Potato and Dill bread

I was very interested to see that Dan Lepard's Saturday Guardian recipes this week focussed on using potatoes in baking. There is an interesting introduction to the recipes where he discusses the qualities that potatoes bring to a recipe, either raw or cooked. I have baked with potatoes in bread before on a couple of occasions and had quite good results so I was keen to try the recipes this week. The loaf appealed more than the potato cakes (although they sound pretty good too - for another time I think) so I added dill to my shopping list for the weekend, already having the rest of the ingredients to hand.

As is often the case, I halved the recipe. As I was making it, the dough was very wet and sticky - but kneading on plenty of olive oil made the dough easier to handle. I was concerned that it was sufficiently wet that I'd end up with a frisbee of bread - not quite my intention, so I decided to bake it in a 2lb loaf tin. This was a little large for the quantity of dough, but the dough just about reached the top of the tin. I had trouble slashing the loaf as it was quite wobbly as I put it into the oven (I don't think my dough would have stood as a loaf) and I didn't really get any oven spring, but then I wasn't careful with timings and had probably left it too long before baking. My own fault.

When the loaf had had about 40 minutes (I think I baked at Gas 7 for ten minutes then Gas 6 rather than Gas 7 all the time - I prefer a lighter crust) I turned it over to brown the base of the loaf. At this point I was rather worried because the crumb felt very, very soft, and indeed, the bottom of the loaf did sink a bit when it was finishing the baking upside down.

I had visions of cutting into the loaf and the middle squidging out at me, but thankfully my fears were not realised! The crumb is quite open and very, very moist (but not in a 'wet' way, which would be bad). I did use quite a bit of dill (and you can see it in the crust) but my tastebuds must have been killed by years of sugar or something because I didn't really taste the dill. It isn't  a herb I've used much before though, so I probably missed the subtlety of the flavour. Though on reflection as I've eaten more of it, there is a distinct flavour, it's just a new one for me. I think this is the kind of bread that grows on you. At first I wasn't all that impressed, but I am getting to like it more the more I eat it.

I think, all in all that this was a good bread, but it isn't quite to my personal taste. The volume of potato is quite big and this affects the crumb significantly. I'm sure that I could get used to this style of bread, but life is about choices, and although a good recipe, this one isn't for my tastes.

It has started me thinking about potato in dough though - and I am wondering what effect substituting a small part of the flour in a bread dough with potato starch/potato flour would do. Hmmm. I feel some experimenting coming on!

I'm linking this up to Herbs on a Saturday, a blog hop run by Karen of Lavender and Lovage.

Roast Butternut Squash and Rosemary soup - No Croutons Required

I always intend to enter No Croutons Required, the vegetarian soup/salad challenge run by Jac at Tinned Tomatoes and Lisa at Lisa's Kitchen. This month the theme is using an ingredient grown in your garden. I have to confess that really, the only thing that grows in my garden is weeds, so I'm really hoping that this soup can still be included. Aside from the weeds, the only surviving culinary plants (fruit bushes aside) are some hardy herbs. I have successfully managed to not-kill a rosemary, mint and I think even some oregano. I know that killing mint is pretty much impossible, but I'm still proud of myself.

For this challenge I decided to use the rosemary, here it is in all its glory..... As autumn is approaching and chilly days and evenings are going to be upon us all too soon I have decided to embrace this change of seasons and am using butternut squash. Even though this wasn't grown in my garden, it came from my local vegetarian co-op where they source all of the produce as locally as possible, so along with the tiny red onion, my squash may have travelled further than from my back garden, but it hasn't crossed an ocean to get to me!

I decided to adapt an idea I saw in a relatively new purchase, Hungry? by the people who sell the Innocent smoothies, veggie pots and juices. I still haven't looked at this book properly, but one of their suggestions for soup is a butternut squash with cinnamon and a touch of dried chilli. I liked the idea of the cinnamon complementing the soup and a  little chilli to lift it. Instead of boiling up the butternut, I chose to roast it (at the same time as baking a cake!) to bring out the natural sweetness and allow the rosemary to impart its flavour to the squash.

