Bread Matters (26 page)

160g Total

Pour the boiling water on to the dried mushrooms. Cover and leave to soak for at least half an hour. Chop the fresh mushrooms coarsely and add to the soaked dried mushrooms. Swirl around together to coat the fresh mushrooms with the liquid.

Garlic purée

30g Peeled garlic cloves

10g Olive oil

40g Total

Finely chop or crush the peeled garlic cloves and add to the olive oil.

Mushroom and garlic bread dough

570g Basic Savoury Bread Dough (page 212)

160g Mushroom Mix (from above)

730g Total

Garlic purée (from above)

On a lightly floured worktop, gently press and stretch the prepared Basic Savoury Bread Dough until it is about 1-1.5cm thick. Spread the mushroom mix over it and then fold the dough over repeatedly in order to distribute the mix fairly evenly. Leave the dough a little streaky and then rest it for a couple of minutes.

Divide the dough into 2 equal pieces. Roll each out into a sausage about 30cm long and then fold into a knot as if you were tying the first part of a bow. Place the knots on a baking tray lined with baking parchment, cover and leave in a warm place to prove.

Bake in a moderate oven (about 190°C) for 20-25 minutes. As soon as the loaves are out of the oven, brush generously all over the visible crust with the garlic purée.

Cheese Bread

Bread and cheese go together in so many ways, all of them delicious in my opinion. One of my favourites is a large, flat roll with cheese baked inside and on top. Sliced horizontally and filled with salad leaves and perhaps a thin strip of ham, this is as good a lunch as I can think of.

The flavour of cheese can easily get lost in bread dough so it is important to use something strong, such as a mature Cheddar or a creamy Lancashire. The chilli and cumin in this recipe add a little something, which seems to boost the cheese flavour.

Makes 3 round cheese breads

1g Chilli powder (a large pinch)

1g Ground cumin (a large pinch)

120g Grated cheese

570g Basic Savoury Bread Dough (see page 212)

692g Total

Beaten egg, to glaze

100g Grated cheese for topping

Stir the spices into the grated cheese and add this to the prepared Basic Savoury Bread Dough. Fold the cheese through the dough until it is fairly evenly distributed. You may need to add a little water if the dough shows signs of tightening up.

Divide the dough into 3 equal pieces and mould them up into round balls. Give them a minute or two to relax and then, with the palm of your hand, press them down so that they roughly double in diameter. Put these flat discs on a baking tray lined with baking parchment, far enough apart so that they will not touch.

With a plastic scraper or the back of a knife, mark the cheese breads with 2 cuts at right angles to make a cross. Simply press down on the dough, aiming to cut through almost to the tray but not quite. (If you do press too hard and the dough breaks in 2 (or 4), do not worry: it will probably join up again during proof or baking.)

Brush the visible surface of each bread with a little beaten egg. Divide the remaining grated cheese and place it as evenly as possible on top of each bread, but do not put it too near the edge. The cheese will partially obscure the cuts made by the scraper, but this does not matter. As the dough proves, it will spread the cheese out a bit.

Prove until nicely risen, then bake in a moderate oven (190°C) for 15-20 minutes. These breads are small and flat, so the heat will penetrate fairly quickly to the centre of the dough. Take care not to let the cheese on the top get overdone: it can go from softly melted to dried and ‘foxy’ in a few minutes.

The deep cross you pressed into the dough should be just visible after baking and the cheese breads should break easily into 4 wedges, which make good soup rolls. If you plan to fill a cheese bread, it is best to keep it as one, divide it horizontally, insert the filling and then cut the whole thing into halves or quarters.

Altamura (Semolina) Bread

Altamura is a small town in Puglia, not far from Bari in southeast Italy. It is now famous as one of the few places where a branch of McDonald’s was forced to close through lack of trade, the locals preferring to get their takeaways from the artisan bakery. In July 2003 Altamura achieved DOP (Protected Designation of Origin) status for its bread, which is made with semolina milled from durum wheat grown exclusively in the immediate area. In deference to the Altamurans, I should make it clear that the recipe here is my own take on a semolina bread. Few of us will be lucky enough to get hold of genuine Altamura-region flour, but Italian-milled semolina is reasonably easily obtained from good Italian delicatessens.

