Sourdough

There is only one place I've found with decent bread in our home town - and if you don't turn up in the morning it's often sold out of the nice stuff - so a few weeks ago I figured it was finally time to attempt making sourdough bread from scratch again.

I've tried making sourdough starters twice before, and it always turned into a foul, black slime. I guess a basement flat in North London and a cold, damp tenement flat in Edinburgh weren't the best places to be capturing wild yeasts and bacteria! We now live in a much nicer and cleaner part of the world, and I had much greater success.

I used the Serious Eats method of creating a 'mother' this time. The previous methods I've tried have involved adding lots of flour and water to feed the mother, and then because that creates a lot of product you need to throw a lot of it out (some require throwing out half each day), while Serious Eats takes a much more sensible approach of making a very tiny batch which you feed in very small volumes until the colony is established, and then you can build it up to the volume you need for baking. After all, it's not like a tiny yeast needs a giant meal. I've made four loaves from my mother so far and I haven't had to throw any away.

I used white bread flour initially to establish the colony and it quickly settled into a nice, vanilla-like aroma with a hint of sourness. This matured over a week into what is now a very vigorous starter, that only smells of delicious yeasty bread dough. Perfect.

Serious Eats provides some really useful guidance on tailoring the mother too. In particular, the more you stir it the stronger the yeast colony becomes, but the less you stir it the stronger the bacteria colony becomes (and so, the characteristic sour flavour can emerge). On previous attempts I had no idea, but this very basic understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the two colonies in the mother helped get me ensure it established the flavours it needed.

I moved to the River Cottage bread handbook for recipes, once the mother was established, as US bread flour has different protein levels and I just have no interest in imperial measurements. River Cottage also suggest feeding the mother equal volumes of flour and water - while Serious Eats uses equal weights - and I found the lower hydration of the River Cottage method to be both easier and produce a healthier colony.

I also switched to feeding the mother wholemeal rather than white flour, and it was akin to turning a switch. The bottle suddenly became alive.

For my first batch I used a white bread recipe that was very high in hydration and that guarantees those big, spongy holes associated with sourdough. Unfortunately it was horrible to deal with in terms of kneading and shaping, and then so sticky it rose beautifully in the proving basket but then wouldn't leave the basket, so when I turned it out in stretched out like chewing gum. Tasted okay, looked horrific and had a very compacted texture as the bubble network I literally spent ten days creating was destroyed in a single second.

My second batch is a lower hydration wholemeal loaf, that's risen nicely and is proving now ready for baking in the late afternoon.

Fingers crossed.

A Fairly Tart Crumble

I also made a crumble while Bear was visiting. He likes things to be fairly tart so I used a mix of gooseberries from the garden and granny smith apples for the filling. I always vary my recipe for crumble with differing results but this one was especially nice so I record it for posterity:

Oven to 170°c.

Mix in a suitable deep dish for 4-5 people:

• 500g gooseberry + chopped apples
• 40g caster sugar
• 1 spoon of cornflour

Rub together into breadcrumbs:

• 175g plain flour
• 85g salted butter, chilled (I used Vitalite as Bear is vegan; any spread suited to baking will work, but not a low fat spread)

Stir into the flour mix:

• 75g soft dark sugar (break up so not too clumped)
• A handful of slivered almonds

Pour topping onto the filling, making an even layer but without pressing down. Bake for 45 minutes. You can grill the topping further if you want it to be toasty golden but I didn't bother.

It was the hottest day of the year so we ate it at room temperature with soy-based vanilla ice cream. Very delicious.

I found the Vitalite easier to rub in than dairy butter, so might use this in future instead. You also get much better texture in cakes with margarine than butter so maybe I should stop being a snob about it (although butter has a much better flavour in a yellow cake I guess).

We all agreed the topping worked because it's not homogenous. The sugar sits as crystals among the slivered almonds within the topping, giving a lot of crunch and texture, almost like a granola. This is the polar opposite of my sister-in-law's method where the topping is made on the stove and everything cooked together.  This is exactly the end of that spectrum I was aiming for.

