Artisan Bread

I love making bread on principle, but I'm still vaguely intimdated. So far my "mastery" only extends to focaccia, bagels and slider buns.  A few weeks ago, however, my friend Nettie shared a recipe for "5 minute bread" on Facebook.  How could this not be easy and fun and probably tasty?
So it's not actually 5 minute bread.  But it does only take about 5 minutes of work.  With a wooden spoon. No intensive kneading, no bread maker, no randomly finding flour on the side of your fridge the next week (ok maybe that one).

This recipe makes between 3 and 5 loaves of bread, depending on the size of loaf you make.  I'm also told it makes good pizza rolls, or you could mix in some garlic or olives to add some flavour. But here is the base, it is delicious and easy to make!

Artisan Bread
from http://www.foodess.com/2009/03/artisan-bread-in-five-minutes/
1 1/2 T yeast (dry, active yeast)
3/4 T fine salt (or 1 1/2 T coarse salt - kosher or sea salt) *SEE NOTE
3 cups warm water
6 1/2 cups sifted all purpose/plain flour (plus extra for dusting)
Cornmeal

Dough preparation (do ahead of time, at least 3 hours, but preferably overnight)

1. In a large mixing bowl, stir together yeast, salt and warm water.
2. Add flour and stir with a wooden spoon until combined.  You could also use a blender with a dough attachment or even your hands, but the wooden spoon worked just fine for me.  This is your five minute step. It's really this easy.
3. Set dough aside (uncovered) in a warm dry place.  Let rise for at least two hours, up to overnight. Dough will rise and then collapse.
4. Set dough in fridge and partially cover (I used a dishcloth).  Do not cover complete as there are gases that need to escape from the active yeast.

Hungry? It's time to bake that bread!

1. Using a serrated knife, pull of a ball of dough to bake.  A piece around the size of a grapefruit makes a 1-lb loaf, according to the recipe source. I used this as my guide to make a "small bread".
2. Turn ball of dough out onto a floured surface.  Stretch the dough and tuck the edges underneath, top surface of dough will be smooth.  If you want to make a flatbread or pizza roll, shape it accordingly at this stage.
3. Using a baking sheet or pizza sheet, roll the dough in a light dusting of cornflour for a crunchy crust.  Let sit for ~40 minutes to rest the dough.
4. 20 minutes before baking, place a pizza stone or upturned baking tray* on the middle rack of your oven (or bottom).  On the top shelf, place a shallow oven proof dish.
5. Preheat oven to 450F.
6. Working quickly to keep heat in the oven, place dough on pre-heated pizza stone or etc and 1-2 cups of water in the shallow dish to create steam.  Close the door to the oven to keep the steam in.
7. Bake for ~30 minutes or until crust is golden brown.  Exact cooking time will depend on the size of your loaf.  The bread is done when it sounds "hollow" if you knock on it.
8. Store any leftover bread wrapped in paper.

I had this with butternut pumpkin soup last night for Meat Free Monday.  And it was really great today as well for lunch.

Notes:
* The recipe calls for 1 1/2 Tbsp coarse salt (e.g. sea salt). I didn't have any coarse salt, so I used a much smaller portion of fine salt.  If you have a coarse salt, I recommend using that and using the larger amount.  I actually used a 1/2 Tbsp of fine salt, and it turned out OK, great if you're going low sodium, but it didn't rise as much as it could have.  Next time I'm going to use the larger portion of salt (or find some coarse salt because it's better anyway).

** So this is something that I would not have known -- using the upturned baking sheet keeps the edges from affecting heat distribution so that you get a crusty bottom to your bread.  Makes sense but I never would have thought of that.

Happy baking!

Garlic Naan

So I have a boatload of work to do for my thesis, which means that boyfriend is benefiting from my procrastination tactics. I made  a ho-hum vegetable curry yesterday, but as a side, I made some naan bread. From scratch! YUM!

