Pitta rising

One of the main delights of reading a cook book is in how it demystifies cooking. Those dishes that seem so intimidating are made approachable with a recipe's few easy steps; just follow the instructions.

This works for the everyday items, too. Pitta bread, for instance; bought with a punnet of hummus, consumed with some haloumi cheese, available in food outlets high and low, so commonplace that one needn't try to make it oneself. Where would one start? Why would one bother?

First answer: looking in the Fabulous Baker Brothers book (again). Second answer: it's fun, quick and in my view the results are tastier than what's available in most stores.

Quick? Oh yes, surprisingly so. But first, the ingredients: mix a sachet of dried yeast in a jug with 20 millilitres of rapeseed oil and 300 millilitres of tepid water; add this combined liquid to 560 grams of strong white flour with 10 grams of sea salt in a large bowl. 

Mix and knead for 15 minutes by hand or for ten minutes by machine with a dough hook: any excess wetness from the liquid will soon disappear as you create a pliable bread dough. Cover with a tea towel and leave for an hour.

Pulling off the tea towel, the dough should have expanded up to twice its size. Now comes the cooking, so heat up your oven to 230º Celsius, or whatever your oven's maximum is (ours is a lowly 200ºC, but we love it so). Put a baking tray inside to heat up with the oven.

While the oven's warming up, pull off pieces of the dough of around 100 grams each. Shape each one into a ball and, on a well-floured work surface, roll the dough out into pittas, keeping both sides well-floured so they don't stick. Keep rolling until the pitta is as long as your arm, from knuckle to elbow.

Once ready, pull out the baking tray with oven gloves or the like and place the pitta onto it carefully. Now, place this in the oven. Within 30 seconds, the pitta bread will start rising... and in well under five minutes, the pitta bread will have not have just risen but ballooned, browned and baked.

Take this out and let dry on a rack; continue with the next ball of dough and then next and the next, until you've got a pile of warm pittas ready for eating or storing. Next? Buy some hummus or haloumi cheese or... actually, why not make some?

More bread

I remember watching Channel Four's cookery show, The Fabulous Baker Brothers, for the first time. I envied the Tom and Henry Herbert's kitchen, their enthusiasm and their time (all that time spent just cooking pies, bread and puddings!) but putting my envy aside, I was inspired. Inspiration was fed further with my housemate buying the series' cookbook for my birthday: I've been working through it since.

So far I've cooked a variety of loaves, some of which will be handy staples. However, what follows is my favourite recipe so far.

Actually, I'm not sure if I've got their Six Seed Malted Wheat Loaf absolutely right: one needs 560 grams of malted wheat flour, but so far I've only found mixed grain malthouse bread flour... I'm sure the real mccoy is available somewhere, but I haven't found it yet. Anyway, it still tastes nice, mainly because added to the flour are 85 grams of mixed seeds, like pumpkin, millet, linseed, poppy, sesame and sunflower. (One can buy these individually from most food stores, or in a mixed bag from others.)

Place all these ingredients in a mixing bowl with 10 grams of sea salt, 5 grams of dried yeast, 20 grams of rapeseed or olive oil with 385 grams of tepid water. Mix them all together, then knead by hand for 15 minutes.

Should you find the dough a little wet, worry not; sprinkle a little flour over your sticky fingers and knead into the bread. It should firm up in no time.

Cover and leave for an hour to rise, after which you're supposed to shape and place it in a proving basket, but I don't own one, so I opt to turn it over, cover it and leave it for another hour.

After this, put on your oven as high as it can go. My ancient machine can go up to 200ºC, but if yours can go up to 240ºC, knock yourself out. Place your dough in a floured baking tray, slash its top and place it in your hot oven, turning it down to 210ºC after ten minutes. (Or, if you have a cooker like mine, just leave the temperature as is.)

About half an hour later, take the loaf out, turn onto a metal rack and leave it to stand. Cut a still warm slice and smear the seed-filled bread with butter and let the flavours fill your mouth. It is absolutely delicious: nutty and nourishing. One for sandwiches or enjoying by itself.

The wonder of bread

I love bread.

I love baking it and I love its taste. I love it in all its varieties: basic loaves; bagels; sourdough; focaccias; and often I find myself looking for a new recipe to try. Once found, I work at it repeatedly until I get the loaf just the way I want, before moving onto another.

Some years ago on a trip to Japan, I cooked a meal with a friend. While I set about making the best chilli con carne possible, she looked through a folder full of bread recipes; the loaf she made was white, soft and delicious. As we all ate later, I decided to make it my business to find bread recipes and start baking my own loaves on my return to England.

Since then, I cook bread as much for pleasure as necessity; after a stressed day at work, a few hours making a new loaf is comfort indeed. The resulting loaf is delightful, too.

It's the "few hours" bit that seems to send those considering baking their own bread rushing away from kneading in a bowl or on a surface to the bread-machine or the local shop, but although the start to finish time for baking a loaf is a few hours, they are not too involved, with the cook being able to take a lot of breaks while the bread does its own thing.

The recipe that follows is a mix: Jamie Oliver's basic loaf was the first I made regularly. A few Nigella Lawson techniques make their way into this recipe. Dan Lepard's tips are also followed. I'm sure I'll be learning from other cooks as time goes by.

To make a basic loaf, you need: 400g of strong white flour; 200ml of tepid water; one sachet of fast-action yeast (equivalent to a teaspoonful) and a teaspoon of salt. You can do your dough mixing and kneading on a work surface. I tend to use a large bowl.

