Traditional Bakewell Tart

Posted on 02/04/2012 by marcus

Can’t actually believe I haven’t posted this one onto the blog already!  Although not made one for a good few months, it’s still a winner if you love that gorgeous fruity, almondy cake taste!

Ingredients:
1 portion pate sucree (sweet short-crust)
100g unsalted butter, room temp
3 large eggs, room temp
125g icing sugar
150g ground almonds
25g flaked almonds
1 tsp almond extract
6 tbsp seedless raspberry jam

Making it:
Preheat the oven (gas 5 or 160C fan-assisted, 175C non-assisted) and grease a 9″ tart tin (the kind with a bottom plate that comes out).
Roll out the cold sweet short-crust to about 3mm thick, in a circle shape and large enough to line the tart tin. Carefully transfer the pastry to the tart tin, leave about 1 cm overhanging the sides of the tin.  Cut a piece of baking parchment larger than the tin, scrunch it up then open out and use it to line the pastry case – then pour in baking beans and distribute them around on the parchment to ensure that the pastry doesn’t rise when ‘blind baking’.
Now place into the oven, middle shelf, and bake blind for 15 mins: remove the parchment and baking beans and return to the oven for 5 mins. Place to one side whilst getting on with preparing the almond filling. Don’t worry about trimming the pastry case at this stage.
Place the icing sugar and butter in a mixing bowl and, using an electric hand-mixer (or similar), whisk the butter and icing sugar together to ‘cream’ them. Crack the first egg into the mixture and whisk together to incorporate: we add one egg at a time to avoid the mixture ‘splitting’, which is a risk when trying to combine fats and egg like this. Once the first egg is nicely blended in, add the next and repeat. Finally add the final egg and beat well – the mixture may well look like it wants to separate (‘split’) but don’t be overly concerned.
Now stir in the ground almond, adding the almond extract during the process. Turn your attention back to the blind-baked tart case, spread the raspberry jam out on the inside bottom surface of the pastry, then carefully spoon on the almond paste you’ve just made, smooth it out roughly, then sprinkle the flaked almonds over the surface. Turn the oven down to gas 4 (150C fan-assisted, 160C non-assisted) as you put the tart back into the oven. Bake for about 30 mins (your oven will determine whether it takes a bit less time or is a bit quicker), bearing in mind that a skewer inserted into the middle of the tart will come out clean (but warm) when the mixture is set, and that a nice golden colour across the top is desirable in a bakewell tart.
Once out of the oven, leave to cool for 20 or so mins before carefully removing the excess pastry with a sharp, serrated knife. Then remove the tart tin wall piece and (optionally) the base, allowing to cool for at least a further hour before cutting. Keep in a cool, air-tight container, not in the fridge, for 2 days – if it doesn’t get eaten in that time :-)

Now one without the protective baking tin:

Individual piece, once tart is cooled:

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Victoria Sponge with Butter Icing

Posted on 02/04/2012 by marcus

This beautifully classic sponge cake isn’t one that I make too often, just so happened that a lady at the church I go to requested some Vicci sponges as part of an event this Sunday.  Anyway, top cake for almost any occasion, pretty quick to make too.

Ingredients:
225g self-raising flour
225g icing sugar (or caster if not available)
225g unsalted butter, room temp
4 medium eggs, room temp
1.5 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
50ml milk, room temp
raspberry jam to fill

[for the butter icing]
50g unsalted butter, room temp
75g icing sugar
0.5 tsp vanilla extract