Garlic Naan Bread
Adapted from: Best Recipes
2-3 cups white flour
1 t dry active yeast (~1/2 a 7g packet)
3/4 cup warm water
2 T olive oil (or ghee, if you have it)
2 1/2 T greek yogurt
2 cloves garlic
1 t white sugar
1 t salt
a pinch of baking powder

1. Mix water and yeast in a bowl until slightly frothy, then set aside for 5-10 minutes.
2. Sift flour, sugar, salt and baking powder into a large bowl.  I used 2 cups of flour and found my dough too moist, so making it again, I would use 2 1/2 cups of flour to start, and then add as needed.
3. Finely chop 2 cloves garlic.
4. Mix yeast, yogurt, oil and garlic into the flour mixture.
5. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead until a smooth dough is formed.
6. Put dough back into bowl and cover with a towel, set aside in a warm dry place for 2-4 hours.  I tried a new trick that I learned on MasterChef instead of the towel.  Rub a small amount of oil onto saran wrap, cover bowl with saran wrap and flip upside down so that the dough rests on the plastic wrap, covered by the bowl.
7. 30 minutes before you want to eat your bread, place two baking trays or pizza stones into the oven and preheat to 200C/400F. A really hot oven is necessary.
8. Divide dough in 4 to 8 pieces and turn out onto a lightly floured surface.  Knead dough until smooth and form into irregular rectangular-ish shapes.
9. Place 2 pieces of dough on wax paper on each cookie sheet. Brush lightly with oil.
10. Bake until golden ontop, 5-10 minutes.

So I'll be honest, this was my first try. It didn't turn out looking too much like traditional naan bread, but it was a heck of a lot tastier than the store bought stuff...

Homemade Pizzas

Boyfriend and I found ourselves wandering through the markets this weekend trying to decide what we wanted to make for dinner. We walked past some people chowing down on pizza and decided. Yup. Fancypants pizzas for us!

The great thing about being a the markets, of course, is the wide variety of fresh, cheap and delicious ingredients to choose from. Example: 3 bags of garlic for $4. There will be no vampires in our home any time soon, that's for sure.

Unfortunately, they didn't sell any pizza dough at the markets. Big disappointment. They had premade pizza bases, but apparently we're purists who only want pizza if we get to knead the dough. And by we in this statement I mean he wanted pizza dough so I could knead it. Blarg.

Oh well. I spent a good hour or two looking up recipes for pizza dough once we got home I decided to go with a nice simple recipe from taste.com.au for pizza dough.  It was one of the only ones that actually described how much dough it created (this is a bit of a peeve).  So I have one ball of pizza dough in the freezer and we made two medium sized pizzas.

Pizza Dough
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 7g satchet dried yeast
1/2 t caster sugar
4 cups plain flour
1 tsp salt
4 T olive oil, plus extra

1. In a medium sized bowl, combine water, yeast and sugar. Stir gently to combine then send aside for ~10 minutes (small bubbles should appear after 10 minutes).
2. Mix flour and salt in a large bowl, forming well in the centre.
3. Pour yeast mixture and oil into well, mix to combine with a butter knife.
4. Turn out onto a lightly flour surface and knead for ~10 minutes or until dough is smooth and elastic.
5. Return dough to a lightly oiled bowl, turning dough to coat fully.
6. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside in a warm draft-free area for 30-40 minutes or until doubled size.
7. When dough has risen, divide into three balls.
8. Turn out a ball of dough onto a lightly floured surface. Coat your hands lightly in flour and punch the dough to get the air out.
9. Once air has been punched out of dough, knead the dough into appropriate shape. A rolling pin is helpful here.
10. Another helpful tactic is to lift the dough up by the sides and let gravity stretch it, then turn the dough and stretch another side. If you're really fancy, you can throw it around like those pizza makers in movies and on TV. Warning: floor pizza does not taste as good.
11. Any unused dough can be wrapped in plastic wrap and frozen.

Pizza Toppings

Roasted Red Peppers, Roasted Garlic and Roasted Cherry Tomatoes

One Large Red Pepper

One head garlic

6-10 cherry tomatoes.

