Five Strand Plaited Wholemeal Loaf

When I was at Leiths, I used to work some evenings and holidays setting up and washing up for the evening or week long enthusiast classes. Lots of the things the students were made were the same as we had made on the diploma – hummus and crudites, boned chicken and lemon tart were a few recipes I saw made over and over again and all brought back memories of my own experiences. However, some recipes were things we never made on the diploma: notably a 3 strand plaited loaf.
I can tell you from repeated experience that watching a class of 16 make (the women teaching the men how to plait, some experienced Dads revealing secret skills), bake and take away plaited loaves is not fun. That smell of freshly baked bread, multiplied by 16, fills the kitchen all morning and then vanishes as they all proudly take away their bread to show their friends and family. Us washer-uppers secretly always hoped that someone would decide not to take it home, or absent-mindedly forget it, so that we could try some but of course no one was this foolish. I always vowed to give it a go myself at home so I could finally try this bread that always looked so delicious and today I finally got round to it!In keeping with my indecisive ways, I upped the ante slightly with a five strand loaf and made it wholemeal so I could feel less guilty about probably eating far too much . I really want to try Paul Hollywood’s eight strand plaited loaf but get baffled every time I read the braiding instructions so I stuck with the five for now, which turned out to be surprisingly really easy. I used this recipe and my only alterations were to include all the bran in the loaf, replace half the white flour with white spelt flour and only bake it for 30 minutes. The results were delicious! I broke all Leiths rules and enjoyed it still warm out of the oven… Enjoy!

White Cobb Loaf

Sometimes I think that the foodie and blogging world can do weird things to baking patterns. Like when Larkin, a finalist on the most recent series of Masterchef, could make incredible multi dimension main courses, often using molecular gastronomy techniques and equipment, but had never made a dessert before he entered the series! Or when contestants on Great British Bake Off can whip up stunning towering layer cakes but have never made jam before. I am exactly the same (albeit on a smaller scale!). I am approaching my 5th blogoversary and 200th post so I’ve made dozens of cakes, cookies, pies and tarts. But I’d never made a simple loaf of bread. I’ve made tomato fougasse, focaccia, pizza dough, naan, bagels, pitta breads, hot cross buns , rosemary honey fruit bread and cheesy tear and share bread. But never a plain white loaf! It was time to go back to basics and change this. I chose a Paul Hollywood recipe following his recent bread television series and the tempting round cobb loaf recipe, a traditional style that really reminded me of big loaves we used to get from the bakery on a Saturday when I was younger. I was so pleased when this turned out well! I’m always nervous of making bread and some of the more complicated breads I listed before did not turn out quite as I’d like – too flat, yeasty or dry. I really took my time when making this and I think this is probably the key with baking bread – it can’t (and shouldn’t) be rushed in order to get the perfect loaf. I loved this loaf warm straight out the oven but it lasted nicely for a few days (although the crispy crust softened) and made great toast. You can find the recipe here – enjoy!

ALSO: Exciting news today – a few weeks ago I was interviewed by Podium for a podcast all about baking and blogging and it is now online and available to listen to here!

Cheese and Onion Tear and Share Bread

I love a good foodie television show. There’s Masterchef – tears and shouty John and Gregg (who’s restaurant I did work experience at last year!). There’s Nigella’s series – fairy lights, dressing gowns and ‘cookie crumbs tumbling like Mexican mud’…There’s Nigel Slater and his gorgeous garden, Simon Hopkinson with slow-mo falling egg graphics or Sophie Dahl’s series where she cooks and reads poetry. Currently, there is The Great British Bake Off – which the week before last featured this delicious bread.Each week of the Bake Off is themed – and so this obviously came from Bread week, a challenging one that I know I would have found really hard. One of the contestants Jason, an 18 year old baker from Croydon, made this and after watching I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Melting cheese, soft bread and a crunchy top plus the onions in the mix – what’s not to like? Happily, the recipe is featured in the new book to go along with the show, and the next day another yeast adventure was going on in my kitchen. As I’m still very much a bread and yeast novice, this took me ages to make. It was an enjoyable process, just long because rolling, stuffing (with two fillings) and folding nineteen balls of bread dough is not going to be a quick process. Add in three sets of rising times and in turned into quite a days baking but the end result was worth it, and could have been even more so had I got it perfect. The problem was I placed all the nineteen dough balls too far apart before they went in the oven so they didn’t join together to properly make a tear and share bread. This meant they were a bit drier then would have been nice and so went stale faster. I had some straight out the oven when the cheese inside was still melting and warm and it was delicious! Sadly one person cannot eat 19 rolls very quickly :( Still, I would recommend the recipe as I think this could be irresistible if done properly! There are a couple more recipes from the Bake Off book that I want to make, so hopefully I’ll get a chance to do them soon. Enjoy :)

