Sunday 28 June 2015

How low can you go? No Knead Bread for one.



Southwest 4 or 5, veering west 3 later.
Slight, occasionally moderate.
Showers.
Good, occasionally poor.



As mentioned before, baking bread for one person is a bit of a challenge. First of all it is not a question of just halving the ingredients and second my bread machine cant cope with such a small amount of dough. And sometimes I cant cope with making dough by hand. I have arthritis. It is not bad (yet), it comes and goes (still) and even when I have an “attack”, I can still move my hands, albeit with a bit of pain. It is a shadow of things to come. And I dread the day when it gets worse.
Especially if I think about bread making. The other day I had such an attack while making Pide and my heart sank. I literally salted the dough with tears of pain. Since then I experiment with my favourite bread, the glorious No-Knead bread.
It tastes fantastic, a bit like a mixture between a sourdough and very rustic farmers bread, it is dead easy to make and the best: it is No-knead. Nope, no kneading necessary.
There are two disadvantages which can be easily overcome: it is very time-consuming- you “work” for a max of 5 minutes in total but need around 18 hours resting time- and you need a “Dutch Oven” (casserole pan), commonly sold as Le Creuset or its imitators. It needs a heavy lid. But it is worth buying it for that purpose alone, I actually think about buying the smallest version just for making this bread better for one. Just want to check first how much they are in France.

If you are not familiar with the idea of the No-knead bread, please watch this video. It explains the easy-peasy steps in detail
It also uses different flours, which I won’t for your first time.
As you might have noticed, the ratio between flour and water is 2:1. This is okay if you make the bread for a family and use 3 cups of flour or for a large family and use 6 cups of flour. But if you get lower, you need to add a bit more water.

BTW, I should have said it long ago: If I talk of cups and teaspoons, I don’t mean the US system where you have exact sized plastic cups, but I use one of my coffee cups for all and a teaspoon is my teaspoon. However, if you like baking you ought to invest in the exact plastic pots. You can pick them up in most supermarkets and they look like this  or you can buy this fun looking Russian doll .
Anyway, back to the liquid business. If you use 2 cups of flour you should add 1 cup of water and one tbsp, if you use 1 cup of flour and ½ cup of water you should add a tbsp and a tsp more of water. Or, if you want to follow my recipe: Kefir or buttermilk.
If you don’t have either, use water for your first time, but do try it next time with kefir, the taste is so much better.
The following recipe is enough for one person to have enough bread for a day, or a huge lunch sandwich or for two people with a soup or stew.

No-Knead Bread for One
1 cup of plain flour and an extra half a cup for flouring the surface
1/8 of a teaspoon of dried yeast
1/8 of a teaspoon of salt
(honestly, don’t faff about, just use a generous pinch each)
½ cup of water
1+1/2 tbsp of kefir

Mix the cup of flour, salt and yeast in a bowl, add the two liquids and stir for a minute or two. The dough will be very wet.
Cover with cling film and leave outside (so not in the fridge) at room temperature for 12 hours or more, but not longer than 16.
Generously flour a piece of baking paper and scrap that stringy looking mess onto it. Sprinkle more flour on top and into your hands and stretch it apart so you end up with flat dough. Fold one third in and do the same with the opposite side. Now fold one third of the top in and the same with the bottom. It will probably look like a square-ish ball. Cover with more flour and put a tea towel on top, but try to avoid a terry towel. Leave to rest for about 15 minutes, then turn it upside down so the bread is now on the towel with the seam side down. Cover again with flower and top with either another towel or the sides of yours. Leave for about two hours. It might not rise very much, but when you poke it you should see a dent.
Preheat oven to 240C for at least half an hour and put your casserole pan, including lid, in it while it warms up. The cooking vessel should be blazing hot, so you better have a good oven glove when you remove the lid later.
Once the dough and oven is ready, quickly remove the lid of the pan and dumb the bread upside down into the pan. The seam side will be now up. Cover with the lid and bake closed for 15 minutes. Check and see if it needs a bit more, I tend to add about 5 more minutes, still with the lid on and about 3 minutes to give it more crust without lid if desired (rarely needed but this is up to personal taste). Take the bread out (I use a slotted turner for this: The bread comes out very easily and I just leave the pan in the oven to cool down) and let cool down on a rack.
Enjoy.

Wednesday 24 June 2015

Confit Potatoes. Twice.



South or southwest 3 or 4, increasing 5 at times.
Slight, occasionally moderate at first.
Fair.
Good.