Place your yeast and salt in the bowl and add a little of the water. Stir then leave for ten minutes while the yeast bubbles up. There's lots of leaving ingredients to do their thing, so I do advise you to have something to be getting on with, say letter writing, reading or phone calls in the meantime.

Some stuff to be getting on with

After ten minutes, add your flour to the yeast and salt, followed by the rest of the water. Now, with the fingers of one hand, rather like a spider, start mixing. This is where the magic starts:

the four ingredients forming something new. Under your fingers, over about five minutes, bread dough will begin to form. Keep kneading for another five or so minutes - listen to a song on the radio to time yourself - then stop, sprinkle the top of the dough with a little flour, cover with a tea towel and leave for ten minutes. This might be a good time to get on with your stuff.

After ten minutes, uncover the dough and knead for another five minutes. Sprinkle the dough with a little flour. Cover and leave for another ten minutes. Do all this once again: you will notice your bread dough becoming firmer, more pliable. Sprinkle with flour, cover and leave for 45 minutes to rise.

Taking off the tea towel later, you will see that the dough has increased size somewhat; maybe by twice as much. If not, don't worry, there's another rising session to come; also further rising will occur when you bake the dough later.

Grease and flour a baking tray then lift your bread dough out onto a floured work surface. Press the dough into a rough oval shape then slowly, carefully and tightly roll your dough, pinching both ends to make it neat. Place on your prepared baking tray. Cover and leave for another 45 minutes. Get on with some more stuff.

Half an hour later, turn your oven onto 200ºC. By the time it's ready, you can uncover your bread dough. Sprinkle the top of it with a little more flour and cut a deep slash down its spine. Now, place it in the oven for half an hour.

Before...

30 minutes later, take out your loaf and place it on a rack to cool. There are various testing methods to check if it's done: tapping the bottom to see if it sounds 'hollow' is one I've heard, but you can normally tell; the bread has risen, the crust is golden and you want to eat it. Wait for about 20 minutes while it cools.

...after!

After this time, you should be able to touch it without hurting yourself. Then, by all means start eating it. It will still be warm. You will discover that, for about three hours time and a little effort, you have made yourself a delicious loaf of white bread. You'll want to make some more.

Serving suggestion

As I said, there are many varieties of bread to try. I'll post up a few more as and when I attempt them.

Give us this day, our daily rosemary loaf

It must be the weather, or the time of year, or something.  Blue Monday has been and gone.  Whew!  Over for another year.  I try to ignore it when the media exhorts us all to feel dire. Weather is rubbish, credit card bills from Christmas all due, no sun, no warmth (well, OK it's been mild for winter but not warm, precisely), no holidays in prospect and the grey skies and damp air are enough to affect even the relentlessly cheery.  We want to hibernate, crank up the  heat and turn to comfort food at the very least.  I begin to feel all 'mumsy' and need to make hearty stew or soup and now, it would seem, bread!  OMG.....

A few years ago I went out and got myself a slow cooker for the stews and I'm happy to report it was not one of those things that got used once then sat in the cupboard gathering dust for eternity.  I have used it a great deal:  in fact, I got so enthusiastic about crock pot cooking rediscovered that I went and bought a better one with an insert pot that will brown the meat on the hob and then goes into the heating element to spend hours lazily cooking to perfection .

A few years before that, it was a bread maker, prompted by a craving for fresh bread that Kit could eat without fear of allergic reaction from any stray nuts or nut products in the bakery.  This, too, has been an appliance hit and I apologise to those of you who make it from scratch and have the time and patience to knead and wait and knead and wait.  I've been there, done that and even, in my youth, attempted croissants and braided egg bread and all kinds of weird and wonderful yeast-based carbs when I got onto a break-making kick in my teens.  Now, however, I prefer to leave the hand kneading to those who enjoy it while I simply plug in the trusty Panasonic and let it get to work.

Today is definitely a bread day.  Yesterday's yummy-sounding post had to do with another antidote to the January blahs and I considered a few alternatives for my own panacea, then hit on bread, more precisely rosemary bread.  And this is why:

Last Saturday, David and I drove down to Tunbridge Wells, a place we used to visit a great deal but which, now we have Europe's largest (and, we think, best) shopping mall almost on our doorstep, has fallen by the wayside.  There are fewer shops, no free parking and it's not all under one elegant atrium roof.   But we spent a couple of nostagic hours revisiting old haunts and noted the demise of some shops and the birth of a couple of others.  We even bought a bed.  But I digress.

  There is a little bakery, Flour Power City Bakery, on Monson Road and David nipped in and bought a loaf of rosemary bread for our lunch.

It was wonderful and,quite simply, one of the best breads we've ever eaten.  It's not something one would toast for breakfast, necessarily, but with soup, or cheese, or any savoury, it was a perfect accompaniment and oh, so moreish.  

So I offer my own version now, which is adapted from my other recipes for the bread machine with the addition of the necessary herbs.  It works. 

Into the loaf pan of your bread maker, measure out

1 tsp fast-acting yeast
1 tsp white or golden caster sugar
1 tsp salt
pinch (good-sized if you like herbs) Italian seasoning
2 tsps dried rosemary
pinch ground black pepper
320 g bread flour (I used half white, half granary on this first try)

Pour 170 ml water on the top and 2 tbsp olive oil

Set on the 'basic' or 'white' bread setting and let 'er go!

The result was exactly what I hoped for.  The bread was soft and 'herby' and went very well with the leftover chili and rice from last night.