How its done:
Pre-heat your oven to 160C (fan-assisted, or 170C non-assisted), grease and line 2×8″ (20cm) sandwich tins (the kind that have bottoms which come out).
Using an electric whisk, cream the butter and sugar together in a large mixing bowl, until smooth and completely combined. Add the first egg, whisking in well before adding the second and continuing to whisk so that the mixture is not separating: proceed to add the third egg, again whisking thoroughly before adding the final egg and whisking strongly to avoid the mixture ‘splitting’, which can easily happen when trying to bind the egg with the butter.
As a general point, the specification of butter, eggs and milk to all be at room temp is significant, in as much as the eggs and butter will combine far more readily if at the same, even temperature.
Add half the flour and milk to the bowl and fold them into the mixture: once combined, add the remaining flour, milk and vanilla extract, again folding in until consistent. Now carefully pour the mixture into the sandwich tins, taking care to distribute as evenly as you can. Don’t worry about smoothing off the surface too well, just put the tins into your hot oven, around middle shelf. Bake for 25-30 minutes, keeping an eye on the colour development of the surface of the cake: a light caramelised brown colour is sufficient. Also test your cake batter is cooked sufficiently by inserting a wooden skewer into the centre, removing it and testing if any mix is stuck to the skewer – if it is, then the cake needs to cook for longer.
Once baked, remove the tins from the oven and place on a rack to cool for 5 minutes, before releasing the sandwiches from their tins, taking care as you peal away the baking parchment. Allow to fully cool for at least 2 hours before filling.

Speaking of which, to make the butter icing, simply take another mixing bowl, add the butter and icing sugar and whisk together until fully ‘creamed’, at which point add the vanilla extract.

To assemble the Victoria sponge, apply the butter icing across the top surface of the bottom-half of the sandwich, using a palette knife to gently smooth the butter icing evenly around. Next apply raspberry jam to the bottom surface of the top-half of the sandwich, again spreading evenly and carefully using a palette knife. Gently, but confidently, lay the second half on top of the first half so that the jam and butter icing surfaces meet.
Dust the top of the sponge cake with icing sugar to serve.  Keep at cool room temperature in an air-tight container.

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Sourdough cheese and sweet onion foccacia

Posted on 22/03/2012 by marcus

Been wanting to try a ‘stuffed’ foccacia for a while now. And seeing the lads at the Apent Bakeri in Oslo on episode 1 of The Hairy Bikers Bakeation the other week just reminded me again, so “here goes!” I thought.

Let’s use sourdough to ensure a mature dough with good, strong texture, I’ll put the classic combo of onion and cheese in it, running through the middle.  Not raw onion, however, but sweetened by sweating the onion off in butter to bring out the sweetness.  And decent mature cheddar, not grated, but in lumps dotted around the inside of the dough body, so that when you bite into it you get ‘pockets’ of cheese flavour.

Finally, you can’t beat the crunch of coarse sea-salt sprinkled across the top of a foccacia.

Ingredients:
300g (100% hydration) sourdough starter
350g strong white flour
225ml water
1 medium red onion
150g block of extra mature cheddar
2 tsp salt
butter for frying
coarse sea salt for decoration

Technique:
Dry-mix the salt into the strong white flour in a mixing bowl. Separately, blend the water into the sourdough starter so more or less mixed in. Now pour the liquid starter mixture into the bowl containing the dry ingredients and hand-knead until roughly combined: cover the bowl and leave the dough for 10-15 mins to more fully hydrate.
Come back to the dough and on your work-surface perform more hand-kneading and stretching for only about 15 seconds, before returning it to the bowl, recover and leave for 30 mins.
Using a sharp knife, chop up the red onion into small pieces, now fry the onion in some butter in a skillet or frying pan until soft and gently caramelized: leave to cool.
Take the block of cheddar and dice it, aiming to get pieces that are a little smaller than 1cm each side: it isn’t important to get the shape of the pieces the same, just don’t make them too large.
Once the 30 mins is, knead and stretch your dough once more, by which stage it should be nicely developed, i.e. won’t stick to your hands that much, offers a fair bit of resistance to being shaped after just a few moments kneading. Return the dough to the bowl and cover again, leaving it this time for 1 hour.
Repeat the brief kneading and stretching once more, then cover and leave again for 2 hours.
Now have a baking tray ready, on an oiled work-surface stretch your dough out into a large rectangle, making sure you don’t pull it so thin that any holes appear. Ultimately you’re going to fold one half onto the other, sealing in the onion and cheese, so consider the eventual size of dough you’ll have and make sure it fits onto the baking tray.