Roast Butternut Squash and Rosemary Soup with Chilli and Cinnamon

Ingredients

1/2 small butternut squash

tiny red onion

1 sprig rosemary

olive oil

about 250ml vegetable stock

pinch cinnamon (or to taste)

pinch dried chilli (or to taste)

- Roast the butternut squash with onion and rosemary tossed with olive oil until tender.

- Move to a small pan, add the stock, cinnamon, chilli and blitz to a smooth soup.

- Season with salt and black pepper to taste and reheat until piping hot.

- Serve with bread.

A perfect lunch for the chilly weather that lies ahead. I think some people would laugh if you knew how much (little!) chilli I had added, but I could tell it was there! The cinnamon was more of a scent than a flavour, but overall this was a lovely soup!



Black olive sesame loaf

A couple of sweet things followed by a savoury. I do try and mix it up a bit so that those of you who aren't so interested in the cakes don't lose interest entirely, and those who don't want to see just bread aren't bombarded by yeasted entities. Me, I love them both.... hence why they all feature here! Do you prefer posts about bread, or do cakes rock your world more?

I found sumac in the supermarket a few months ago, and bought it. I'm pretty sure I'd seen a couple of recipes calling for it, and even though I couldn't remember where they were I knew I'd find them again at some point. I still haven't. And after I'd bought my rather expensive sumac, it started appearing everywhere in my sights, most notably at a much more reasonable price in the local vegetarian co-op. Sigh!!! Anyway, I was intruiged by my purchase and immediately opened it up to have a sniff, it smells utterly lovely, sort of citrussy but not. That's not a great desciption I grant you, but then I'm not great at describing things! So I couldn't wait to use it. Luckily for me, Dan Lepard published a recipe for black olive sesame loaf, requiring sumac!

The first time I made it I followed the recipe (which can be found here on the Guardian website) very closely (aside from halving it, ongoing storage problems), with kalamata olives and sesame seeds. You can see the result in the top picture. Very successful. However, I'm not entirely sure about sesame seeds and so the loaf languished and I thought I'd better make it again without the sesame.... I only had green olives available this time round, and again intended to make a half recipe. I carefully measured out half of the olives, yeast, sugar and proceeded to add the warm water. I added half the flour and looked at the resulting slop and wondered whether it had been this wet last time. I guess you're a step ahead of me and I realised the full amount of water would obviously require the full amount of flour.... I added more olives once I'd realised my watery error. Aside from that, the baking went to plan and produced a lovely light loaf.

It's defnitely one for the olive lovers (that'd be me then) you can see just how many olives are in each mouthful. It's a great partner for my cheese sandwiches (sometimes it's good to be satisfied with the same filling - I can't quite see this bread working so well with say, egg mayonnaise or salmon, but thinking about it, I bet it'd be great if you like ham (I don't) or cured meats (ditto) or maybe even tuna.... I need to branch out a bit) and I love the salty olives. Mmmm, salty (in the style of Homer Simpson). Having said this, I was disappointed with the topping. Because the loaf is baked at a high temperature (although I didn't bake mine as hot as specified, choosing to give it longer at a lower temperature instead) the topping seems to catch a little, and although I'm now used to the flavour of the topping on the loaf I actually think it would probably be better without. Sorry Dan! I also can't really distinguish any flavour added by the sumac or lemon, it just tastes of thyme and oregano to me. Anyway you live and learn and to end on a positive note, this is a great loaf for olive lovers and a little out of the ordinary.

Sun dried tomato bread

The last time I made tomato bread was years and years ago, before I started baking bread properly. I used a recipe from 'Bread Matters' by Andrew Whitley and although very good it was undeniably complicated for a bread making novice, involving as I recall, rolling a puree of cooked onions and tomatoes into the dough (though my memory could be wrong!). This recipe on the other hand would be excellent for beginners! It's Dan Lepard's latest Guardian recipe - seen early on Saturday morning, baked by Saturday lunch and blogged by Monday, pretty good turnround for me!

