Saturday, March 31, 2012
Baking bread - Linseed-sesame bread
One of the first things I started doing myself in Namibia, was bread. And not, because you don't get good bread in Namibia, you do. With the German past and still present influence, you will hardly miss the German culinary world. There are not only plenty German restaurants in Namibia, but also the typical occupations like baker and butcher, the Germans are famous for, are either influenced by or in hand of Germans. Beside Namibia importing wast of German products for the "feel at home" sensation.
But it was a new challenge. I asked myself, is it possible to bake bread at home as good as you can buy at the bakery or even better? Well, I don't know, if it's better, but at least as good as and I know, what ingredients I'm using. The main motive for me cooking, was being aware of the ingredients I'm using. After the birth of our daughter even more than ever.
I remember I baked my first breads without a yeast sponge or sour dough. They are tasty, the day you bake them and if you're lucky even the day after. But we need mostly a bit longer, to finish a bread. I remember reading millions of recipes and various websites about baking bread, one of them very helpful from a German baker (Bäcker Süpke's Welt).
The preparation of bread spread to two days or more kind of scared me off. And to be honest, when I was baking bread, then I needed it now or never, always somehow last minute. But after throwing away, I don't remember how many halves of breads, me, who is very aware of being poor and having nothing to eat and of the poverty in our country, I realised, that I have to change my bread baking behaviour. And I did and was rewarded with fantastic bread, sometimes even ready in only one day.
My first sour dough I made from a ready to buy sachet. It was a German product, I don't know if you can buy ready sour dough all over the world. You can always do your starter yourself.
The linseed-sesame bread was again part of my birthday gift for my mum in law. I know, I'm late with my publishing, but I was sick and not really in the mood of writing. No excuse.
So let's start, we don't want to waste any more time. One more thing, I only bake small breads, as I like eating them as fresh as possible. Please join me!
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Let's make some jam today
I wasn't in the mood for making either of the dishes, so I bought the rhubarb without any recipe in mind.
Back home, I not only had an idea what to make, I also solved my problem, what to give my mother in law for her birthday. She loves rhubarb, but doesn't really like cake and while I looked at my freshly baked bread I decided to make some jam.
I don't really have a sweet tooth and till today I've only made jam once or twice, so I had to look up some recipes. To my disappointment all of them were either mixed with strawberries that I can't buy at the moment, or bananas. As I don't like the combination of bananas with rhubarb I was pretty clueless. Thinking about making a pure rhubarb jam, I had the fear of rhubarb not having enough pectin to set.
A glimpse to the limes gave me the inspiration for this recipe. I saw in all the recipes, that some kind of a citrus fruit was always used, but I was unsure, if the jam would come out very sour. But I decided to give it a try. As I had vanilla beans left from our stay at Mauritius I put one of those in as well. Out came a delicious jam, although not as firm as I expected. Still worth writing about it. And at the end, half of the jam became part of the birthday gift for my mom in law.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Sunday is pancake day
By the time, our daughter started to eat solids, we introduced "Pancake Sunday". Pancakes are simple, easy to make and you can diversify them with different fillings. But most of all, our little one loves them and so do we. And now it became a tradition. I try to alternate every Sunday between the crêpe style pancakes, I know from my childhood, and American pancakes, or Flapjacks, as they are also called.
That Sunday I decided for crêpe style pancakes, we call them naleśniki in Poland, on the net you find them as polish crêpe . They are not as thin as french crêpe, but used the same way.
Please don't think, because I'm doing them every Sunday, they turn out perfect. If it comes to taste and texture, I found the perfect recipe for us, but I still don't manage to do them perfectly round and evenly thin. Every Sunday I try to perfect my technique, try to pour the batter differently, and still... somehow I'm not capable of getting them right. But I'll never give up. One day...
The recipe I show you today is a basic recipe. The secret of the moist and elastic texture, is the balance between the ingredients. Please don't do the mistake replacing the water with milk. That would make the pancakes very hard. But on the other hand you can leave the milk out and replace it with water, that's up to you. Then you must watch the batter not becoming to fluid. You can use the pancakes for sweet or savoury dishes either way. My mom mostly filled them with jam, Nutella (or any other chocolate spread) or vanilla cottage cheese with raisins and almonds. She fried them rather blank in the first place, filled and browned them again with butter, so they became golden and crispy on the outside, but stayed nicely soft on the inside. You can imagine, I do it the same way till today. However, be pretty careful with the jam; it starts getting runny as soon as heated, so does Nutella.
Two of my favourite savoury dishes are pancakes with spinach and chicken in a nice béchamel sauce (white sauce) and pancakes with ham, asparagus and sauce hollandaise.
But I will come to that anytime soon. For today let's just start at the beginning, with the pancakes.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
About flour
I never paid a lot attention to the flour, since I refused to bake for many years. I suppose that was one of the causes for my continued failure in my baking projects. If you want to bake well, you must start to understand the difference between flours. I got that, when I eventually gave baking another try and with lot's of experimenting I started to love it. I still fail now and then, mostly because I don't stick exactly to the recipes, which seems to be very important, but more and more the outcomes are really tasty. The most important thing about the use of flour is the content of gluten and its effect. Gluten is the main protein in wheat and its content is influenced by the milling, the husk and the removing of the wheat germ. Gluten gives the dough its elasticity, as it absorbs water very well, that again makes the dough light and spongy.
Most of the facts below refer to an article in the South African "Food and Home", Issue June 2011. I'm not talking about all flours discussed in the article, only about flours I mostly use.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Burger brioche buns and an accidental bread
In my mind, the best burger buns ever. I never made the effort of baking burger buns myself, as I could always get them in the shops. That changed when I moved to Namibia, where one can't get them at all. You only get burgers made with ordinary white flour buns, even in the (fast food) restaurants. After a while, I started missing those soft buns I knew. So I decided to give it a try and bake the buns myself. After trying a few recipes, which were mostly terribly disappointing, I already gave up and settled for enjoying my burgers during my visits in Europe or on holidays.
Said so, on our honeymoon in January, we went to Mauritius and had the best burgers in a long time and the buns were made from brioche dough. Back home, I started again browsing, this time for burger brioche buns and luckily I found them here. It wouldn't be me, if I wouldn't make a mistake. While mixing the ingredients, I became suspicious, when the dough wasn't as runny as described in the recipe. The problem was I converted the milliliter measurement one-on-one to gram, without even thinking. So now I had to research how to modify the measurement right. As it turned out, I used way too much flour. The recipe you find is with the converted measurements and according to my liking and also to the ingredients I can get here. As you can see on the picture, they turned out perfect; and they not only look lekker, as you say in Namibia, they are delicious.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(Atom)
Connect
/>
Bloglovin