I mentioned my love for potatoes before and if I hear about a new preparation method I normally cant wait to try it out.
Quite a few restaurants serve now “confit potatoes”, a preparation method I know from duck confit or vegetable confit. Basically you cook duck on low temperature in extra duck fat, and once it is done, leave it in the fat (make sure it`s fully submerged), put into a cold place so the fat hardens and preserves the goodies underneath. 
But somehow these restaurants don’t seem to do a confit, from what customers describe, it sounds more like poaching in fat, letting drain, press, cool and deep fry when needed.
The internet is no help here; despite extensive search I did not get a proper recipe. I set out to make my own take on it. And I must say I was very pleased with the outcome, but I was more pleased with the “leftovers” (which I served with my radishes). The latter is a dish you need to try; you have not lived if you have never tried potatoes that way. And the original take makes a very impressive and unusual side dish for a celebration meal for one or a dinner for two. Just a bit more work and more elegant tasting than the more rustic simple dish. Which I image is also great on its own, just a bit of aioli to get by. And if you cook the potatoes in advance, you have a super quick and tasty meal or snack if you come home very tired.
I used New Jerseys for it, for no other reason than that Aldi had a special offer on them that day. But I am sure any all-rounder or a simple White will do. Potatoes for mashing or baking however wont do.
As poaching fat I used a jar of goose fat which was still lurking about and needed using up. Feel free to use that, duck fat, beef drippings or lard, and I am pretty sure olive oil works like a dream as well.

Confit potatoes
Both methods:
Scrub and dry 3 medium sized potatoes per person but leave the skin on. Put into an ovenproof dish, add one peeled clove of garlic (whole), a twig of rosemary and cover with fat or oil of your choice (see above). Heat the oven to 120C and put the dish in during the heating process. When it reaches 120C tiny bubbles should appear and the potatoes start to cook. If the bubbles get too big or the potatoes start browning, take the temperature down. Basically you want to cook the potatoes in the oil until soft, without a major colour change. This will take (depending on the size of the tatties) anything between 25-45 minutes. The potatoes are done when a sharp knife glides through, don’t overcook them. Drain (but keep the fat for another use) and let them cool down until still a bit warm but comfortable enough to handle.

The elegant dish:
Peel the potatoes and cut in slices.  Take a small dish and cover the inside generously with cling film, so the bits which hang over the edges can go on top of the potatoes and seal them. Fill the dish with potato layers; you ought to aim for at least 3 layers, so you might want to take a small dish.  Put the spare cling film over the potatoes, so you have a dish where the potatoes are fully enclosed with clingfilm. Press slightly down but don’t make a mash. Basically you want to encourage them to “bond”.  Cover it with something heavy (as you can see I used a second dish which I filled with coins from my “empty the wallet of coins jar”)




and put in the fridge for up to three days, but they are firm after 8 hours (see top photo).
Once you are ready to proceed, heat your frying oil (rapeseed, peanut or olive oil) until you reach deep- frying temperature. Take your block of potatoes out and cut them in squares (about 6). Fry 2-3 of these cubes at a time, (keep them warm while you do the next patch), sprinkle with salt and serve as a side dish.

The rustic dish:
Cool potatoes completely and wrap each potato (still whole and with the skin) in clingfilm. Just squash them a tiny bit with the palm of your hand, they should still look like whole potatoes but with a few sides sprung open. Put in the fridge until ready to proceed.
Once you are peckish, heat your frying oil (rapeseed, peanut or olive oil) until you reach deep- frying temperature. Fry the three potatoes at the same time until they are golden brown, not only at the spilled sides, but also on the skin. Sprinkle with salt and serve with aioli or the radishes from the previous post.

Monday 22 June 2015

A new take on an old recipe. Fried Radishes with Herbs and not Quark



Northwest 4 or 5, increasing 6 or 7 for a time.
Slight or moderate.
Thundery showers at first.
Good, occasionally poor at first.




It is a bit late for a typical spring recipe; however we seem to have moved from spring fast-forward to late autumn, so I can kind of justify this recipe on the grounds that I am a bit early. 