Olive oil

Salt

1. Preheat oven to 230C (~475F).
2. Peel excess skin off of garlic head, keeping cloves together.  Chop off the tips of the cloves.
3. Put head of garlic in a ramekin or similar small container, pour a glug oil over top of garlic.
4. Cover with tin foil.
5. Put garlic on middle rack of oven and bake for 40 to 50 minutes.
6. Rinse the red pepper and slice in half, removing stem and seeds.
7. Rub thoroughly with oil.
8. Place, outside up, on a baking tray covered in baking paper. Slide into the oven with the roasted garlic, as close to the top as possible.
9. Cook for 10-15 minutes.
10. When red pepper looks well roasted and skin is slightly blackened, take them out of the oven and transfer to a ziploc bag.
11. Set aside bag of peppers for about 10 minutes.
12. Rinse cherry tomatoes and slice in half.
13. Place on a baking tray, cut side up and sprinkle with salt and olive oil.
14. Put in oven for 5 minutes.
15. Meanwhile, remove pepper from bag and peel the skin off.  
16. Chop as desired and set aside (congrats! You've roasted red peppers).
17. Remove tomatoes from oven when they look sufficiently roasted
18. Let garlic sit for 5-10 minutes after removing from oven to cool down.

Once your pizzas are garnished, bake at ~200C for 10 to 15 minutes, or until cheese is melted and crust is looking golden.

For our pizzas, we went a big gourmet.  We picked up a spicy tomato relish to use as our salt base, along with a glug of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt on my pizza.
Boyfriend fried up some grilled sausage meat which he had formed into small balls.  He also had some sliced button mushrooms, roasted garlic, roasted red peppers, roasted tomatoes and finely chopped basil. For cheese, he had sliced baby bocconcini balls and a handful of grated tasty cheese (it's a type of cheddar).

For my pizza, I used some proscuitto, tomatoes, garlic, red peppers and basil.  For cheese, I used the bocconcini balls and some Meffra Garlic Cheddar we found at the markets. I'd never tried it before but it was YUM. I was originally gonna go for a pecorino or similar with the bocconcini, but I'm glad I changed my mind!

Our pizzas turned out freaking DELICIOUS. And the leftovers were awesome for breakfast this morning too!

PS - This was actually last weekend, but then it took me a week to get the photos off of boyfriend's camera.  You know, the ones that are in focus and look nice? The other ones, obviously, are mine.  More baked sweets coming soon.

Hot Cross Buns

So it's Lent I think, which means it's Hot Cross Bun times. These are one of my favourite seasonal treats, they taste so good lightly toasted with butter and jam. YUM.

I keep eyeing them at the grocery store, but they're $4.50 a pack and I'm still fairly poor. I don't wanna spend all my extra money on tasty bread. That's the money I save to spend on wine!

So I dragged poor boyfriend all over the mall on Saturday looking to replace my 2L Pyrex mixing bowl which I had dropped on the floor a few weeks back. Turns out they are sold out all across the mall. Except for one store, which had them, but was selling them for twice the price that other stores carried them. I had a little mini breakdown in the mall. I totally threw my shopping list at boyfriend's head and had a hissy fit in the grocery store too. Bread flour. WTF is bread flour because they certainly don't sell it at grocery stores here. 

So, weary and triumphant we finally left the mall, then I blew up some strawberry jam in the microwave (not awesome to clean up by the way) and made some hot cross buns. They did not turn out beautiful, but they definitely turned out delicious.

