Duck food

I was reading about brewing the other day and was interested to discover the concept of the amylase rest (see this page on Wikipedia). Before the yeast is added to the mash, there's a stage where the mixture of water and malt is held at around 70C to allow the amylase enzymes to have a party. It's their favourite temperature, and so they quickly break down the starch molecules into smaller, sugar molecules, which the yeast can then turn into alcohol and CO2.

This seems like a good idea. I've already used autolysation, where you let the mixed dough rest before you knead it, but that was at about 40C at best. You can't go much higher because you'd kill the yeast. So what happens if you mix flour and water, bring it up to 70C and hold it there for a while?

(I mixed 200g of strong white flour with 200g of water at 70C, and then put this in a bowl over an saucepan of hot water on a low gas. The temperature of the mix initially fell, of course, but rose to nearly 70 before I turned off the gas and let it stand for 20 minutes. I'd expected it to be longer, but it was obvious that big effects had already happened. )

The short answer is that you get porridge. The texture of the dough is distinctly different from usual, and it's noticeably sweeter, which is what we want. So I added about 170g more flour, 100g water and half a teaspoon of dried yeast, and 3g salt. Kneaded this all together then let it rise. It didn't rise well, but looked ready for baking so I formed it into a pain d'epi shape and baked at 240 for 45 minutes.

Readers, it was a disaster. Doughy on the inside, but crisp of crust (all that sugar!) it was inedible for humans. Now I know why I've never seen this technique mentioned. Something crucial to the structure of bread is lost. The shivering ducks in Ladywell Fields loved it though.

Three-bearded rockling

Do you like rockling? Don't tell me you don't know, you've never rockled. I saw some rather attractive fish at Blackheath market this morning, so asked the stallholder what they were. "Three-bearded rockling" he said. "We don't normally sell them, but use them as bait. I've never eaten one but I know people who have, who say they're just perfectly fine white fish." This wasn't convincing me, but then he said "They're a pound a fish", so I bought one.

Got home and looked in Hugh Fearnley-Whittenstall's fish book. Not a mention. On the web, hardly anything. Safest, I thought, to take off the fillets and shallow fry them, with a bit of seasoned rice flour coating.

And they are perfectly nice white fish. A fairly soft and open flesh, and a surprisingly good taste. And the head and bones will make a super stock, I'm sure.

With knobs on

I'm always excited when I see skate knobs on sale, so bought a bag of them in Beckenham yesterday. Then had to think about what to do with them. How about a fish stew, maybe with some mash? I had various veg I needed to use up, and a couple of salmon fillets that have been in the freezer too long.

2 fairly small leeks, trimmed and sliced into rounds
1 large (as shallots go) shallot, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic
3 skinny carrots, chopped
2 sticks of celery, chopped; save the green leaves
1 parsnip, cut into blades
1 small head of fennel, chopped
1 red chili (fresh from my backyard - yes, I'm still harvesting chilis in December) chopped
400 ml fish stock
about 500g skate knobs
2 salmon fillets, diced
salt as necessary


In a large pan heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Fry the onion, garlic, carrots and celery until soft. Add the chili and fish stock and let everything simmer for 15 minutes. Add the parsnip and fennel and simmer for another fiive minutes. Verify seasoning. Add the skate and salmon and simmer for another five minutes until cooked. Chop the celery leaves and sprinkle on top, letting them wilt a bit.

Serve with mash made with a spoonful of mustard. If you're feeling poncy you could call it a deconstructed fish pie.

This would probably serve four people. But the other three would have to armed to get close to it.

Seedy rolls

Another influence of the Great British Bake Off on me here. One of the challenges is always to create a set of things - they might be iced buns, cupcakes or mini-pies - and one of the objectives is to get uniformity: they should all look the same. Some people are naturally good at this. I'm not, and therefore I think they are dull automatons, while I am a free spirit. Your rules can't bind me, man.

But it's something I ought to try, and as bread's my forte, baking a tray of rolls seems the best way to look for my inner zombie.

