Bread Matters (27 page)

Ferment the sponge according to the instructions on page 212 for 18 hours. At the same time, refresh a small quantity of rye sourdough and ferment this, too, for 18 hours.

When both sponge and sourdough are ready, add the flour, oil, salt and water at a temperature that will finish the dough at about 27°C. To begin with, the dough will seem impossibly soft and sloppy. If you are kneading by hand, scrape it out of the mixing bowl on to the table. Using a plastic scraper, scoop the dough up into the other hand as best you can. Using both hands in an action that makes it look as if you are playing a concertina, ‘air knead’ the dough without letting it drop on to the table. Pinch the fingertips of each hand together and pull the dough away from the other hand, repeating the action in a rolling motion that should involve all the dough.

Stop once in a while, drop the dough on to the table, scrape the dough off your hands into the general lump and then pick the whole lot up again and continue air kneading. After a few minutes, you should notice the gluten beginning to ‘fight back’, making the kneading a little more difficult. Carry on for 10—15 minutes, by which time the dough should be showing signs of coming away from your hands as you knead.

Of course it is easier to do this in a mixer. But you won’t experience the magical feeling as the gluten gradually develops. If you do use a conventional mixer, start with the cake beater, which will make contact with more of the dough than the hook. Keep an ear open for the motor: if it starts to strain as the gluten develops, change to the dough hook for the final few minutes of kneading.

Do not expect the dough to be very manageable even after a good knead. It will still be extremely sloppy and will want to stick to your hands and the table if given half a chance. So smear water on a convenient area, drop the dough on it and cover it with an upturned bowl to conserve moisture and keep it away from draughts.

After about an hour, the dough should have begun to aerate as the yeast gets to work on the fresh flour. Using wet hands and scrapers, gently fold the dough in the way described on page 114. Be careful not to deflate the dough as you do this. You are trying to thin the gluten so that it will stretch further as the yeast produces more gas; and you are also trying to preserve and elongate the gas bubbles that have already formed in the dough. When you have completed the folding, make a wet area on the worktop again and move the dough piece on to it. Cover the dough with the bowl and leave it for half an hour.

Remove the bowl and dust the worktop beside the dough piece with a good covering of flour. Holding a scraper in each hand, ease them under the dough and flip it over on to the floured surface. Using flour as the lubricant instead of water from now on, cut the dough in half by pressing down firmly with a plastic or metal scraper dipped in flour. As you cut, dust flour into the incision to prevent the surfaces rejoining.

Take one of the pieces of dough, very gently stretch it lengthways and put it on a floured baking tray. The end result should ideally be a slipper shape, but it is more important not to have handled the dough roughly than it is to produce a perfect shape. You can do a bit more gentle shaping once the gluten has relaxed again in a minute or two. Notice how what started as a semi-liquid pile of gloop has now acquired a definite structure, and how there is enough tension around the edges of the dough to stop it flowing into a random puddle.

Repeat this process with the other piece of dough, or divide it further into smaller pieces to make ciabatta rolls. Space them out on the baking tray because they will grow in size. Give all the finished pieces a final dusting of flour and then cover the baking tray(s) for the final rise.

Proof will take somewhere between 1 and 2 hours. Leave it until your fingers tell you that the dough is at its peak and there is not much more gas pressure coming from inside. Bake in a hot oven (about 220°C) for about 15 minutes. Ciabatta should be only slightly brown (because the floured surface prevents the crust from taking colour or going crispy). It will feel rigid as you take it from the oven but, as it cools, the moisture from the middle of the loaf will migrate to the edges and soften the crust.

Crumpets

It is odd that English baking has never seemed interested in the open, holey textures that are routinely found in the breads of mainland Europe. Perhaps the early industrialisation of our bakeries and the dominance of bread made from imported strong wheat and baked in tins put paid to the sprawling, unfettered doughs that may once have been more typical of cottage baking with home-grown grains. A possible memory of those textures survives in that baking oddity, the crumpet (or pikelet, as it is known in Yorkshire). In its standard English form, even the crumpet is a modern construction since it is baked in a metal ring. Indeed, Elizabeth David argues in her book
English Bread and Yeast Cookery
(Allen Lane, 1977) that ‘crumpets are only yeast pancakes confined to rings and so made thick and of a uniform size.’ But the characteristic very open, chewy texture of the crumpet is a result of baking a dough so wet that, if not confined by a ring, it would flow into a puddle – which is pretty much what a pancake is.

