Pumpkin Pie

I made pumpkin pie today, as I do every year from the scrapings of our Hallowe'en pumpkins. This year I used ready-made shortcrust pastry for a change. After all, the pastry isn't the best thing about the pie, it's really just a shell to hold the spicy pumpkin-flavoured custard. So why take a lot of effort over it if you don't want to?

Delia Smith got a lot of stick a little while ago for teaching people how to cheat at cooking. I don't understand why though. I'll take Delia over ten of your Gordon Ramsays any day. I understood what Delia meant, and I think it showed a deep understanding of the difference between good food and bad food. Take instant powdered mashed potato for example. It's a travesty. It's not food at all. It's some sort of fake food substitute. Here are the ingredients (I found them on the web):
Potato (82%), Full Cream Milk Powder (15%), Salt, Emulsifier: Mono and Di Glycerides of Fatty Acids, Antioxidant: Ascorbyl Palmitate, Natural Colour: Curcumin

It can't do you any good to eat it and it doesn't even taste nice. But frozen mashed potato is a different kettle of fish. The ingredients are:
Potato, Milk, Butter (2%), Salt, White Pepper.

I don't know how you make mashed potato, but that's exactly how I do it. And that's what Delia was trying to say. Use your brain. Distinguish good food from bad food. You don't have to make everything from scratch. Even top chefs don't do that. I know how to make butter from scratch but I only do it once in a while, for fun (or by accident). Most of the time I buy my butter like everyone else, top chefs included. I know how to make bread from scratch. Is it cheating if I buy a loaf instead? How about if I buy it from a farmer's market instead of from a supermarket? Is that less cheating? Why?

What matters is not that you make every damn thing from scratch every time, but only that you know good food from bad, and that you choose the good food most of the time. If having access to ready made pastry means you make apple pie at home from apples, sugar and cinnamon, rather than buying Mr Kipling's apple pies (ingredients: Wheat Flour, Apple (21%), Sugar, Vegetable Oil, Glucose Syrup, Dextrose, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Modified Maize Starch, Humectant (Vegetable Glycerine), Salt, Acidity Regulator (Malic Acid), Raising Agents (Disodium Dihydrogen Diphosphate, Sodium Bicarbonate), Preservatives (Potassium Sorbate, Sodium Metabisulphite), Gelling Agent (Sodium Alginate), Adipic Acid, Milk Protein, Flavouring) then I think ready-made pastry is a really good thing.

Top Ten Uses for Apples

(The total lunar eclipse was a washout, with a thick layer of cloud across most of Britain. The alarm clock went off at 2:45 am, but when I looked out of the bedroom window all I could see was a bright orange glow caused by the street lights of Manchester bouncing off the unbroken low cloud, so I rolled over and went back to sleep.)

Here are ten uses for too many leftover apples, hanging around in the bottom of the fruit bowl and looking unappealing.

1. Tarte tatin

2. Gordon Tracy's Favourite Way of Eating Apples - bear with me. This is our family name for apples cored and cut into wedges, served with a dish of sugar mixed with cinnamon, for dipping. The name was a desperate attempt to trick Tom, then aged 2, into eating any kind of fresh fruit or vegetable at all. He was obsessed with Thunderbirds at the time, and his favourite character was Gordon Tracy. I offer the recipe to any parents who can't get their kids to eat fruit. Feel free to rename it with your own child's favourite fictional character.

3. Sourdough Apple Fritters

4. Cheese and apple toastie - cut an apple into quarters and grate it on a cheese grater. Also grate some Red Leicester cheese (or other cheese) and mix with the grated apple. Season with sea salt, freshly ground black pepper and ground cumin. Make into sandwiches with sliced wholemeal bread and toast (we use one of those electric toasted sandwich makers, but you can also do it under a grill)

5. Chutney

6. I often chop an apple into my porridge or muesli for breakfast.

7. Apple Spiced Muffins

8. Stuffed baked apple - Core an apple and stuff the hole with something nice - leftover Christmas mincemeat works well, my dad keeps a jar of raisins soaked in rum to stuff apples with, or just improvise a mixture of raisins, porridge oats, chopped nuts, honey, or whatever you can find in the store cupboard. Bake the stuffed apple either in the microwave (you don't need one of those stupid plastic doodads they sell in the Bettaware catalogues, just bung it in a bowl, for heaven's sake) or in a moderate oven until the apple has softened. Serve with ice cream.