Sourdough Cheese and Onion dough

Distribute the sauteed onion and cheese pieces across one half of the dough sheet, then – using a dough scraper to help you – lift the untouched half and fold it over onto the cheese and onion half. Again using a scraper, carefully transfer the dough onto your baking tray.

Sourdough Cheese and Onion folded over

Then cover and leave to rise for 4-5 hours: I’d recommend lightly oiling whatever you use to cover the dough if there is any chance it is going to come into contact with the dough.

After the dough has proved, bake it in the oven on hot – I used a fan-assisted oven on 210C – for 25 mins, or until you’re happy with the crust.

Sourdough Cheese and Onion bakedSourdough Cheese and Onion cut open

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Mammoth Bread

Posted on 06/02/2012 by marcus

So I did another mammoth bake last week, for a Men’s Breakfast event. Couple of things already there I should clarify – when I say ‘mammoth’, I just mean for a domestic environment, and when I say ‘Men’s breakfast’ I’m not talking about partaking of nice bread whilst focusing on near-naked girls girating around a pole.

Glad we cleared that up. On with the bread saga.

Given about 130 menfolk to feed at the Breakfast, I decided that 30 loaves should cover it, and since I’ve only previously presented the Milk Loaf at such events, I figured it was time to bring on the big guns.  That means sourdough, my friends.  Proper, long ferment, hewn-from-granite, gorgeous sourdough – at least I’d only be making one big batch of the same dough, not fannying around with different doughs. How hard could it be?!

30 loaves: that means 30 x 980g of dough, almost 30kg in other words. Since sourdough relies on you building a levain ultimately large enough to raise the entire dough, you have to work backwards from the end-goal, calculate how much levain you need and work out how you long you need to build up that amount of levain. Think in terms of multiplying the weight of levain by 3 with each build – so you might start off with a fully-refreshed starter at 100g, you increase that to 300g in one go, it then needs 12 hours (sometimes less) before you can multiply it again, to 900g, then 12 hours, then 2700g. You get the picture.

Come the day of mixing the final dough, I’d realised that hand-mixing about 30kg of dough was logistically impossible, as I just don’t have any containers THAT big or strong. So decided on building 3 doughs, basically splitting the final amount across 3 containers. Easy, I thought. Yes, until it came to hand-combining the ingredients – my fingers are still aching, trying to get the huge, sticky, beligerent doughs to mix together, talk about hard going!

Have to see about being allowed a floor-mixer for my birthday!  (as if..!)

So, this long ferment stuff I mentioned, I see it not only as being the fact that the levain gets built over the days in the run up to baking, but in having the final dough rest in a cool environment before being finally proved and then baked. That usually means needing to leave the dough overnight somewhere roughly fridge-temperature-ish, then next day you carve off loaf weights according to when each batch can get into what oven space you have. For 30 loaves, I had to do 5 batches, because I only have 12 proving baskets, even though I could bake 8 at a time: are you still with me? :-)

nyhow, sourdough once again came up smelling of roses (now there’s a mixed metaphor!) because even though batch 1 came out of the cold and got proved 8 hours before batch 5, they ALL rose beautifully in the oven and demonstrated very good crumb structure.

Ah, feet up, smell that bread… lovely.

