Yeast!

There's an urban myth that if you go into any big supermarket and ask nicely at the bakery counter they'll happily give you a lump of fresh yeast. I've never met anyone who'd done this, and I don't have the nerve to try it. But I've found a much more expensive way of getting fresh yeast, which does at least work. The Bertinet Kitchen Cookery School sells it online. Price is £3.95 plus postage of around £3 for a block of 500 grams. I imagine the cost is all to do with the preparation and that the wholesale price is a lot less. I ordered on Tuesday, the yeast was dispatched on Wednesday, I received it about 10 on Thursday, and by 2 pm I had this cooling on the table:  The yeast variety is Hirondelle, which is what my very local baker, Cooper's Bakehouse, uses. There it's described as "a slow-acting, gentle yeast". I probably used too much yeast, as it rose very quickly, but it's an impressively light half-wholemeal loaf. Next time I'll use less and give it a longer rise, so that the flavour develops better. But I'm very pleased and I now have enough fresh yeast to last me a few months. Some is still in the fridge, and I've frozen quite a bit of it in manageable lumps. It arrived in good condition in a huge amount of thermal insulation. So, if you want fresh yeast, this is something you could try. 500g is a hell of a lot for a home baker, though, so I'd suggest if you can find someone to share with, do.

Leek and walnut pie

This was an improvisation, and could be tweaked no doubt.

Ingredients
1 fat leek, the white part, sliced into rounds
1 fairly large shallot, finely chopped
some cubed pancetta - half of one of those twin packs Waitrose sell
2 small cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped
a handful of shelled walnuts, lightly chopped
some stock (I used the liquid from boiling chick peas)
about a tablespoon of plain flour
salt, pepper, a little allspice
some mashed potato
oil

Procedure
In a big saute pan heat the oil and add the pancetta, shallot and garlic. Fry gently until the shallot is soft.
Add the leeks and let them get hot.
Add the flour, stirring it into the oil. You might want to add some butter.
Before the flour goes brown, add the stock, and mix it into the flour. Keep stirring for a while. You're basically making a white sauce.
Season creatively and add the walnuts.
Let it all cook for about 10 minutes, adding more stock if it looks too dry.

Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 180c and prepare your mash.
Put your leek mix into a pie dish and dump the mash on top. Decorate it artistically with a fork, then bake for about 20 mins until the mash has browned a little.

Allow to cool a little before eating. If you can stand to wait, let the pie cool completely to room temperature and eat it with some kind of salad. (It was much nicer like this).

Possible tweaks would include leaving out the pancetta and adding cheese somewhere along the line.

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.