9. Braised red cabbage with apple (recipe is near the bottom of the page).

10. Apple pie - Here's a little-known secret. The best apple pies are not made with cooking apples such as Bramleys. Cooking apples turn to mush when you cook them. They're great for applesauce, and that's about it. If you want large succulent pieces of apple in your apple pie, use eating apples. But let's start with the pastry:

You can use your own shortcrust pastry recipe, or ready-made pastry or a ready-made pie shell. Here is my favourite shortcrust pastry recipe for when I'm really pushing the boat out. It makes the best ever mince pies, for example. Sift 14oz plain flour into a bowl with 1 teaspoon of salt. Make a well in the centre. Add 8oz diced softened (really soft) unsalted butter, 4oz caster sugar, 8 egg yolks (sorry - this is not a frugal recipe unless you have your own chickens and plenty of eggs. But it really does make excellent pastry) and 1 teaspoon vanilla essence into the well. For apple pies I like to add some grated orange rind and ground cardamom, cinnamon or nutmeg. Rub everything in. In fact I usually heave it all into my food processor with a dough hook attachment and let it run until it looks like pastry. Bring it together into a ball and knead it lightly, then wrap it in clingfilm and chill it for at least half an hour before using.

Divide it into two, and roll one portion out, but it's a b****r to handle, so if it falls apart when you try to line your greased 9-10” pie tin with it, don't panic. Just smoosh it back together with your knuckles, and feel free to cover any holes with leftover bits of pastry and work them in until you can't the join. Put the pastry shell, and the unused portion of pastry back in the fridge whilst you sort out the filling. Oh, and turn the oven on low.

Peel, core and roughly chop about 2lbs of eating apples. Put them in a pan with the merest splash of water, 2oz sugar and a few whole cloves, cover and cook for a few minutes until the apples are tender but not mushy. Carefully drain the apples. Don't go banging them about or they'll go to mush. Carefully put the drained apples in the bottom of the pastry shell (I don't bother picking out the cloves, I rather like the burst of tongue-numbing flavour when you bite into one in your wedge of apple pie, but if you hate that you'll have to pick them all out - I advise counting them when you put them in so you can be sure you get them all). Roll out the other portion of pastry and lie it on top of the pie. Pinch the edges together to seal the top layer to the bottom. Make a couple of slits in the top of the pie to let any steam out and stop the pie going soggy or exploding. Sprinkle generously with golden brown sugar, and bake in a low oven until it's done (I don't know how long, it depends on your oven, how big your pie dish is, how thin you rolled the pastry etc. Check on it after about 25 minutes, but be ready to give it an extra 5, 10, 15 minutes or whatever until it looks golden and done. Also listen to your nose - if it smells done after 20 minutes then maybe it is. Have a look at it and see.)

Apple pie is nice hot or cold. Either way, serve with custard, ice cream, or whipped cream. But I love it best served cold with a big dollop of smetana.

Leftovers? We Call Them Ingredients

I spent a happy day in the kitchen today dealing with the leftovers from Christmas dinner.

Juices and fat from the roast ham - became pease pudding with the addition of a bag of split peas.

Uneaten turkey, gravy - became two things. 1. two helpings of turkey in gravy (frozen) 2. turkey and caramelised onion flan (frozen)

Uneaten ham - was sliced and frozen in 8oz portions, trimmings were stirred into the pease pudding

Turkey carcase - became turkey soup

Leftover veggies, surplus cream, cheese - became vegetable quiche with cheesey pastry (eaten fresh with reheated leftover roast potatoes and sprouts)

Spare bits of cheesey pastry from the quiche and flan - became cheese straws for kids to nibble on

And there is still some sliced ham, turkey, cranberry sauce and stuffing in the fridge for sandwiches (omelettes, stir fries etc.), along with loads of leftover pudding, mincemeat, Christmas cake etc.