As in the UK, new potatoes are greeted with glee all over the continent. This was especially true for me as a child. Like many European households we had a cellar. And in this dark and cold cellar we had a big wooden box which was filled in autumn with potatoes. Every family had their own “potato man”, who just showed up each year in order to get us ready for winter. He filled the huge box full of “tatties” and covered it with soil. And from that day on it was my task to go daily into the cellar and get the potatoes up. 
I hated it. Not because I was scared of the darkness or the spiders, but the potato sprouts freaked me out. If you are a bit younger than I am, you probably have no clue what I am talking about. You don’t see potatoes which have sprouts in supermarkets; they are a product of long storage and look a bit like this.
The sprouts are toxic and need to be removed, but the potato is still fine. But having to dig (especially after a long winter) in the box and get to the potatoes while these sprouts touch your hand....I still shiver thinking about it.
The arrival of the new crop of potatoes was thus a case for celebration for me. The few leftover old potatoes were given to a pig farmer and in spring and summer potatoes were bought at the market. Until the potato man showed up again..

There was a second reason I loved the arrival of new potatoes, its means boiled potatoes with herbs and quark, a very traditional spring recipe. There is no real equivalent for quark in the UK; it is neither cottage cheese nor curd.
But you can buy it here in the supermarkets, often next to the Italian ricotta. Each family had their own recipe how to proceed with the quark, we cut enormous amounts of fresh herbs into it, salted it, added cream and stirred it. The potatoes were cooked in their skin, served with the quark, fresh salted cold butter and radishes.

A few days ago, a friend of mine send me an article from the German newspaper “Die Zeit”, a weekly.
It covered the story of a celebrity chef who gave up cooking in his famous restaurant and focuses now on traditional recipes in a kind of pop-up venture. At the bottom was a very short recipe, but it made me sit up. His take on that old favourite was to fry the radishes and serve them with herbs and soft goats cheese. I have never heard of frying radishes, so obviously I had to try it. However there was a problem. Many of my friends don’t like goat`s cheese; and I cook and blog also for my friends.  On the other hand, I though quark alone won’t cut it. If you fry the radishes (so I thought) you mellow their sharp taste, so you need something sharper than quark (probably the reason he uses soft goats cheese).
Out came my experimenting hat and I looked at my pot of freshly made labneh and thought: “you are a good starting point”.
But it was not very successful until my gaze fell upon the kefir in the fridge door.

Fried radishes with herbs and not Quark
1 bag or bunch of fresh radishes
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp of butter
1 portion of Labneh (about 6 tbsp), but you can use quark
3 tbsp kefir
1/2 bunch of each chives, parsley, mint, thyme (and dill if you like)
1 squeeze of garlic from a tube or jar (fresh garlic will be too sharp)
salt and white pepper to taste.

First prepare the dairy. Separate the bunch of chives in two and keep one part aside. Cut all the other herbs into a bowl, add the Labneh, salt, pepper and the garlic. Pour the kefir over and mix thoroughly. Chill for at least 10 minutes in the fridge, but you can also prepare it well in advance.
When you are ready to eat, top and tail the radishes and cut them horizontally in half. Heat in a small pan the olive oil and butter, and, once the butter is foaming, add carefully the radishes with the cut side down. Cook for about 5 minutes on medium high until they are slightly brown, turn the radishes and cook for another 2 minutes. Drain them and shake the oil well off. Cut the rest of the chives and sprinkle over it and arrange several tbsp of you herb dairy mixture next to it.
Make sure you eat radish and quark together, but do try first the cooked radishes.

Verdict:
This is amazing. Cooked radishes taste like very mellow and extremely juicy turnips. It is like a new vegetable and one I don’t want to give up. I can see a future for them in winter stews, to give them some lightness where turnips make it heavy.
The (heavy herbed) Labneh with kefir was a full success as well. More tart than quark, and it did cut nicely through the radishes, but without the goat taste. In fact it was so good, that I might replace my quark with it. Definitely a spring and summer dish.

Teaser:
Of course you can eat it with freshly boiled potatoes or bread. And I bet it will be nice. But I had it with something different (just don’t want to overload today`s post). Just wait for a day or two and you can add another OMG this divine component to it. I promise it will be worth the wait.

Saturday 20 June 2015

Sweets for my sweet. Super quick toffee/fudge/caramel



West or southwest 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later.
Smooth or slight, becoming slight or moderate.
Occasional rain and fog patches until later.
Moderate or good, occasionally very poor until later.



Ever looked outside your window in the garden and thought: “Oh, the kids play so nicely I wish I can rustle up some treats for them?” No??? Me neither. If they were for once not arguing or in danger, I was so relieved that I treated myself to a coffee and hoped the peace lasts until I finish it.
But I did open the cupboard on occasions and wanted something sweet. And good. But there was none.
No more putting the coat on and looking miserable at the display at the late night petrol station: I present the super quick ultimate treat: A microwave fudge/toffee/caramel.
While they are all different, they are also similar and since this recipe defies all fudge making rules, I am not sure what it is.
Let`s say I present you a bonbon (love that song!).
Chewy, soft, buttery, sweet caramel bonbons.