I made the recipe pretty much as stated (here) bar not being able to locate sundried tomatoes in oil. Stupid supermarket! So I subbed normal dried tomatoes and soaked them for 10 minutes in boiling water to compensate for their lack of moisture. I didn't bake at gas 7 though, because when I've tried that in the past everything comes out like charcoal. I baked for 10 mins at gas 7, 30 at gas 6, then turned upside down and a further 10 at gas 6. I then ignored the timer, forgot to check the loaf and left it another 10 minutes, resulting in over-browned loaf. Not really a problem, but I did find the loaf a little dry - entirely my fault for not checking sooner. I think this will always be a well coloured loaf as the sugars in the tomatoes will caramelise quite quickly. I might bake it slighly lower next time, and obviously for less time!

I even managed to use a sprig of rosemary from my garden in there (it's the only productive thing in my jungle, sorry, garden, at the moment!). Great flavour, don't know why artisan bakers don't like sundried tomato bread, I can't be a proper baker then, because I thought it was lovely, as did J!

Rosemary madeira cake

Sometimes I have a flick through cookery books that I've had for ages and ages, and suddenly a recipe that I've passed over for years and years appeals to me. So it was with this Nigella recipe. It's from How to be a Domestic Goddess, which was one of the earlier baking books I bought, when Amazon wasn't there to offer cut-price books (or if it was, it was in its infancy, and I didn't trust buying over the internet - oh the days of innocence and past!) and this was an expensive treat. Many a time I've looked through the pages, admiring the photography, imagining what the recipes would taste like. Don't get me wrong, I've cooked plenty from it too, but this recipe had always been overlooked. I did make the Madeira cake though, years and years ago. And I had problems. With hindsight, it was the oven because student houses never have great equipment. And it was my inexperience too. Now, however, I have an oven that I know and plenty more experience. It was time to repeat the recipe and forget the acrid smell that had been the result of a cascade of cake to the oven floor....... my head is hanging in shame.

So, did it work? Yes. I'm pleased and relieved to say that I had no problems whatsoever with the cake this time round. In fact, it's a rather majestic looking loaf cake, and I'm sorry that I didn't get a picture of it whole, before slicing. However, the slices show you the crumb and I'm sure you know what a loaf cake looks like! I'm talking about this cake and the Madeira cake as if they're one recipe. They aren't, and there are two separate entries in the book, but they are extremely similar, and given that Nigella has published the Madeira cake here on her website, but not the rosemary loaf cake, I'll just tell you how the recipes differ.

For the rosemary version:
Omit the zest and juice of the lemon specified for the original version. Add 1tsp vanilla extract, 2 tsp finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves just before the flour (you'll need about 2 4"/10cm stalks of rosemary) and 4 tbsp of milk where Nigella specifies lemon juice. That's it!

Nigella says the cake takes an hour to cook. Not for me it didn't. I ended up leaving it about an hour and a half, which wasn't a problem - the outside didn't burn, but be aware if you're trying to fit lots of baking into a session that this one will take longer than specified.

Taste test? This was fab. Really buttery and moist and the balance of the vanilla and rosemary flavours was lovely. I thought the rosemary was quite subtle, with perhaps more vanilla flavour, but it was really, really good. Colleagues agreed and it didn't last long.

Oven dried tomato and basil rolls

These rolls are what happened to the rest of the dough that I used to make the bread bowls and foccacia here. You can find the recipe in that post, so I'll just outline how I made these here.

I had some cherry tomatoes in the fridge crying out to be used up, so I decided to roast them with a little dried thyme and a drizzle of olive oil. I used a 250g punnet of tomatoes, halved them and roasted fairly slowly, probably on a medium heat (although I can't quite remember, about Gas 4 ish) for a while (oh, this is so precise isn't it!!!) until they looked shrivelled but not cremated. Probably around an hour, but start checking earlier and keep checking. I had other things in the oven at the same time, so I'm not sure exactly how long they took. Remove and allow to cool.