Hot Cross Buns from Recipes+ magazine
4 cups plain flour (or bread flour), plus 1/3 cup flour
1/3 cup caster sugar
1 7g packet dried yeast (2 tsp)
1 t cinnamon*
1/2 t nutmeg
1/2 t allspice
200g raisins**
1 t salt
1 1/2 cups warm milk
60 g butter, melted
1 egg, lightly whisked
1 can apricots in juice

1. In a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, yeast, spices fruit and salt.
2. In a separate bowl, mix  milk, butter and egg.
3. Form a well at centre of flour mixture, pour milk mixture into well and stir until dough is just mixed.
4. Either turning out onto a lightly floured surface, or using dough attachment for your hand mixer, knead dough for ~10 minutes or until smooth and elastic.
5. Place dough in bowl cover with clean tea towel, and set aside in a warm draught-free area untili doubled in size (~1 hour).
6. Grease a 23x23cm slab pan (or similar).
7. Scrape dough from bowl using a spatula and turn onto a lightly floured surface. 
8. Divide dough into 16 small balls (20 if using a larger, rectangular slab pan).
9. Place balls side by side into slab pan and set aside in a warm draught free area for 30 minutes.
10. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 200C/180C fan forced (375/350F).
11. Combine 1/3 cup flour and 1/4 cup water in a small bowl and mix to form a paste.  Transfer to a ziploc bag and cut a small (really small) hole in the corner.
12. Pipe crosses onto the dough.  Let me tell ya, this was strangely tricky.
13. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown and cooked.
14. Heat a small bowl of syrup from canned apricots in microwave, brush tops of buns with the sauce.***

* The recipe calls for 'mixed spices', which is actually a thing you can buy at the grocery store.  However, all it is is cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice mixed together. I happen to keep all these things on hand anyway.

** Raisins are our preference, but dried fruit mix is also pretty commonly used in hot cross buns, I just don't like it much.

*** Recipe calls for warm, strained apricot jam, however I don't like apricot jam so instead I simply used the syrup from canned apricots and ate the rest. Yum. Apricots are good.

These made for a fantastic breakfast with some homemade strawberry jam.  My jam, however, needs some work.

Easy, Fluffy Hamburger Buns

Last weekend, I was minding my own business, looking at the various cooking people I follow on Google+, and someone (I'm sorry, I can't remember who) posted a link to the Kitchn's post on 12 Recipes to Know By Heart, and I got sucked in (no surprise there).  So one of the recipes posted on this list was How To Make Your Own Hamburger Buns.  I thought to myself, this must be difficult, bread is complicated, but wait, all the other recipes here are so easy, I'll check it out.

So I did.

And it was easy.

After spending the weekend at the Multicultural Festival here in Canberra, I woke up on Sunday morning envigorated and decided to make slow cooker chili. I'm not going to bore you with the recipe because a) ground beef in the slow cooker is nothing special and b) my chili recipe is nothing special either.

However, these buns were delicious. I halved the recipe from the Kitchn blog, simply because I only had enough yeast for half a batch, and it worked pretty well. I look forward to trying the full recipe some time soon and seeing if it makes a difference (it often does).  They were great with chili and not bad the next day either :)

Easy, Fluffy Hamburger Buns
1 7g packet active dry yeast (1/2 T)
1/4 c warm water
1/4 c milk
1 large egg
1 T olive oil
1 T sugar
1/2 t salt
1 1/2 c plain flour
1 T butter
(Sesame Seeds)

1. Poor water into mixing bowl, stir in yeast and let sit until dissolved.
2. In a second bowl, whisk milk, egg, oil, sugar and salt.
3. Pour milk mixture into mixing bowl with yeast and stir.
4. Add flour and mix until combined. 
5. Using a hand mixer (or similar pastry mixer), mix on low speed for 10 minutes, or knead slowly by hand against the counter.
6. Finished dough will be smooth and springy.
7. Place dough into mixing bowl and cover (tea towels are perfect for this).  Let sit in a warm area for ~1 hour (until doubled in size).
8. Turn dough out onto floured surface.
9. Divide dough into 8 pieces and shape into a tight ball by rolling between your hands. *
10. Place balls on baking sheet and let rise until puffy, roughly 30-40 minutes.**
11. Preheat oven to 375F/190C
12. Brush melted butter over risen buns, and then sprinkle lightly with sesame seeds if desired.
13. Bake until golden, ~15 minutes.
14. Slice when buns cool to room temperature.