Update October 2022:

We didn't have any butter - not even for ready money - and so I adapted the crumble recipe for basic vegetable oil. It tasted great and was much quicker to make, so this is my recommended method now. Stir together:

• 100 grams flour
• 75 grams oats
• 75 grams dark brown sugar
• A handful of slivered almonds
• 1tsp cinnamon
• ⅓ cup sunflower or other oil

Then use as above.

Given oil has no water content it seems to toast very quickly, so cooking at 160°C for 45 minutes might work well. You can cover in foil halfway to stop it browning further too.

Summer sanchis

In my twenties I would go with my friends on regular road trips to the southwest of England, without any level of planning at all. We'd inevitably end up in a remote caravan park for the night with no food, and at thay point Monkey would pull out a Tupperware box of sanchis and dinner was sorted. On one long trip to collect Spim from France, Piglet and I were dispatched in a van with a weekends' worth of sanchis in a bucket.

Monkey invented the sanchi, which is effectively a samosa jaffle, i.e. curried vegetables toasted between two slices of bread in the sandwich toaster. They are delicious hot or cold, and perfect picnic material. I'd not had them for a decade, but Bear is visiting and kindly resurrected our ancient wiki to unearth a rough version of the recipe, and together we put together this interpretation:

• Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a big pot, add a heaped spoonful or two of mustard seeds, a cinnamon stick and 3-4 cloves. Let the aromas release.
• Add a small chopped onion and salt, let soften.
• Add a big carrot and big potato - both cut in small dice - stir and let sweat, then stir in 1 tbsp garam masala, 2 tsp cumin, 1 tsp turmeric, a good pinch of chilli flakes and a handful of red lentils.
• Stir until aromas are released, then add a small can of drained sweetcorn, a handful of frozen peas and enough water to cover the bottom of the pan, put on the lid and leave to cook for 10 minutes or so. It's ready when the potatoes are tender. Keep an eye on water level - you don't want it to burn, but it should be dry when finished.
• Stir in the juice of a lemon, a very finely chopped small red onion and adjust the seasoning.
• Use the filling to make toasted sandwiches, using cheap white supermarket bread. Butter the outside of you like it crispy and brown but it's not essential.

Serve hot or cold with appropriate condiments. We went for a Canarian green mojo sauce and - in the absence of any tamarind sauce at Waitrose - tonkatsu sauce, which was perfect.

Mojo sauce is: blitz two garlic cloves, half a teaspoon of cumin, a teaspoon of salt, a bunch of coriander and half a cup of olive oil in a small blender. Add five tablespoons of cold water, blitzing between each spoonful to mix it in. Finish with a few teaspoons of vinegar or a good squirt of lemon juice. Adjust the seasoning.

Sponge pudding and custard in the microwave

I felt nostalgic for the sponge puddings with custard which I was fed as a child, but didn't have much time. Or any ready-made custard. Or custard powder. Or cream. But after a bit of googling I found this easy way to make it in the microwave, which I mostly record here so I won't lose it:

Whisk 450ml milk into 3tbs caster sugar and 4tbs corn flour in a jug.

Blast for 2 minutes in the microwave, whisk and then repeat. Should be a thickened paste. If not cook a little longer.

Pour the paste slowly into a large bowl containing two eggs, whisking enthusiastically.

Pour this mix back into the jug, microwave for another minute and then whisk in 50g butter and half a teaspoon of vanilla paste (or the equivalent of extract etc).

It tasted better than most other custards I've had.

The sponge pudding I made just the way my mum always did - in about five minutes in the microwave! Microwaves were new and exciting in the 1980s and entire books were written about how to get the best results from them. This was all before they earned their reputation for reheating ready meals for lonely singletons. The basic pudding is:

Microwave 115g butter and 115g caster sugar in a microwave for 15 seconds. Beat with a wooden spoon until a unified paste (should be quick given you heated it all).

Beat in two eggs until a unified paste, then sift in 115g of self raising flour and beat that in.

Grease a pudding basin, put your filling in the bottom (jam, syrup, fruit compote, Nutella, etc ... I did pineapple), dump the sponge mix on top and cover with a lid or cling film.

Microwave for five minutes, test with a toothpick and cook longer if it needs it.

It was lovely and brought back a lot of memories, but I have no idea how we managed to eat something this heavy every Sunday after a full roast dinner!