Dad has gone up to Sunderland to spend New Year with Steph and our North Eastern relatives. He is under strict instructions to bring back some saveloys and stotty cake to go with the pease pudding. And two old uni friends came for a brief visit which made me very happy. Now they know where we are I hope they'll come again.

What are you making with your Christmas leftovers?

Mince Pies

My carol concert on Saturday night was lovely. My sister Lindsey came with her husband Andrew, and so did Eleanor (aged 7) and Sam (aged 6). Ellie stayed awake throughout the concert for the first time ever, but Sam dozed off during the second half.

The audience were treated to mince pies and mulled wine in the interval (all part of the ticket price), so every member of the choir had to bring 6 mince pies. Mine were home-made, and following Kethry's and Tracy's suggestions, I added shredded orange rind to the rich sweet pastry. It was lovely, I think I'll always do that in future. I bet it would work well with pumpkin pie as well.

Dilemma!

I have a terrible ethical dilemma. Perhaps you can help me out.

Tomorrow (Saturday 24th November 2007) is Buy Nothing Day.

It's a day where you challenge yourself, your family and friends to switch off from shopping and tune into life. The rules are simple, for 24 hours you will detox from consumerism and live without shopping. Anyone can take part provided they spend a day without spending!

It's organised by the awesome culture-jamming organisation, Adbusters. You can send an e-postcard, download a computer desktop or a poster, join a BND Facebook group, participate in an event near you, or do anything at all except shopping.

So where's the dilemma?

Well on that same day, and that day only, The Guardian newspaper is giving away a 100 page baking guide by bread guru Dan Lepard. To get the free guide you have to buy the newspaper.

Do you see my problem?

I've decided to be loyal to Buy Nothing Day, and not go out and buy The Guardian that day. But I'll ask in my local Freecycle group if anyone got the paper and didn't want the guide. I'll ask on Freeconomy as well. And I'm asking you chaps, is anyone prepared to post me an unwanted baking guide (I'll refund your postage, of course)? Don't go out and buy The Guardian just for me. That would defeat the point. But if you get it delivered anyway, and you didn't want the baking guide yourself, that would be great.

Have a happy Buy Nothing Day.

Baguettes

Now that I can reliably make tasty, well-shaped sourdough boules every day, I decided to try my hand at a different shape - sourdough baguettes. Here is my first attempt. A bit misshapen, and rather short because my oven isn't as big as a commercial bakery, but definitely baguettes nonetheless.

Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

In the past few weeks I have learned how to make better, tastier bread than I've ever made before. My family like it and are happy to eat it, fresh with butter or toasted for breakfast. But we still weren't not ready to stop buying sliced bread. The kids wouldn't have my bread for their sandwiches at school. I don't blame them - the sandwiches were almost two inches thick. That's a lot of chewing when you just want to finish your packed lunch quickly so you can go out and play.

So today I bought an electric slicing machine from Lakeland. It wasn't cheap, but boy does it do the trick. I sliced a boule of yeasted rye bread I made yesterday and the slices came out thin and even. The kids have had jam sandwiches as an after-school snack, and declare that they're happy to have this bread in their lunch boxes.

I think we've bought our last loaf of Hovis.

Christmas Cake

I baked the Christmas cake yesterday. I always love they way the house fills with the smell during the long slow baking. When it cooled I stabbed some holes in it with a skewer and poured brandy all over it, then wrapped it up in baking paper and foil and put it away. I'll get it out a few more times for more "feedings" of brandy and by the time I come to decorate it and serve it, you won't be able to have more than a small slice if you're driving.

Loaf Baked in Cloche

Here's today's sourdough loaf baked in my poor-man's cloche. I'm going to say no more. The picture says it all.