To make good crumpets you need a ‘soft’, low-to-medium-protein flour such as used to be milled from wheats grown in Britain and parts of the Continent. The strong, high-tensile, elastic gluten of North American wheat will produce a tight, bound result with the texture of carpet underlay. In the USA, the flour known as ‘all-purpose’ is about right. In the UK, a mixture of equal quantities of ‘strong’ breadmaking flour and plain flour should give the desired protein level of about 10-11 per cent. UK-grown wheat, ground at a small watermill or windmill, is often ideal for this kind of baking.

I don’t like bicarbonate of soda as a chemical aid to crumpet making. It is used to provide a last-minute source of fizz to aerate the dough. I think it is unnecessary and can easily give a slightly soapy flavour to the product. My solution is to use a dough that already bears most of the hallmarks of a crumpet – soft, wet, very holey. I am referring, of course, to the ciabatta dough above. With a slight adjustment of the water content, it has everything needed to make the tastiest crumpets you have ever had.

Traditional steel crumpet rings are around 10cm in diameter and 2.5cm high, but nowadays kitchen shops tend to sell all-purpose rings designed for poaching eggs and forming mini cheesecakes; these are a bit deeper. However, a crumpet has to cook with bottom heat only and therefore should not be made too thick or the base will burn before the middle and top are cooked. Aim to pour the mixture out to an initial depth of about 1.5cm. It will rise a bit as the heat expands the dough.

Makes 5 crumpets

504g Ciabatta Dough (see above)

50g Water

554g Total

Prepare the dough exactly as specified for Ciabatta, but add the extra 50g of water at the mixing stage. It should be a gloopy texture, just pourable, but with clear evidence of a gluten network. Ferment the dough in a bowl for 1-2 hours, until it is bubbling up nicely.

Prepare a hotplate, cast-iron girdle or heavy frying-pan by heating gently. The crumpet rings should be oiled or buttered lightly. When the dough is ready, brush with a little oil the area on the hotplate where you are going to place the first ring. Put the ring down on this oiled area and immediately ladle or pour about 100g of mixture into the ring. It should run out and fill the ring and start bubbling quite soon. Cooking time will depend on the thickness of the mixture and the heat of the hotplate. Cook until the top of the crumpet has just solidified, then remove the ring, flip the crumpet over and bake it on the other side for a minute or two. Serve warm, with a good smear of butter.

Crumpets do not keep well, but can be revived from terminal toughness by gentle heating in a covered dish. Toasting, though frightfully pukka when done on the end of a long fork by languid youths over Oxbridge coals, does tend to harden the crust – but then perhaps that’s all part of the experience.

‘Let them eat cake…’

Wet doughs make wonderfully chewy breads. But for sheer indulgence there’s no substitute for fat. I don’t mean the modest quantities that improve the size and keeping quality of plain breads. I mean serious amounts of oil or butter – the sort of dose that threatens to turn bread into cake and your waistline into a fading memory.

Breads enriched with fat (and eggs) were often called ‘yeast cakes’ and the definition survives in names like ‘teacake’, ‘barm cake’ (not particularly fatty) and ‘lardy cake’ (very). But adding a good amount of fat was traditionally a way of making everyday bread into something special – for a treat, a religious festival or a celebration. Fat used to be expensive, so for most people consumption of enriched breads was severely limited – a fact that clearly escaped Queen Marie Antoinette when she suggested that her starving subjects should eat ‘cake’ if there was no bread to be had. Linguists (and royalists) point out that she has been maligned: what she suggested the hungry Parisians eat was not cake but brioche or, according to Elisabeth Luard in
European Peasant
Cookery
(Bantam, 1986),
Kugelhupf—
both of which are really enriched yeast-raised breads. But little was lost in translation, because these breads have more fat in them than many cakes.

