Bread
When my parents were here in Feb 2003, my father showed me how to make bread. His recipe was for a small, yeasty loaf. Now, I'd been trying to make bread myself for years, but whenever I tried it, I'd get something thin which didn't rise. Great for the Passover feast, but not much use otherwise. Dad's recipe is as follows:
Take half a mug of warm water (about 40 degrees C), add about a teaspoon of sugar and about half a sachet or so of yeast. (In place of the sugar, you can use treacle, and you get a darker loaf.) You'll know the yeast is working because you'll see bubbles in the water/sugar/yeast mixture. Put the mixture in a bowl and add flour, mixing all the while, until you get a sticky mixture. This shouldn't be a dough - it's should be quite sticky. Grease the sides of a baking tin (about 9" by 5" by 5" deep) and gloop the mixture into it. smoothing it out roughly and cover the tin with some oiled cling film. Put this somewhere warm and leave the mixture to rise until it's close to the top of the tin. Turn on your oven to 180 degrees C and when it's heated up, put the baking tin in. Don't forget to remove the cling film! Bake it for about 25 minutes, or until it's golden brown on top. It should sound hollow when you tap it with your finger. Remove it from the tin when it's cooked, or it'll collapse.
Now this gives a very nice loaf, which is quite dense, rather like a soda bread in some ways. Having baked a few of these, I began to get the hang of the whole process, and resolved to try some variations. While I'm still experimenting, I'll describe how I do it now and show some of the variations.
The basic: take a cup of warm water and mix sugar (two teaspoons) and yeast (one packet, about 7g). Place this mixture in a bowl and add a few cups of flour. The exact amount isn't too important at this stage, but don't add too much. Put two teaspoons of salt in on top of the flour and add some butter or olive oil, about two table spoons. Mix this all together well, until smooth. Gradually add more flour and mix again until you have a dough which starts to hold together. This is probably a little more flour than you think. Eventually, you should have a smooth, elastic dough. Turn this out onto a floured wooden board and knead it for a while. You can add more flour if it starts to get a little sticky. Let this rise for a while in a warm place until it's doubled in size, then knead it again. Put it in a greased tin as before and leave to rise again. This time, it'll rise over the top of the baking tin. Heat the oven to 180 degrees C and cook it for about 20-25 minutes. It should sound hollow when tapped. You can also just shape it into buns or rolls or cobs and bake on a tray.
Variation 1: Adding an egg to the mix. This gives a more cake-like texture to the bread, and makes it very rich.
Variation 2: Add some finely chopped red onions to the mix: Mmmmm, onion bread! You could also try this with garlic.
Variation 3: Forget to add salt: this gives quite a bland loaf. I recommend slathering this with Vegemite to try and get some flavour into it.
Variation 4: Treacle instead of sugar: This can give a very strong taste to the load, and will also colour it like brown bread.
Variation 5: Brown or Wholemeal flour. I normally use white flour, as my wife doesn't really like brown bread.
I noticed that my little oven is basically too small to cook a large loaf in. The top would be burnt, while the inside wasn't cooked yet. I experimented with lower temperatures, which give a nicer looking loaf, and it has no burnt top. However, the bread tends to be very dense. Some Research on the web would seem to indicate that a very high initial temperature is required, dropping to 160 C or so for the main cooking. I haven't tried this yet, but it's on the program. Meanwhile, I can say that adding some beer to the water makes a small difference in taste, although it does get drowned out a lot by the yeast taste. Spraying some water from a plant-mister should give you a nice golden crust as well. (French bread is traditionally baked in an oven which creates mist.
There's a recipe for Pain a l'Ancienne which involves refrigerating the dough for 24 hours before letting it rise and cooking it. This is supposed to give wonderful results, although the process sounds as fussy as heck.
18/04/2003: OK, I've just made the nicest bread I've ever made, and I've no real idea why it's so nice. However, here's the recipe, so you can try it for yourself, while I refine it some more.
- Take some warm water (about 40 degrees C) in a small bowl. About a cup full of water is right.