Poor Man's Cloche

I'm becoming obsessed with baking sourdough bread. I've been avidly reading all the information and tips I can find on the internet. One tip which really appealled to me is baking under a cloche.

You can buy a baking cloche for about $50. I can't find a UK supplier, so if I wanted one I'd have to pay international shipping. I imagine it would work out pretty expensive.

Or you can go to your garden centre, buy a 10" plant pot and base, a big nut, a few bolts and washers, and make your own "poor man's cloche". Mine came to less than £10 all told, especially since I got a 10% discount for showing my allotment membership card. The arrangement with the bolt and washers has two purposes - one is to make a sort of handle, helpful for handling oven-hot earthenware. The other purpose is to close the hole at the bottom (top) of the pot, to create a sealed environment. It becomes an oven-within-an-oven (although it can also be used for baking bread on an open fire or barbecue - can't wait to try that).

I gave my poor man's cloche a bit of a clean and then put it in a low oven. I turned the oven up little by little to gradually drive out any residual moisture from the pot. This process took about 3 hours. Then I let it cool slowly, and it was ready for its first use. I'll bake my sourdough boule in it today. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Christmas Cake

I started making my Christmas cake today. I weighed out the dried fruit, chopped the glace cherries and candied peel, and poured over a few slugs of brandy. It will sit overnight so the fruit can soak up the booze, then tomorrow I'll mix and bake the cake.

I use Delia Smith's recipe. I've made it every year for well over a decade now. It's one of the few recipes I use unaltered - I usually make a few "improvements" over the years, and my copy of Delia Smith's Christmas is heavily annotated. But this cake is perfect as it is. No improvement is possible.

Bannetons

I've had a few people ask where I got the bannetons (proving bowls) that give nice spiral patterns to the bread.

They're from a website called Manufactum. They sell all kinds of strange things, and they seem to be beautifully well-made. For example brass compasses, wooden toys, and their gardening section arouses consumerist feelings in me that I don't normally experience. Have a look. If you can confine yourself to buying only proofing bowls, I'll be very impressed.

Cowpat Bread

If yesterday's sourdough bread was Dali-esque bread, today's bread is cowpat bread. It was even wetter (slacker) than yesterday and just sort of slopped all over the baking sheet when I turned it out. It then rose spectacularly and looks pretty great inside (tastes great too) so we don't mind. But I would like to make bread that looks as good as it tastes.

Someone on The Fresh Loaf suggested dusting the banneton with rice flour to help with sticking. And of course I need to learn to add just the right amount of water to get the light holey loaf I want without the cowpat effect. I'll get there. I'm much happier with this bread than with handome loaves I've made in the past that were dense and chewy.

Dali-esque Bread

Perhaps foolishly, I tried several new (to me) breadmaking techniques all at once. I followed this recipe which promised light, holey bread due to very wet dough and minimal kneading. If you're interested in bread making, watch the video linked to on that page - it's amazing. He just sort of folds the bread over five times. It takes 10 seconds. It's supposed to replace ten minutes of energetic kneading and lead to much lighter bread.

As well as a new recipe using new techniques, I also tried to prove my bread in my new cane bannetons which give this bonny spiral pattern. However my dough wouldn't turn out of them properly. It stuck and formed this strange melted appearance.

I'm a surrealist breadmaker.

But look at what happened when I cut it. That's today's Dali bread on the left, and yesterday's loaf on the right. Look how much more risen today's bread is, and look at all the big holes. It's light and easy to eat. It doesn't make your jaw ache. It's not dwarf bread.

It's a life-changing experience. I'm never making dwarf bread again. I'm never kneading again. I'll have biceps like a normal person, not like Dolph Lundgren. The bread looks weird on the outside but I'm sure I can fix that. On the inside it's beautiful, and that's what counts.

Elevenses

A cup of tea, and a piece of home-made sourdough bread with home-made jam. This is what I mean about "food that makes you go wow!" If you offered me a cream cake, I'd say no thanks, I prefer the bread and jam.