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Hamelman 66% Rye Sourdough

Posted on 09/01/2012 by marcus

66% Rye Sourdough

As they say on Blue Peter, “here’s one I made earlier…”

In this case, one is actually two, and earlier was actually on the weekend, but the sentiment is still there ;-)

Hats off to Hamelman, this is a lovely rye loaf taken from his acclaimed book succinctly titled Bread.  Easy to remember, that.  Does what it says on the tin, etc.  Anyway, recipe, instructions and more pics ->

66% Rye Sourdough

Makes 2 x 900g loaves

For the levain:
150g ripe rye starter
370g light rye
370g water

For the final dough:
890g levain
290g light rye
380g strong white flour
390g water
4 tsp salt
2 tsp instant yeast

Start with your ripened rye starter.

Rye starter

Add the levain water to it, mixing in well before adding the levain rye flour and mixing until combined:

Un-risen levain

After 12-16 hours at ambient room temperature the levain should have risen and developed:

Risen levain

Levain side-on

Now weigh out the dry ingredients and mix those together with each other; place to one side for the moment.

Add the final dough water to the levain (transfer the levain to a large mixing bowl, if you haven’t already):

Hydrated levain and dry ingredients

For small quantities like this, mixing by hand makes the most sense to my mind, however you may decide to use a machine, depending on what you have in your kitchen.  Having squelched the water into the levain, I add the dry ingredients and continue to hand-mix until roughly combined:

Initial Dough

Cover (clingfilm or a bin bag over the bowl will do) for 10 mins, then oil your worksurface lightly and stretch and turn the dough for 15 seconds, resulting in:

After 1st stretch

Cover again and leave for 15 mins. Then repeat the worksurface stretching, now looks like:

After 2nd stretch

Another 15 mins, more stretching and here’s what we have:

After 3rd stretch

Leave now, covered, to bulk ferment for about 30 – 40 mins (if your kitchen is warm, I’d say 30 mins should be enough), then divide the dough up: you could make up rolls, or batards (torpedoes) or even baguettes (if you’re feeling brave!) at this point, but I decided to go for the classic large boule shape, so divided my dough in 2 and shaped into boules, carefully rolling the shaped boules in more rye flour before placing into the proving baskets:

Proving time

The baskets get wrapped up in bin bags or clingfilm while the doughs prove for 60 – 90 mins, or until they meet the Proof Test.

Ideally you will get your oven switched on so that it reaches 220C about the time that your loaves have finished proving and are ready to go in:

Sufficiently proved

Carefully tip each loaf onto the baking tray, making sure you don’t deflate the loaf.

Now it just remains to perform some strategic slashing (1cm deep approx, I use a safety razor):

Slashed!

Bake these puppies around mid oven, mine is a fairly reasonable Neff circotherm and I’ve got it on the ‘baking’ function (think this just means it tries to ensure heat emanates from all surfaces of the oven):

Baking Bread

After 15 mins, reduce the heat down to about 200C (turn the tray around too, if it looks like one loaf is a bit paler than the other) and continue to bake for a further 35 mins.

When mine came out of the oven, they looked like this:

Top view

Close-up

Hamelman states in the recipe that you should leave the loaves for around 24 hours before consuming, to let the eating quality fully mature.  At the very least, leave them for 3 hours to cool down before cutting into one of them:

66% Rye Sourdough crumb

So, important question, how does it taste?  You won’t be disappointed is all I can say!  I’m very happy with this, the fermented rye levain gives it a lovely depth of flavour (and should help it to keep really well too) whilst the strong wheat flour content helps the loaf to have lighter crumb, which a lot of people usually expect.

Thanks Jeffrey Hamelman, another winner!

Posted in bread, rye loaf, sourdough | Leave a comment

12 Steps of Baking

Posted on 06/01/2012 by marcus

Based on some recently received feedback (Derek!), here is a link to a list of the 12 fundamental steps of baking, with a brief explanation of what they are and what they’re for: http://www.thebutcherthebaker.net/2010/11/bread-essentials-12-stages-of-bread.html

I would emphasise that it is worth reading these in the context of an overall guide to creating your own bread, not purely as the only information.