- Add about one or two teaspoons of dried yeast and three teaspoons of white sugar. Put them in the water and stir it. The yeast is Ideal brand dried yeast.
- Go to Sham Shui Po Computer Centre and look for Bluetooth network components. Fail to find anything.
- Go to Tsim Sha Tsui and look for ludicrously cheap lenses for a Pentax K-Mount. Completely fail to find any, but nearly get involved in a TV drama which was being filmed. Leave when you realise that they're not interested in having a token Gwailo hanging around.
- Get home approximately three hours after starting the mix and look at it and sneer. Have a shower. Add some warm water to the mix and put it in a bigger bowl.
- Add a cup or so of flour and mix well. Put about one teaspoon of salt in and mix well. Put a little peanut oil in there as well. (I normally use olive oil, but the peanut oil, which my wife uses for frying was closer. By about two inches. And I was curious about what effect it would have.)
- Add in enough flour until you have a doughy mixture which comes away from the sides.
- Start kneading the mixture. I knead it in the bowl by knuckling it down until it's flat, turning it over and folding the floured sides together. Repeat, adding more flour if it feels sticky. Stop when it doesn't want to stick together anymore.
- Make a lump of the dough in the bowl and leave to rise. Put the bowl on top of a stereo system which is playing VCDs in Cantonese and English at the same time at ear-shattering volume for the half dozen kids who have appeared in the flat.
- Drink some beer.
- Remember the bread about an hour later. Notice that it hasn't risen very much. Beat it up. Repeat the kneading process for a bit until the prisoner confesses or the bread looks sorry for not rising.
- Drink more beer.
- Attempt to get a Toshiba laptop to recognise the Bluetooth Dongle which is plugged into the 32bit Cardbus Card which it also isn't recognising. Consider taking a baseball bat to makers of laptops who use the weirdest hardware they can find and then vary it from model to model.
- Have dinner.
- Remember the bread again about an hour after dinner. It's now risen a bit more respectably, so knock it down and fold it over and leave it to rise for what should be the second proper rising.
- Open some wine and drink that, as all the Chinese people (my wife and her MahJong buddies) are quaffing the beer while playing MahJong. My fault for buying gallons of TsingTao.
- Return to work on the laptop. Download the toshutils package from http://www.buzzard.org.uk when you realise that the fan isn't working and the thing is about to set your table on fire.
- About 10:30pm, remember the bread again with a guilty start and, noting that it's now risen like a champion, knock it down. Ask yourself why you did that, as it'll probably take hours to rise up again anyway. Form it into a rough cylinder approximately the width of your oven. Leave to rise for about 30 minutes and heat the oven to as hot as it'll go. Occasionally spray some water in there from a plant mister. (Bread needs steam to get a nice crust.)
- About 11:00pm, put the dough in the oven for thirty minutes, adding some water to the tray to get a hot steam going. Set the temperature to 180 deg. C so the oven cools down to that while the initial cooking is taking place. This is, in my experience, absolutely critical to getting a thin, crispy crust while not overcooking the centre. For the first few minutes, spray some water from the plant mister into the over. Aim for the walls of the oven: the goal is to have a hot mist in the over, not make the bread soggy. Once the bread is past the 'spring up' stage, no more water. (The dough will sag a little at first,then spring up with heat until it's at maximum spring. After that it browns and crisps on the outside.)
- Ignore complaints about the funny smell coming from the kitchen. Pretend you don't understand comments from MahJong buddies' kids about why a man is cooking. Mentally applaud number one daughter who defends Daddy's bread making powers. "Roxanne eat daddy-bread later. Daddy have to cook first."
- Hear oven go ding after about 30 minutes, check that bread sounds hollow when tapped on top. Note that bread has risen up surprisingly well and has browned all over. Remove from oven and put on plate to cool. Completely fail to resist cutting the end off while still hot, slathering with butter and consuming in about two milliseconds. Have primitive part of brain rejoice that: "Ug make bread, feed family. Ug good."