Admittedly, the jam and bread both took a certain amount of time to make. But you can get the same effect if you can find really nice bread and jam in the shops. I don't mean Tesco's Finest. I mean in your local bakery, a farm shop or farmer's market. There might be home-made jam at the church fair or school fete. It's not expensive. It just takes attention, and the will to break the supermarket habit.

Bread Tasting

Well I didn't wait until the bread was cold, but it was just warm rather than hot straight from the oven. How did it taste? A bit of a mix - good and bad points. It's certainly bread (rather than a brick of glue like my first attempt), made with only wild leavening, so that's fun. It didn't taste noticeably sour, though. It was white bread, and I'm not a fan of white bread. I tend to find it tasteless. I wouldn't say this bread was entirely tasteless, but nor would I say it was an orgasm on my tastebuds. Closer to "food that makes you go hmmm" rather than "food that makes you go wow!". But I'll keep trying. I'll make bread that makes people go "wow!" soon.

What do I need to change? The Silverton book has recipes that include flavouring ingredients such as olives, walnuts, cheese etc. I'm sure any of those would be tasty. But I want the bread to be "wow!" bread, not "hmm" bread with tasty ingredients. I might get a better flavour with a different starter. I'm still waiting for them to arrive from the States. When they arrive I can experiment, and perhaps that will provide the wow! factor. Or I can try making wholemeal bread instead. I like wholemeal bread much better than white bread (it's fair to say I like wholemeal anything better than white anything. I don't understand why people choose to eat polystyrene, whilst brown rice, wholemeal pasta, wholemeal flour etc. have a grungy hippy image. I like my pasta, rice and bread to taste of something.)

I'll probably try different flours then. Wholemeal flour, rye flour, spelt flour. I'm having lots of fun learning this new breadmaking technique. And these loaves are at least edible, not like my first sourdough loaf which went in the bin. I'll feed some to the kids when they get home, and if the worst comes to the worst I'll make it into cheesey bread pudding.

Sourdough Loaves - Attempt #2

My first attempt at making sourdough bread was not a success. The instructions told me to make my starter and then use it exactly the same as yeast. It didn't work, probably because my starter was not active enough at that point, and also because sourdough is not yeast. It needs totally different baking techniques, including (but not limited to) much longer proving times.

So I fed up my starter and when it was very active I tried again. This time I followed the very detailed descriptions for sourdough bread from Nancy Silverton's sourdough bible, Breads from the La Brea Bakery.

This attempt is much more of a success. The bread behaved as Silverton said it would. Primarily it rose as it should. They don't have that nice spiral pattern because my proofing basket hasn't arrived yet, so I proofed them in mixing bowls lined with tea towels. They have taken the shape of the folds and creases in the towels, and are somewhat misshapen and asymmetrical as a result. When I dusted them with flour, I think I used too much. I slashed the loaves with my sharpest knife but the cut is still ragged, because the surface of the bread was tougher than I expected. Silverton recommends the use of a tool called a lame, which is like a razor mounted on a stick. Perhaps I can make my own. My loaves are also darker than I expected, and I'm not sure why that is. I didn't bake it as hot as she said to, because my oven doesn't go up to 500°F. Is my bread overcooked? Or is sourdough bread supposed to look like this? Silverton says:

If I had to choose a Crayola-box crayon to describe its colour, it would be burnt sienna.

Yes, you could say this bread is burnt sienna. Or maybe it's just burnt. I'll know when I taste it, but I'm not allowed to eat it yet. Silverton insists I must wait until it is cool. I don't think I can wait that long.

Sourdough Update

I made bread with my home-made sourdough starter but it wasn't a great success (that's not it in the photograph). My loaf didn't rise well and so was very dense with a gluey texture. The taste was intriguing, though - certainly different from bread made with commercial yeast. I was following the instructions in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fizz Carr's book, The River Cottage Family Cookbook, and I think maybe that's the problem - I need a specialist sourdough bread reference.