* I made slider-sized buns, so I made 8, for full sized burgers, this recipe would only make 4. If you make full sized buns, cook for 15-18 minutes.

** Don't touch the buns after they finish rising, I had the brilliant idea to reposition the buns on the sheet before baking and my bun deflated! Horror!

Anyway, these were delicious and light and were great with chilli, and with jam the next morning. I highly recommend them, and pretty much every other recipe I've seen over at the Kitchn Blog, and for the record, the original post has some suggestions on substituting in wheat flour and tips on kneading dough, etc.

On yeasts, they also have a brilliant post that makes yeast seem less scary. For me, this isn't a huge deal, however, since the only yeast they have at my local grocery store is the 7g sachets of active dried yeast... It's really easy to use.  My local grocery store, however, is easy to hate.  I had to explain the difference between baking cocoa and hot chocolate powder to the stock boy today when I asked if they had any cocoa powder in the back. He rolled his eyes at me. I deliberately put the hot chocolate powder back in the wrong aisle. I'm a rebel.

Bite-sized Bagels

So the other day when I was looking for a recipe for bread (I made a Rosemary Focaccia), I also found a post for Cute, cuter, mini bagels over at the Delicious Days blog.  The photos made them look simultaneously delicious and adorable and I've been looking forward to making them ever since.  I actually made two batches, one on Saturday and one on Sunday.  They were fun and easy to make, and boyfriend and I had a great time making them together, and an even better time eating them.  We ate them all, two batches.

Wouldn't you?

Bite-sized Bagels
2 cups white flour
1 tsp salt
165 mL warm water
1 tsp olive oil
1 tsp dry yeast (1/2 a 7g packet of dry yeast)
sesame seeds (or whatever) for topping

1. Sift flour into a large mixing bowl with salt, making a depression in the middle.
2. Pour water and oil into the depression.
3. Spread yeast overtop and cover bowl with a towel.  Set aside for 5-10 minutes.
4. Mix dough until shiny and smooth, either by hand or with the dough attachment on your mixers, adding extra flour if needed.
5. Put in bowl and cover with a towel, set aside in a warm place for 60 to 90 minutes - dough should double in size.
6. Preheat oven to 200C/400F and start a large pot of salted water to boil.
7. Roll out dough and separate into small balls (~1.5-2" in diameter, or the size you want).
8. Poke a hole through the centre of each ball of dough - the recipe recommends a wooden spoon, I used chopsticks and my fingers.
9. Drop bagels in boiling, salted water for ~1 minute, they will rise to the surface.  They will look pruney when they're ready.
10. Place on a baking tray and cover with sesame seeds, or poppy seed, or dill, or whatever you like.
11. Bake for 10-15 minutes.
12. Enjoy the awesomeness.

This recipe was remarkably easy - I mean, making bagels. It seems like a scary amount of work.. but it wasn't! It was super easy! The only bump we hit was that the recipe called for "250g of flour" and I don't actually own a kitchen scale.  I did the usual and got dry weight and liquid weight confused and used the smaller weight of flour - they still turned out ok, we just ended up with a really sticky dough in the early stages.   This recipe makes somewhere between 12 and 16 bagels, depending on how big you make them.

Saturday night, we had these with sloppy joe and a delicious salad.  On Sunday, we had bagels for lunch with cream cheese, smoked salmon and capers. All in all - super delicious. A big thank you to the lovely people at Delicious Days for posting this recipe!

PS - thanks to boyfriend, all the really nice looking photos were taken by him. The slightly out of focus and generally average looking photos were my camera.

Butternut Pumpkin Soup and Rosemary Focaccia

I felt a strange urge today to make bread.  I've only ever tried to make bread twice before and both times were a miserable failure.  The first time, I tried to make a rosemary focaccia from the Barbecue cookbook I mentioned in my post on Spiced Beef Fajitas.  I am sometimes not the greatest at following recipes.  "What the hell is strong flour? I'll just use white flour."  "Ehh... expired dry yeast can't be that bad."  So both of those statements were wrong.   The second time I made bread it was beetroot and cream corn bread. That just explains itself.