Semolina has a slightly gritty feel when dry but can produce a surprisingly smooth and extensible dough. It has a creamy colour and considerably more flavour than white flour.

Makes 1 small loaf

135g Sponge (see page 212)

270g Semolina flour

4g Sea salt

135g Water

544g Total

Ferment the sponge according to the instructions given above for 18-48 hours. Add the semolina, salt and water at a temperature that will finish the dough at about 27°C. Knead well, until the dough is silky and stretchy. If it is hard to stretch and seems to tear easily, add some more water. It takes the semolina a little while to absorb its full complement of water because the granules are bigger than flour. So be prepared to adjust the dough while you are kneading.

Cover and leave to rise in the bowl for 1-2 hours. This dough may be moulded up as a loaf or used as the base for other ingredients, as in the Semolina, Raisin and Fennel Bannock below.

Mould into an oval loaf that is slightly tapered at the ends, the shape of a rather fat rugby ball. As you finish moulding, dip the loaf into a bowl of semolina flour so that the whole thing is covered. If the dough is so dry that no semolina will stick, wet it and try again. The semolina coating gives a wonderful crunch and nutty flavour to the crust.

Dust a lined baking tray with plenty of semolina flour and place the moulded loaf on it.

This bread will expand a good deal, so allow plenty of time for a full proof. When the loaf is well risen, take a sharp blade and make 2 cuts, from point to point, about 8mm apart at their widest and following the ‘contours’ of the loaf. Place immediately in as hot an oven as you can muster – 230-240°C if possible – for about 30 minutes, dropping the oven temperature by 20°C after 10 minutes or so. The finished loaf should have a golden brown crust that is quite hard immediately after baking. The 2 cuts should have helped the inside of the dough to expand and push up a little through the crust and there will be a pleasing contrast between the cuts and the semolina-dusted crust.

If you have a baking stone or tile in the oven, prove Altamura Bread on a flat, lipless baking sheet that has been well dusted with semolina flour. Heat the baking stone up with the oven. When your loaf is fully risen, slide it gently off the baking tray on to the hot baking stone and close the oven door as quickly as possible.

Semolina, Raisin and Fennel Bannock

This extension of Altamura dough produces something like a tea bread, which is not so sweet it cannot be eaten with savoury accompaniments. I like it best with a very thin smear of unsalted butter. Wensleydale cheese is also a wonderful partner.

Soaking the raisins in advance brings a little extra moisture to the dough and pleasantly enhances its chewiness and keeping qualities. If you want to push the boat out, soak the raisins in something strong: grappa seems in  the right spirit.

Makes 1 large bannock

Soaked raisin mix

220g Raisins

10g Fennel seeds

70g Water, fruit juice or spirit

300g Total

If you are using water to soak the raisins, make it hot. Put the raisins and fennel seeds in a strong polythene bag and add the liquid. Seal the bag and shake it about to wet the raisins thoroughly. Leave this overnight or longer. Swoosh it about from time to time if you are passing.

Semolina, raisin and fennel dough

540g Altamura Dough (from above)

300g Soaked Raisin Mix (from above)

840g Total

Prepare the Altamura dough as described above and leave it to rise for at least an hour. Drain any excess liquid from the soaked raisins and fennel seeds (and reward yourself with a tipple) and then gently fold them into the aerated dough. Try not to knock all the air out of the dough during this operation. Mould up gently and not very tightly into a round cob. If a lot of raisins are sticking out of the top surface of the loaf, pick them off and push them into the base – prominent fruits always get burnt and go bitter. Dip the moulded cob into semolina flour and place it on a baking tray that has been lightly dusted with semolina. Cover the tray loosely and put it in a warm place to prove.