If you ever tried to make fudge you probably had some not so nice outcomes. The culprit is sugar=sucrose. Sucrose has a tendency to crystallize when making fudge. When you dissolve sugar in a liquid, and then begin to cook this mixture, the water begins to evaporate. This leaves obviously less and less water for the sugar to be dissolved in and the sucrose clusters together, forming large crystals. Larger than they were before. So you might end up with something gritty. There are several ways to prevent this. Either add more fat or more acid, which will split the sucrose into glucose and fructose. Or add more glucose. And of course whisk the hell out of it. But only after it has reached a certain temperature and then got colder. So you need to follow a recipe and work with a sugar thermometer.
Not with this recipe. It is one of these “first attempt strike luck” recipes.


I saw this video here and wanted to find out if it works.  But of course in smaller quantities. And less sugar. But I liked the technique so I started with something dead simple and wanted to improve it from my mistakes. There were none. I was so puzzled by this unexpected result that I made three more batches, each with different flavouring. Still perfect. So it seems that this is one of the few occasions where the amount of ingredients worked like a dream in my 850 microwave.
This also means you can’t just double the ingredients. But first of all it is enough for a treat and second you can make several batches with different flavours (I made mine with vanilla paste, chocolate syrup (which I normally put in the coffee), Amaretto and Baileys Original Irish Cream. While the alcohol flavouring is obviously a no- go for small children, who says they should have all the fun.
As with all simple recipes, use the best of the ingredients. I made mine with salted butter from Brittany. I personally believe it needs either salted butter or a tiny pinch of salt, but if you want to cut your salt intake or your children are very small, you can leave it out.

Super quick caramel bonbons
1 tbsp of melted butter
1 tbsp of condensed milk (not evaporated milk)
1 tbsp of white sugar
1 tbsp of liquid sugar (glucose syrup, white corn syrup or golden syrup. I used golden syrup which is sweeter than glucose syrup)
Flavouring. Amount depends if it is dry or liquid. If you use alcohol/syrup I say one teaspoon is enough.
As you can see, all in the same amount apart from the flavouring. But if you use more liquid flavouring it will be even softer.


Add all the ingredients into a large cup (it bubbles up a bit so don’t use a too small cup), stir with a fork and put into the microwave. It needs to cook for a total of 2 minutes, but it is important that you do that in 4 batches at 30 seconds each. Between each heating you need to stir like mad. The first two times to distribute it evenly, the second two times to get your caramel right.

So in it goes for 30 seconds. Out and stir. It will be barely heated yet. In it goes again. For 30 seconds. If you take it out now and stir, you will already see small bubbles. From this point forward DONT put your fork or spoon or whatever you use for stirring into your mouth again. Liquid sugar is hotter than boiling water. If you want to see how it gets on and might taste, let one drop fall on a plate and taste that after you finished stirring and the caramel is in for its 3 turn. It will bubble seriously when you take it out but will get calm when you stir. You should see, while you stir, how the caramel develops.
And in it goes for the last time. When you take it out now it not only bubbles, but will continue to bubble for a second or two when you stir. Just beat the hell out of it and you will see that it gets shiny and smooth and thick. Beat, beat, beat. Then pour it into a dish lined with buttered paper or one of the waxed baking sheets and put it into the fridge. It will be a rather thin sheet, looking more like the covering of a cake than a bonbon. Don’t worry, give it 5-10 minutes and take it out again. It should be nearly cold but still pliable. Either fold it onto itself so you get a thick layer which you can cut in small squares; or just take it out and roll it into a sausage shape and then cut some slices. Please be aware when you handle it at this stages your hands will get buttery. Since you don’t want visible layers you need to handle the dough a bit, but you also need to work fast, you don’t want to remove too much of the butter.
Put it back in the fridge and let it cool completely. You then can either cover it with melted chocolate or eat it as it is. If it is too hard for you when you take it out from the fridge, just leave it outside for a minute or two and it will get soft.
The above picture is one (chocolate covered) caramel with vanilla and the other with Baileys. You can see how smooth they are, not gritty bits.

Two tips:
Do prepare the buttered tin before and put the kettle on. After you have put the caramel into the fridge you want to clean the cooking mug immediately. Best to put boiling water in and get the rest out like this.