Brioche, of course, turned out to be bad for Marie Antoinette’s health, but for political rather than nutritional reasons. And, on the principle that a little of what you fancy does you good, home-made brioche is a winner.

Brioche

Making brioche by hand is an experience: it’s pleasantly energetic, and quite a challenge to incorporate so much butter into a seemingly unwilling dough. Eating it is the reward for trusting in a favourable result when all the evidence seems to suggest disaster. Doing it yourself means that you can avoid the strange compound fats that are used to eke out expensive dairy butter in bought brioche, not to mention the gratuitous additives that make it look good and ‘keep’ for an improbably long time. If you make it yourself, you can eat it genuinely fresh.

This is a two-stage dough. The ferment, made before the main dough, helps get the yeast bubbling vigorously before it encounters the egg and butter, which are not yeast foods.

Makes 1 large or 2 small brioche loaves

The ferment

15g Sugar

5g Fresh yeast

50g Milk (or water)

50g Strong white flour or a mixture of plain and strong

120g Total

Dissolve the sugar and yeast in the milk, which should be warm enough to bring the ferment to a final temperature of about 27°C. Make a paste by mixing a small amount of the liquid with the flour, then gradually add the rest of the liquid. This prevents lumps forming. Mix until smooth, cover loosely and let it stand for about an hour in a warm place. The ferment should rise up in the bowl and should be used at just about its high point. If it ‘falls’, this is a sign that the yeast is producing more gas than the weak gluten structure can retain and it is time to make the main dough.

Brioche dough

120g Ferment (from above)

200g Strong white flour

100g Egg (2 eggs)

5g Sea salt

125g Unsalted butter, lightly chilled

550g Total

Beaten egg for glazing

If you are using salted butter, reduce the added salt in the recipe by half. Mix the ferment with the flour, egg and salt to make a smooth dough. At this stage it should feel like a normal, fairly soft dough. Knead it for a few minutes until the gluten structure is beginning to develop.

Then add the butter. There is no elegant way to do this. Simply squidge the whole lot into the dough and enjoy the feeling of the cool, oily mass softening in your hands and disappearing into the dough. Work the dough between your hands, not on the worktop. As the butter softens and melts, the dough will turn into a greasy, sloppy mess. This is as it should be. Do not add more flour, even if it seems as though the dough is impossibly soft or even turning semi-liquid. Keep going, pulling the dough quickly and firmly with the fingers of both hands. As the gluten develops, you will be able to elongate the dough piece more and more until you have a ‘concertina’ of gloopy dough suspended perilously between your hands.

Keep going for about 10-15 minutes. Do not add any flour. Quite suddenly, the surface of the dough, which was rather ragged and dull, will take on an oily sheen. The dough will appear a bit lighter in colour because it will reflect more light and its surface will look a bit like chamois leather. The butter is now fully worked into the dough and you can stop kneading. Gratification will be all the greater for having been delayed.

If you ignore the above and add extra flour, you may appear to reach a satisfactory dough a bit sooner. But by altering the balance of flour and butter, you risk producing a rather cementy brick rather than the light and buttery texture of a true brioche.

If you have naturally warm hands, you may find that the butter turns to oil before the brioche structure is fully developed and the dough will appear to ‘curdle’. This is a pity and, if chilling your hands in iced water does not do the trick, you may have to forego the pleasure of kneading and use a mixer.

Return the dough to the bowl and cover it with a polythene bag. At this point you can choose to ferment it at room temperature or in the fridge. It will need a good 2 hours at ambient temperature and up to 16 hours in the fridge. One advantage of chilling the dough is that it solidifies the butter and makes final moulding a bit easier, so it is a good plan to give it an hour at room temperature and then at least an hour in the fridge. Leaving it overnight in the fridge means that you can have a head start if you want to bake fresh brioche in the morning.

Prepare your tins by buttering them carefully. Despite being over 20 per cent fat, the dough will expand to more than double its original volume, so allow for this when choosing tins. The amount of dough in this recipe will fill a large fluted brioche tin or savarin mould or 1 large or 2 small loaf tins. I don’t bother with individual small brioches because they do not keep at all well, having relatively little crumb in relation to their crust.