Chicken Tikka and Naan Bread

So, it’s been a while. To put it simply, I had twenty-three big exams lasting for a month and once they finished I was off to Glastonbury festival to celebrate. I have missed this blog and have definitely missed reading all the other great blogs on a regular basis. I’m back now, on my summer holidays until September, and look forward to getting this blog busy again with lots of delicious things planned! Starting with…a savoury dish!I don’t often cook savoury food, and so the ideas of proper amounts of spicing and seasoning are not familiar to me. I thought a good place to start would be Indian food – giving me a chance to use new flavours and see the awesome combinations that make spicy food taste so good. I love curry (my Mum makes a fab chicken korma and Thai green curry that I really want to learn to make) but as we’re in July I wanted to make something a little more summery so I made chicken tikka, cucumber raita and naan bread. I can imagine making large batches of this chicken for summer barbeques or cold for a picnic: delicious.  Both the chicken and the breads were surprisingly easy. I used a Mary Berry chicken tikka recipe (her recipes are always foolproof) and a naan bread recipe from Anjum Anand’s book, Indian Made Easy. The naan bread recipe doesn’t use yeast which makes it really simple and quick. I used caraway seeds and black onion seeds (also known as nigella seeds) from above to top the naan breads and they were delicious. The black onion seeds in particular are just perfect and give off a very tempting aroma. The chicken marinade was simple to make and I was surprised by the inclusion of ground nutmeg – not something I expected to see there.  Once the three components were ready it was time for the all important taste test. Spicy chicken, cooling raita, crisp buttery naan bread. Eaten in my garden in the July sunshine, it was good. Very good. All in all, a delicious introduction to Indian cookery for me and I look forward to making more. If all savoury cooking gives results like today then expect to see a lot more of it around here!The recipe for the naan bread can be found here, although there is a typo: the bread needs to be left to rise for 1hour, not 10-15mins.
Chicken Tikka from Mary Berry’s Complete Cookbook
Ingredients: 750g skinless,boneless chicken breasts, cubed
Marinade: 2tbsp plain yoghurt
2tbsp tomato puree
1 small onion, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1tbsp tamarind paste
1tbsp paprika
1tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cumin
large pinch of cayenne pepper
large pinch of grated nutmeg
1. In a bowl, combine all the marinade ingredients.
2. Toss the chicken in the marinade. Cover and marinate in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.
3.Thread the chicken on to the skewers, put under a hot grill and cook for 3-5 minutes on each side. Serve at once, with a cucumber raita.

Sun-dried Tomato & Thyme Fougasse

 You’ll have to forgive the night time photo, but I made something savoury, I used yeast and attempted bread making! None of these things often happen so a slightly dodgy photo wasn’t going to stop this bread reaching my blog. The recipe came from Lorraine Pascale’s TV series – Baking Made Easy. Lorraine used to be a model before turning to cooking and baking and now owns a cake shop I am determined to visit extremely soon! This TV series was her first but I hope it won’t be the last – the recipes were original, easy and al looked irresistible.

It was difficult to choose just one recipe to try, and I hope to try out some more, but I felt it was time to go out my comfort zone. Fougasse is a fern shaped French bread, and this version had sun-dried tomato and dried thyme added. It was  easy to make – I used the KitchenAid to do the kneading. This was the first time I had done this but I would do it again – it saves time and messy worktops and gives me a chance to do a spot of cleaning up! However, if making a dough with lots of add-ins I don’t think my dough hook is quite right as it doesn’t disperse these ingredients evenly. Somewhere along the way I think I went a little wrong as my dough didn’t seem to fully rise – but happily this didn’t affect the final taste! Chewy, studded with sweet spikes of tomato (I was using this instead of chorizo but would like to try this another time for a hint of spice) and rather moreish – dipped in good olive oil this was a winner. You can find the recipe and see Lorraine Pascale making it here: enjoy!