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Bulk Bake – one dough

Posted on 19/12/2011 by marcus

Sourdough Rolls, Baguettes and Loaves




Having built up the starter over the weekend, I mixed a load of dough up on Sunday night, giving it a couple of turns before putting the whole lot “out into the cold” (literally! No point worrying about making precious space in the fridge when it’s hovering around freezing at night, so she simply goes into the unheated lean-to).

Next morning, bring in the dough, seemingly barely risen, and leave it to slowly warm up in the kitchen: since I had just over 4kg I reckoned on not touching it at all for 2 hours.

Once 2 hours has passed, divided up the dough into 3x900g, 3x250g and 10x100g for the loaves, baguettes and rolls. Actually left the 2.7kg for the loaves in its box whilst I focussed on the baguettes and rolls first: deliberately, as it happens (so often, that ISN’T the case!), because I was reckoning the smaller items would prove faster and therefore bake first.

Shape baguettes, place on floured tea-towel and cover; shape rolls and place straight onto baking sheet, then cover; make cup of tea.  Ahhh, that’s better!

Next divide the remaining lump of dough up into 3 and shape into large boules, dust with flour and place into proving baskets: cover to prevent drying out.

2 hours after shaping the baguettes and rolls, grab the viciously sharp razor blade and start slashing, managing to catch the edge of my thumb only once (that was enough, mind!). Oven’s been heating up for half an hour, quickly load up and give a liberal spray of water into the oven, shut the door and stick the timer on. 20 mins total, with one rotation of trays half-way through.

About another hour later, in go the boules, suitably slashed (and no further injury to the baker, result!), for 40 mins overall, again with initial water spraying and rotation at regular intervals.

I am totally sold on the overnight first ferment technique, I should mention: it is not the first time I’ve done it and I’m really impressed with how well the dough performs – I’m not getting amazing rise during proving, no, its more the way it reacts when it gets in the oven; really good oven spring and lovely crumb. Mind you, I think my slashing is better than it used to be, which undoubtedly helps the dough to reach closer to its full potential during that ‘spring’ phase of baking.

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Flexible Sourdough

Posted on 23/11/2011 by marcus

No pictures, at least not of the Pain de Campagne I just made, this time, just some words about the single, most useful feature of sourdough: its convenience.

For me, baking bread has to fit around the day job – and any other inconveniences that crop up, such as getting the head-lamp bulb changed on our Renault Scenic. “What’s this?” “He can’t even change the bulb on his car?!” I hear you chortle.
In my defence, I can change a tyre, check oil, water, usual basic tasks, and am usually not defeated when it comes to head-lamp bulbs. But I haven’t had to change one since buying our current car, so I haven’t had the joy of admiring the genius design some French engineer has come up with, whereby the flap granting you access to the light-bulb is inaccessible to anyone with hands larger than a 3-year old’s.
I went along to my local Renault stealership, thinking (naively – french word oddly enough…) that since they’d obviously designed it badly, they’d change the light-bulb for me gratis: hah! What desperate optimism on my part, they wanted £26 and gave me some flannel about how EU safety regulations mean that car designers HAVE to map out the car in such a way to ensure maximum passenger safety – all well and good, I said, in complete agreement about the safety angle, but why on earth should it mean you can’t change the light-bulb?!
Apparently, unless you fancy removing a large section of the front of the car, the only way to get to the head-lamp assembly is via the car’s wheel-arch… I mean, come on!

Back to the bread. Having revived my starter over the past couple of days, I mixed up a batch of dough last night and eventually placed it into the fridge for overnight retarding (and flavour development, as it happens), taking it out this morning with the intention of baking about lunchtime (1pm).