The dough is soft and weighed down with raisins so this cob will flow out into a flattish bannock as it proves. When it is ready, bake it in a moderate oven (about 190°C) for 30-40 minutes. Leave it until it is completely cool before attempting to cut it.

CHAPTER NINE OF CRUST AND CRUMB

‘I didn’t know that Life held anything so ineffably delicious as this bread…’

KATHERINE MANSFIELD
,
1908

(from
Selected Letters,
Clarendon Press, 1989)

Most bread is plain – just flour, water, yeast, salt and maybe some fat – and yet it comes in all shapes, colours and textures. Despite the best efforts of the industrial bakers, a considerable variety of breads can still be enjoyed around the world. How is this possible with so few basic ingredients?

There are two main reasons. First, the amount of water or fat in a dough makes a great difference to its texture and character; and second, how you treat the crust before, during and after baking greatly affects the appearance and eating quality of the loaf.

The following recipes explore the changing character of crust and crumb and demonstrate what is possible beyond the confines of tin loaf and toaster.

‘The cheapest way to make water stand upright’

This was how some wag described standard white sliced bread after the 1977 Monopolies Commission Report
¹
into the British plant baking industry revealed that the big bakers got an average of 4 per cent more bread from a given quantity of flour than the craft sector, due to the extra water incorporated into the dough. It was a clever way to allude to both the soggy texture of the bread and its producers’ presumed greed. I admit to having used the phrase more than once.

That was before I had seen with my own eyes sloppy wet dough being transformed into great crusty, chewy
pain de campagne
at the Paris bakeries of Poilâne and Journot. When I learned how to make this bread, looked at the recipe and calculated the water percentage, I realised that extra water, far from being a trick that gave the public poor value, was essential to the life and character of some very tasty breads. So it is not the water content
per se
that is at fault in British sliced bread, as I now readily admit. What
is
remarkable is how the industrial loaf can use high water levels and still turn out so awful.

One of the commonest reactions from students on my breadmaking courses is, ‘I now realise I have been making my dough too dry.’ Once encouraged to add more water, they overcome the natural desire to avoid sticky hands and are amazed at how a wetter, softer dough is both easier to knead and more likely to expand as the fermentation gases inflate it. There may sometimes be reasons why a tighter dough is required – to make a freestanding loaf hold its shape, for instance. But in general, as one student put it, ‘the wetter, the better’.

More water in the dough creates a chewier, more interesting texture in the crumb, and helps the keeping quality of the bread.

Ciabatta

After pizza, ciabatta must be the best-known Italian bread product, at least in the UK, where most people probably imagine it as part of a venerable national baking tradition. But Italy has a resolutely regional food culture and few genuinely national bread styles. Furthermore, ciabatta has not been around for very long; it is reputed to have been invented about 40 years ago by a baker who, in dreaming up the ‘slipper’ name, could not have imagined how popular it would become.

Ciabatta was popularised in the UK by a London bakery called La Fornaia, which still uses skilled handwork to shape this sloppiest of sloppy doughs. Sadly, popularity has turned ciabatta into a commodity and often it is no more than a plain white dough formed into the characteristic slipper shape. This is a shame, because the delight of ciabatta lies in its extraordinarily open texture, with vast and random gas bubbles and a flavour that mingles olive oil with a hint of acidity from a long-fermented sponge. The crust is thin and delicate – the result of the wet dough, its generous coating of flour and being baked quickly in a hot oven.

My version of ciabatta uses both a yeast-based sponge and a proportion of rye sourdough, which gives extra flavour and assists in the development of a very extensible gluten structure. If you do not have any rye sour on the go when you make this bread, it can be omitted, in which case some additional water will be required.

Makes 2 ciabatta loaves (double the quantity and you can bake crumpets as well – see below)

150g Sponge from Basic Savoury Bread Dough (page 212)

50g Refreshed Rye Production Sourdough (page 165)

180g Type 0 or plain white flour (not strong)

10g Olive oil

4g Sea salt

110g Water

504g Total