Recipes, home grown goodness, BBQing and food stuff
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@Crucial said in Recipes, home grown goodness, BBQing and food stuff:
@nzzp said in Recipes, home grown goodness, BBQing and food stuff:
Also, Panasonic Breadmakers FTW. We have hardly bought bread in 15 years... not as awesome as hand made, but still superb for little effort.
Effort in that sourdough loaf was under 10 minutes spread over 24 hours including feeding the starter.
Would be the same for two or three loavesYep, it's great.
But 2 minutes effort to wake up to freshly made bread, day after day is pretty tempting.
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@nzzp said in Recipes, home grown goodness, BBQing and food stuff:
@Crucial said in Recipes, home grown goodness, BBQing and food stuff:
@nzzp said in Recipes, home grown goodness, BBQing and food stuff:
Also, Panasonic Breadmakers FTW. We have hardly bought bread in 15 years... not as awesome as hand made, but still superb for little effort.
Effort in that sourdough loaf was under 10 minutes spread over 24 hours including feeding the starter.
Would be the same for two or three loavesYep, it's great.
But 2 minutes effort to wake up to freshly made bread, day after day is pretty tempting.
Yeah, I used to have one but have since unlearned all I had been taught about making bread (kneading, punching down, warm proofing) and gone for time, structure and fermentation.
The bread is no longer empty calories and cotton wool with a nice smell.
Amazing what the food industry convinced us was good bread in order to sell cheap and quick.
These so called gluten intolerances are at worst intolerance to indigestible goo. Fermented wheat and water is more digestible and more nutritious. It’s why bread became a staple food in various forms across the world.Yes, I’m a born again bread bore.
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Dunno if this belongs in this thread, but I've just made some home-made Tia Maria as the whanau likes to drink the stuff over Christmas. Used good quality stuff - coffee beans, dark rum and vanilla pods.
Tastes real good - not much cheaper than the commercial stuff but lots more depth of flavour and interest
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@Victor-Meldrew funny that no matter where you are in the world people only tend to drink it around Christmas!! Like the sound of this myself, did you use a recipe, I want to start experimenting with drinks like this other than the usual mulled wine, hot whiskeys etc.
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@Crucial I met this health coach recently at a conference, her main audience is older ladies but she had some great material on well being in general, totally passionate about traditional food and cooking, particularly "reclaiming bread". I'd became a bit of a bread-phobe over the years but I'm definitely going to give sourdough a go. Seems to be a bread men love cooking too!
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@R-L said in Recipes, home grown goodness, BBQing and food stuff:
@Victor-Meldrew funny that no matter where you are in the world people only tend to drink it around Christmas!! Like the sound of this myself, did you use a recipe, I want to start experimenting with drinks like this other than the usual mulled wine, hot whiskeys etc.
Just picked up some ideas from various recipes on the web. This is what I did:
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750ml of dark rum
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2 vanilla pods split down teh middle
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10g coffee beans.
- Stick in an airtight jar and leave for a week, shake very day.
- Check you have the amount of coffee/vanilla flavour you want then strain out the beans & Vanilla pods
- Make a sugar syrup of 400ml & 400g sugar and let cool.
- Mix with the coffee/vanilla rum to taste
- Bottle...
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@Victor-Meldrew sounds like a good replacement for Port in the old Xmas slammer.
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@Bones said in Recipes, home grown goodness, BBQing and food stuff:
@Victor-Meldrew sounds like a good replacement for Port in the old Xmas slammer.
Sacre Bleu, Non, non, non!
The bottle of Vintage Port after the Christmas Pud is a sacrosanct tradition for any Meldrew Family Christmas
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@Victor-Meldrew it's best slammed! Piece of cheese, shot of port, grape.
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@Victor-Meldrew I could use this in a tiramisu, I'd probably just want to drink it though
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@R-L
Drink it putting up the Christmas Tree. Bit of a tradition like the Single Malt being opened on Dec 1.
It's really all about alcohol isn't it?
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@Victor-Meldrew Baileys is a favourite of mine at Christmas, god its like Christmas in a bottle, never drink it any other time of year. "Santa's milk" is what we called it last year when it was left out with a mince pie on Xmas eve.
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@R-L
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How do we all stuff the festive bird? Looking for new ideas, never tried birds in birds either, anyone else? Seems like a lot of hard work.
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@Hooroo said in Recipes, home grown goodness, BBQing and food stuff:
@Crucial Can you give us some guidance on producing one of those wee numbers you have in the photos.
I can go into great detail and/or simple steps on my current method but tbh I would have no idea if it would work for you.
Yes there are some basic skills and ratios and concepts that you need to respect (not necessarily adhere to) but the beauty about sourdough in particular is that you discover what works well for you as a process and are forever adjusting/learning. The end result is yours.
It's kind of like asking for a wine recipe.What I can do though is point you toward some stuff that I learned from and tried things from along the way and give you some absolute basics.