I learned today that strong flour aka bread flour is actually quite different than plain flour.  It's got more protein and gluten in it.  It also turns out that my local grocery store does not appreciate my desire to bake bread.  The only regular bread flour they had came in a 5kg bag.  Considering that I was buying other groceries and that I walk home from the store, not to mention how rarely I ever bake bread... I didn't want to buy 5kg, so I ended up in the health/organics aisle buying a 1kg bag of "Organic Egyptian Gold Flour" which was almost the same price.  It was a bit of a frustration.

The pumpkin soup, aka butternut squash soup, I found while reading a story by Ethehunter - she referenced the recipe after describing "Gran's Butternut Squash Soup" in the story.  I tried it and fell in love.

Butternut Pumpkin Soup  from Ethehunter
1 large butternut pumpkin (peeled and chopped)
broth or bouillon (I use veg, she recommends chicken)
2 small red chillies (or 1 jalapeño)
1" fresh ginger, grated
3T brown sugar
salt & pepper
1-2 t cumin
1/2 c heavy cream
queso fresco, sour cream or Greek yoghurt

1. Put squash, ginger and chilli/jalapeño in a large pot and cover with broth.
2. Bring to a boil and simmer over medium heat, 20-30 minutes, or until squash is soft.
3. Let cool and take out the peppers.
4. Blend soup until smooth.
5. Add salt and pepper to taste, brown sugar and cumin.  Adjust spices to taste.
6. Add cream and adjust spice as desired*
7. Garnish with queso fresco, sour cream or Greek yoghurt.

* If you're making enough for leftovers, don't add the cream to the whole pot, because it makes the soup spoil faster.  This may seem like common sense, but I've made this mistake more than once.

I recommend adding sour cream to this, the Greek yoghurt is OK but not great and... well I have never seen queso fresco at the store so I've never tried it.  A piece of advice for this is to be careful about the use of chillies/jalapeños - I added the two chillies today, but only used half a squash - there was a really spicy afterburn.

I forgot to take a picture before I finished all the soup.  This is while it was cooling, before I put it in the blender.  Half a squash (this much) made two good sized bowls of soup, a whole pumpkin would probably serve four.

Rosemary Focaccia aka Focaccia from Scratchia
from: Go Cook Yourself

500g (3 1/3 cups) strong flour

10g fine sea salt

325 mL warm water

5g Fast Acting Yeast

seas salt

crushed garlic

rosemary

1. Mix yeast with warm water.
2. Combine sifted flour and salt in mixing bowl.
3. Pour yeast water into flour and stir until well mixed.
4. On well-floured board, knead dough for 12 minutes.
5. Place kneaded dough in well oiled bowl, cover (with a towel) and let sit for ~1 hour in a warm place.
6. Move dough to board and beat the air out with fists.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6.
8. Heat oven to 240C.
9. Roll dough out onto an oiled baking tray (I lightly oiled a piece of wax paper on a baking tray, because I'm finicky).   The recipe says to roll into a rectangle, but I went for 'somewhat oblong' and about 3/4" thick.
10. Let rise for 30 minutes.
11. Press into dough to create irregular dimples on the surface.
12. Spread washed and chopped rosemary, crushed and chopped garlic and coarse sea salt across the surface of the bread.  Drizzle with olive oil.
13. Bake for 12-15 minutes.
14. Serve warm, it's delicious.

Dough rising in an oiled bowl.

Preheating the oven, dough is dressed with rosemary, garlic, oil and salt.

The finished product, we sliced up about half of it and dipped it in the soup.

I'm still not sold on the bread, I think I have room for improvement, but boyfriend said he liked it, and so I'll take that as due praise. I guess I just need more practice in bread making.  The wine was delicious though!