. The first batch was under-done and too sticky. After Becky made a number of fine adjustments to the balance of ingredients and cooking process, I think she has perfected a great new recipe - at least it's now my personal favorite. 

The actual recipe remains unpublished for now.  As I am not the actual chef, nor do I play one on TV or at a B&B, it is possible that some of my details in this story may be in error. 

-David