When the dough was ready for shaping, I patted it out into a rectangle, and spread the roasted tomatoes (I probably used about half of the punnet) over the dough, and add a liberal amount of fresh basil. Roll into a sausage and cut 6 slices. I then pinched one side of the slices together to stop the tomatoes escaping from inside, and turned the rolls onto that sealed side, so that the open side faced upwards, see below.

I allowed the rolls to prove for around 40 minutes (I think, again these were a side line to various other things going in and out of the oven) and then baked at 200C/Gas 6 for around 30 minutes - again check to make sure they're not burning.

They were delicious - the sweet tartness of the tomato worked really well with the silky soft, smooth olive oil enriched dough, which was moist and very more-ish. I was really pleased with the way these looked and would definitely make them again. Really good with any Italian meal requiring a bread roll, or with soup for winter lunchtimes. Perfect when there's frost on the ground and a nip in the air.

Fresh from the oven - Edible bread bowls and focaccia

A while ago, Jules over at Domestic Goddess in Training mentioned that the baking group she is part of were looking for new members. I have started to really enjoy making my own bread, as followers of this blog will realise by now! but I wanted something to push me out of my comfort zone (T take note!) and joining a baking group seemed like a good way to do it so I jumped at the chance! I am now a member of Fresh from the Oven.

My first challenge was hosted by Corry of Bake It Off and was to make edible bread bowls, based on a recipe by Richard Bertinet and published in his book 'Dough'. I actually have this book, and have opened it and admired the lovely photography and creative ideas many times but had only baked once from it (a plain white loaf if I recall correctly), so I was really pleased to get another chance using a different recipe. Edible bread bowls sound like a nice idea, but I wasn't honestly sure how well I could get them to work, and my fears were well founded. The dough came together well, and was easy to work. I have a confession to make though, I'm afraid that I have tried Richard Bertinet's method of working dough in the past and found it messy with the dough being sticky and difficult to work, and I didn't find that the dough became smooth and pliable, remaining obstinately sticky when I tried in spite of watching the very helpful DVD that came with the book (and can be found here online - he is making a sweet dough in the video, but the technique is applicable to all dough) so I defaulted to my chosen Dan Lepard technique for the dough, which worked perfectly.

I had difficulty in shaping the dough around the bowls and found that the edge ended up significantly thicker than the base, which is annoying if you're planning to pour soup into it - the base needs to be strong and thick, not thin and weak! I think that resting the dough for a little after knocking the air out of it might help for the future. So my bowls were never graced with soup, I have to admit that I broke them up and used them as chunky croutons, which worked really well! The other problem I encountered was that the insides of the bowl were very pale in comparison to the exterior, as you can see by comparing the photos above and below. I'm not really sure how to recify this though.

I'm sure other people will have made much more successful attempts at this great idea than me though, so check out the round up over at the Fresh From The Oven blog for better pictures and more inspiration.



However, one of the benefits of owning this lovely book was that I could look at the original recipe. The book is divided into four main sections, covering four doughs - white, olive (used for this challenge), brown and rye. At the start of each section is an inspiring double page photographic spread of all the breads Bertinet will show you how to make with that particular dough. In the olive dough section are tempting delights such as pizza, pancetta and mixed olive bread and ciabatta, along with one of my favourites, rock salt and rosemary focaccia. How could I resist using some of my dough to make one of these lovely breads? Well, I couldn't and it was much more successful than the bread bowls!


I used dried rosemary I as find fresh tends to burn, and I thouroughly enjoyed this focaccia. The texture of the dough was superb - moist and tender and just slightly chewy, just the way I like my focaccia. A perfect accompaniment to a risotto or a lovely bowl of soup - enjoy!