Guess what I forgot? Conference call at 1, followed by trip to the doc’s at 2. The loaves were not going to be hitting the oven until nearer 3pm.
If I was working with yeasted bread, I would have been most likely stuffed at this point, as the dough would have accelerated towards peak development, then overshot (i.e. become over-proofed) and collapsed thanks to my delay of about 2 hours. I’ve had this before, where I thought I’d timed everything ok, only to find that I couldn’t bake at the time I thought, resulting in over-proofed dough, which simply don’t produce a nice loaf.
With the sourdough loaves, all I did was place them in the outhouse (where it’s effectively outdoors temperature, today around 8 degrees C) to slow ‘em down. Come back from Doc’s, whack the oven on, wait a bit for it to heat up, throw in the loaves, 45 mins later out come these gorgeous P de C loaves, which have sprung up nicely in the oven.

“Surely,” someone might ask, “you could use the same trick with yeasted dough, i.e. stick it somewhere cool to slow it down?” Well, yes, it does slow it down, but not enough in my experience. Putting yeasted dough in a cool environment is a bit like stroking the brakes on a 400-ton freight train: it’ll slow things down, but you’ll struggle to notice.

Convenience, you see. And people think sourdough is this difficult, mystical thing that takes years to tame… :-)

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Hamelman Technique – VERY useful stuff!

Posted on 08/11/2011 by marcus

Can’t emphasise enough how valuable this information is and how it provides a template for those of us (check!) with insufficient brilliance in the area of handling dough.

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Sourdough Wheat Beer and Onion Bread

Posted on 02/11/2011 by marcus

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… sorry, wrong movie. Anyway, I made a wheat beer and onion bread using baker’s yeast some time back and was pretty pleased with it. If I’m honest, it had its genesis in at least one other bread, namely the New York Deli Rye, or maybe I could attribute it to a recipe in my Dan Lepard bread book for a barm loaf, made using beer.

Dunno, don’t think it really matters that much really, after all the main thing is what we now have on our hands – naturally-yeasted wheat beer and onion bread.  Yes, sourdough fans, this is the *pure* version, unadulterated by nasty, artificial, commercial yeast!  Come and get your fix!  :-)

Before I spell out the wizardry of creating this divine creation, some pictures perhaps:

I know, one isn’t enough…

Now for the interior:

The loaf relies on a common approach of development in 2 stages: pre-ferment and then final dough. The ingredients and instructions are split out on this basis.

The evening before baking, prepare the Pre-ferment:

  • 1 red onion, finely chopped
  • 30g unsalted butter
  • 200ml de-alcoholised wheat beer
  • 200g strong white flour
  • 50g starter at 100% hydration

Place approx 230ml of wheat beer in a saucepan and heat until boiling, then take off the heat and allow to cool.  In a heavy-bottomed frying pan, saute the finely chopped red onion in the butter, until soft and translucent, then also remove from the heat to cool.

Once these ingredients are at room temperature, measure out 200ml of the wheat beer into a mixing bowl, then whisk in your 50g starter: next add the 200g strong white flour and mix in briefly before adding the cooled butter and onions, then combine to fully distribute the elements before covering with cling-film to leave to develop overnight.

Next day, ideally the pre-ferment has had about 12 hours to develop and you should see it has risen – do not be put off that it isn’t fighting to escape its container, as long as it has grown since yesterday then it should be fine.

For the final dough:

  • all the pre-ferment
  • 80g rye flour
  • 215g strong white flour
  • 113g water, from the tap
  • 2 tsp salt

Add the water to the pre-ferment and mix to fully incorporate.  In your main mixing bowl, dry combine the rye, strong white flours with the salt, then add all the pre-ferment and water mixture and mix all the ingredients together by hand.  My recommended approach here is to follow the hand-kneading technique (as described on this site) with initial quick kneads at 10, 15, 20 minutes, followed by another after 1 hr, again after 1 hr, then after a further 1 hr you should shape the dough and leave it to prove for up to 4 hours before baking.

I baked this one (above) on a pre-heated stone, starting the oven on 250C for the first 15 minutes, then reduced the oven to 190C for the remaining 30 minutes, just to avoid it getting too dark.

Posted in beer, german, rye loaf, sourdough | 4 Comments