First is recipe (in its simplest form)
Flour
Water
SaltThat's it. The amounts used is a method called the baker's ratio. First thing I will say that you absolutely need equipment wise is a good set of scales to the gram. Just cheap digital ones will do as long as they will weigh by the gram and up to the total of the bowl you use and the amount of mix (probably 2kg max is all you need)
The ratio works like this...you will see recipes and videos where people talk about hydration %s and it sounds complicated. It isn't.
(I will use the single loaf I made in those photos)Start with your amount of flour. 500g
Then add your amount of starter (I will cover this later) 200g (which is 100g flour and 100g water)
Your mix will likely be anywhere between 66% hydration and 72%. The 66% one is low hydration, the 72% very high. Believe me these slight variations make a huge difference hence the need for scales.
So the calculation. Do this right and you get a 'well done' from Rachel
Flour 500 +100 =600g
Water = flour x ratio therefore 600 * 70% = 420. Less the 100 from the starter means you add 320g of water to the dough.So a 68% mix would be 308g of water, a 66% would be 296g. That difference of only 26g of water is huge. The difference between a tight, tough dough and a loose wet one.
My recommendation as a start point would be to try 67-68% while learning techniques.
As an aside, when I was originally taught bread basics as a chef the ratio was always 'a pound to half a pint' which is 2/3s or 66.66% which is pretty much what breadmakers etc use.Now the variables in ingredients (which is what causes you to play around and find what works for you)
Flour - some people will advocate only using Organic and/or stone ground etc etc. You do want to use bread (or High Grade) flour though which has a higher gluten content. It is 'stronger' and will develop the structure that captures the little pockets of air which will help you shape the loaf and help it rise in the oven. Given that organic strong flour in NZ is hideously expensive went cheap and had to experiment a bit when I got home and actually found that Pams High Grade is much better that the more expensive Champion and Edmonds brands. This is probably because the Pams is some imported stuff from Bulgaria using a Canadian wheat variety and the others are local NZ flours which are notoriously 'soft'.
The next thing I had to adjust was that in the UK I used 80% white and 20% wholemeal in my dough. What I have found here is that what is sold as Wholemeal looks to be white with wheat bran mixed back into it rather than the bran being ground with the kernel. Wheat bran by itself gets hydrophobic and although it gets wet it doesn't absorb liquid in the same way. I was getting really sloppy gooey dough that wouldn't hold together.
Currently I am using 100% white and starting to experiment with other options as I like the nuttier taste that the bran element brings.Water - Not much to say here except that I use filtered or boiled water. I have no experiment that backs this up but I would prefer to remove the possibility of chlorine killing or dulling the starter and fermentation.
Salt - Use whatever you like but you do need salt or your bread will taste shite. 10g to the mix above is enough. finer ground salt will disperse through the dough better than flakes or rough salt.
Now about the starter - There is lots of bullshit on the internet about starters. People get massively put off making sourdough as they think they need to keep this constantly demanding pet that requires daily feeding and monitoring or it will die. Some twits even get their starters 'babysat' when they go away even for a weekend.
Now this is where I am going to hand over to https://www.bakewithjack.co.uk/videos
Search out his video on the 'Scrapings Method' this is what I currently do and it is simple as. I have a jar with a very small amount of starter that lives in the fridge dormant. I bring it out around 12 hours before I need it and add the amount of flour and water I need to it (so 100g plus 100g) and leave it on the bench until needed. When I have taken 200g out I just put it back in the fridge and don't touch it.All of the above is just a starting point to try and explain just how easy yet complicated making sourdough is. Flour, water and salt. Simple as.
For me, now that I have worked out what works for me, I simply take that starter out of the fridge the night before, feed it, mix the dough to the ratio (combine together - not knead) and leave that aside for 5-6 hours. I do a little manipulation to build structure, pre-shape (takes 30 seconds), leave again, shape and put into banneton, leave again then bake.All of those steps will involve variables such as ambient room temp, strength of starter, ingredients, shaping technique blah, blah blah. These are the things you need to discover yourself.
So, where to go from here? You could just look at more pictures of Rachel but if you want to play with dough you could start making yeasted loaves with lees yeast and more time. You could try making a yeasted loaf where you don't add the yeast until the flour/water mix has 'fermented' (making a Biga or Autolyse or whatever you want to call it) e.g. you mix your flour and water the night before and put it in a covered container in a cool place to let the gluten develop naturally, then add the yeast, give a light knead and carry on.
You could watch videos on the 'dutch oven' no knead method of making sourdough which takes away some of the scariness of working with wet dough (this is how I started making it).That link I put up before of 'Bake with Jack' has a wealth of information. Some may not like his approach or attempt to be the bread version of Jamie Oliver, but I like his philosophy and upbeatness over technical tossers that tell you how you 'must' do things or you will fail. His videos are a bit random in their order but just start watching them and he will always point you back to previous ones to explain a technique.
If you are still reading this then I'm guessing you are interested but if you want your interested piqued more then watch the episode titled 'Air' in this Netflix 4 parter.
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@R-L said in Recipes, home grown goodness, BBQing and food stuff:
How do we all stuff the festive bird?
I usually let her drink enough that I may get lucky