So I bought Nancy Silverton's book Breads from the La Brea Bakery. It's supposed to be "the I am" of sourdough baking. But I didn't fancy her instructions for making a starter because the quantities were too great - you end up with 7lbs of starter! That's great for a commercial bakery, but crazy for home use.

I decided to build up the starter I have already made, using the principles in the Silverton book, but with smaller quantities. So I have been feeding it two or three times a day, and stirring it in between times, in the hope of making it a bit more active. It's definitely working and today I have taken the plunge and tried again to makebread with it. This time I'm following Silverton's instructions. Again her quantities are too big - I am making two large loaves of bread. What's more, the whole process takes two days. This really is not a book for someone who wants to whip up a little bit of bread for their own family without too much bother. But I've invested in the book and I'm hoping to learn some general principles that I can simplify for my own situation.

I am still waiting for the two starters which a kind person on the Yahoo Sourdough group has mailed me from Florida. I've also ordered a baking stone - that's a heavy stone slab you place in your oven when baking bread or pizza. It recreates the conditions in stone-built bread ovens, and is supposed to make a big difference to your finished bread. And just for fun, I ordered a cane proofing bowl. It's a spiral basket you put the boule of dough in for it's final rise before baking, and it's what give the loaves in the picture their characteristic spiral pattern. It's fun to play with a totally different way of making bread.

Recipe: Ginger Muffins

The sediment of the ginger beer plant contained yeast and ginger, so I thought I'd use some to make some yeast-risen muffins. They turned out really well, and the kids have been devouring them. The best thing about the recipe though is the smell as they cook. So don't forget to take a few great big lungfuls and enjoy.

Ginger Muffins

Mix a couple of heaped teaspoons of the yeasty/gingery dregs with half a pint of warm water and one and a half cups of plain flour (all-purpose flour). If you don't have an expired ginger beer plant, you could just add a packet of instant dried yeast and a couple of teaspoons of ground ginger. Let it sit somewhere warm for half an hour or so, it should froth up so make sure it is in a large container or it may overflow. Cream 300g of sugar with 200g of butter, beat in 3 eggs one at a time. Beat in half a cup of treacle (molasses - or if you don't have any, substitute Golden Syrup, or honey, or corn syrup. It'll taste different to mine but it will still taste good). Add two teaspoons of cinnamon, half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, a pinch of salt and a bunch of chopped nuts (I happened to have these in the cupboard. Could as well have been sultanas, chopped crystallised ginger, or just nothing). Mix it well, slop it into muffin tins and bake it at 180C for 25 minutes or so until the muffins are springy and done.

It's a big batch - I made about 30 muffins with it. And sorry for the weird Frankenstein mix of ounces and grams, weighed measures and cup measures. It's a bit of a Frankenstein recipe.

I still have lots of ginger beer plant sediment left, so I plan to do more experimenting with recipes that need ginger and yeast. I was thinking some kind of spicy tea bread next.

Home-Made Sourdough Starter

Sourdough bread starters have some things in common with ginger beer plants:

• both are symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeasts (known in some circles as "beasts")
• both are "fed" in order to multiply and grow, before being divided when you want to use them
• After division, part of the culture is used to make the product, either ginger beer or bread, and part is kept and fed again

But they also have some differences:

• There is only one ginger beer plant, as far as I know, but there are many sourdough cultures and each one is different
• You can only get an authentic ginger beer plant from someone who already has one, but you can make a sourdough starter from scratch

I tried to make a sourdough starter from scratch on Saturday, using the instructions in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fizz Carr's River Cottage Family Cookbook. I've called it Fizz. I thought of calling it Hugh, but since it's supposed to bubble and froth, I thought Fizz was more appropriate. I won't reproduce the recipe here, if you want it you'll have to buy the book, but basically you mix flour, water and orange juice, then feed it every day with more flour and water until the natural beasts in the flour multiply.

So far it's looking a wee bit frothy, but it's not very lively. I need to feed it again today, and tomorrow I can use it to make bread. I'm also waiting for an established starter to arrive in the post, so I can compare it with my home-made version.