I've used a seedy mix, as follows:

250 g strong white flour
50 g whole rye
100 g strong wholemeal
10 g red malt flour
5 g salt

20 g poppy seeds
20 g sunflower seeds
30 g pumpkin seeds
20 g sesame seeds

with 300 g water and 5 g dried yeast. A fairly quick rising - pre-toasting the seeds made the mix quite nicely warm.

So I had about 700 g of dough and decided to use around 100 g for each roll. Yes, reader, I weighed each roll to a tolerance of plus or minus 10 g. At first I thought I'd do knot rolls, but then decided to do spirals. Uncooked they look, let's say, unfortunate. So I egg-washed them and added more poppy seeds. Oh, and I took two of the lumps and made a three-strand plait. I'm so wild and crazy.

Here's the result. Eggwash always makes bread look better, doesn't it? But look at the two rolls at the front. One spirals this way; the other that. It's left-handed. (Left handed-ness in bread rolls is clearly a recessive gene; of the four spiral rolls, only one expresses it.) I didn't even think of this when I was rolling. And I can't say it's free-spiritedness; it's just that I revert to universals too quickly: a spiral is a spiral. Will I ever have an eye for detail?

Pain d'épi

My imaginary girlfried Lorraine Pascale inspired me to do this: french bread in the shape of an ear of corn. It's surprisingly easy to form. You just form a baguette with the proved dough, then snip flaps with scissors at regular intervals and fold them in alternate directions.

I used a basic french bread dough - half and half plain and strong flour, no oil, not much yeast, and a fairly quick rising and proving. It took about four hours from start to finish.

It's probably not going to be the best bread I've baked - it's too quick for that - but it's definitely a proof of concept and I will certainly try this again for a special occasion.

Love life loaf and be happy

Waitrose's new range of "love life" products seems a bit confused. Alongside the wholegrains and pulses, there's a selection of ready meals. One product that caught my eye was this: a wholemeal flour with 11.5% mixed seeds (millet, poppy, linseed) and some other grains. Protein is high, at 16.3%, but a lot of that is down to the seeds.

It's attractive packaging, I think, combining a homespun simplicity with sophisticated colours. So I bought some. What kind of bread does it make?


My first attempt was disastrous. I didn't take any photos and wouldn't publish them if I had. I made a basic dough, using fast action yeast and about 65% hydration, but left in the fridge overnight, which probably isn't a good idea.  The dough never really came to life and when I baked it, in a cudgel shape, it rose very unevely with a big cavity in the middle. I also underbaked it. I think I'm just not used enough to wholemeal baking.

So I tried again, substituting strong white flour for about a fifth of the flour, again using fast action yeast but with normal rising times. Here's the result. Believe me, it's a lot better, but I can't get excited about the taste. I guess it's the seeds: linseed still doesn't do it for me, and the poppy seeds aren't making a big impact. Maybe I've just got so used to the flavour that a long slow rising with old-fashioned dried yeast gives.

Waitrose do a couple of similar seedy flours, and I might try one of them, but I think it will be better to carry on adding seeds etc to my own specification.

Black peppery rye

My first go at a Dan Lepard loaf is his Black peppery rye bread. It's a bold combination of ingredients, using coffee as the liquid, and black pepper as one of the ingredients. I followed the recipe almost to the letter (using fennel seeds), the only difference being that I turned down the oven to 190 after 15 minutes. And I think I should therefore have increased the baking time to 45 or 50 minutes, as the bread's a bit underbaked and doughy.

I'm not sure I like the taste. For me there's a bit too much pepper. Lepard recommends eating this with soft cheese or smoked salmon. I've tried it with some goat's cheese, and that's ok, but still a bit too peppery. I'm not sure the coffee's actually doing anything

There's another couple of faults in my loaf. First, for some reason it's split a bit at the base. Second, the internal structure is slightly marked by the rolling process; here and there it looks a bit like a swiss roll.

But it's a pleasant even texture, and I guess it could be my basic rye bread. Without the coffee and the pepper, though.