To make, to bake, to buy: leavened bread

Various food staples or low-cost foods are time consuming to make and have ready-made versions readily available. I have often wondered, though, whether I should be making them more, both in number and frequency. I have pulled together a few thoughts on this topic in a series of entries. Here’s the first, which deals with my experiences with leavened bread.

Yeast has always been something of a nemesis for me. Some of my handmade loaves of bread have been so dense they could have been used as deadly weapons. I did make a vaguely lightweight loaf of cheese bread once but I seriously think that was a fluke. My attempt at foccacia went OK, but that doesn’t really have to get very tall, which I think was the secret behind my success.

I know the theory, a tad of the science, and how to knead, thanks to home economics lessons at school. I have also received many a hint and tip from successful bread bakers, but in my hands, dough is put to sleep rather than brought to life. I think a major hindrance has been that in the absence of an airing cupboard—the loss of immersion heaters must be becoming more widespread in the age of combination boilers—I haven’t been able to find an alternative spot warm enough to prove the dough well. Balancing the dough container on top of the radiator just doesn’t cut it.

My mother saved the day. After listening to my tales of woe she bought me a bread-making machine. I have many things for which to thank my mother, but this features pretty highly. At last I can create light, tasty bread at home. There’s nothing like a sandwich made on super soft, barely cooled, bread. Plus, with the delay setting, if I remember to put the ingredients in at night, I can wake up to the smell of baking.

Machine-made bread does, however, have a few oddities that amuse me. The loaves often come out of the pan a like a square pannetone, taller than they are long. This trompe l’oeil, especially when the loaf is brown, means I have to keep reminding myself that ham won’t clash with the candied peel. Even more confusing, the flavour is also slightly sweet. I use the recipes provided by the machine manufacturers, which they claim are designed to optimise results in their machines.  An ingredient in quite a lot of the recipes is milk powder. Not only might this impart the distinctive flavour to my machine-made bread, but neither my mother nor I can work out its exact purpose. I’m sure some tweaking the recipes would be possible, but I haven’t tried this yet. In view of my lack of success with bread, though, I’m not really confident enough to know what to change. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has successfully changed them. Finally, the paddle that kneads the dough frequently gets stuck inside the cooked loaf. It’s easy enough to get out once the loaf has cooled, but a funny dent is left in several slices, and if you forget to remove it, hitting it with the bread knife can be a little disturbing!

The machine leaflet also comes with recipes for dough for smaller or shaped breads, such as bread rolls, pizza bases, French bread etc, which it kneads and proves before you remove the dough to shape it. So, this brings me full circle to the proving problem, as a rising stage for this or other dough I make by hand, such as for naan, is required after shaping. I have a double oven, so tried proving bread rolls in the top oven while the bottom oven was on. It helped a bit, but not much. My new solution, tried out yesterday, is to heat the oven to the lowest temperature for a little while, turn it off and leave the dough in there for several hours while it cools. This seemed to work quite well, as I thought my naan dough might get out of control it increased in size so much! I will definitely be trying this out more in the future and will report on my experiences anon.

The only major downside to a bread machine is the size. It takes up quite a lot of work surface if left out, but fitting it in a cupboard might also be tricky. If it does end up in a cupboard there’s the risk of out of sight, out of mind! Owing to various recent house refurbishments, mine is currently balanced on a hamper with a load of junk on top of it. The next bit of work on the house, though, will be a new kitchen, and when we were designing it we ensure there would be plenty of work space to have it available for use at all times, that’s how much I love it! So, I think that for loaves I will never return to the handmade method, but for some things, such as naan—and I’m thinking about trying pitta soon—there might be hope.

Risotto or ironing: need it be a choice?

So, it was a Sunday evening and I wanted to cook risotto for dinner, but I also wanted to get some ironing done and to have time afterwards to relax. To manage all three seemed highly unlikely. 

I have toyed with the idea for several months of trying a baked risotto. ‘Sacrilege!’ I hear some people cry. Well, I guess that depends on whether you’re from the school of alleged Italian cuisine purists or that of metropolitan multitasking housewives. 

I considered the rationale behind making risotto in a pan. As well as preventing sticking, some scientific considerations are taken into account with this method. One, perhaps the more obvious, is that agitation of the rice grains helps to release starch, which creates the characteristic creaminess of risotto. Stirring too vigorously can result in a stodgy risotto, but that’s a discussion for another time. Another reason for pan cooking is that the introduction of stock, which must be hot, in small amounts prevents too much temperature fluctuation in the pan and ensures that that not all the water is absorbed but rather that a proportion evaporates off to ensure a good intensity of flavour from the stock. 

On weighing things up, I decided that cooking in the oven should still provide the necessary heat meet the flavour requirement. Re the creaminess, lots of recipes for baked risotto claim that the result is ‘just as creamy’ as pan-cooked versions. Evidently, this can’t be true if agitation is key, but I decided that starch release would still be sufficient and chose to sacrifice a little creaminess in order to get my relaxation.

I had one more new thing I wanted to try in my risotto. Although I only learned to make risotto of any description quite recently, I can guarantee that adding a little wine noticeably enhances flavour (Vermouth is allegedly very good too). White wine seems the logical choice but I didn’t have any, and I didn’t want to add shopping into the already crowded time equation. Thus, I thought I would try red wine. I investigated a little about using red wine, discovered that I’m not crazy and that’s red wine is quite widely used in northern Italy.

The overall result was delicious. The texture was noticeably different from that of pan-cooked risotto and if you’re a purist you might not like it so much, but we found it very pleasing. Also, I managed to get five shirts and a pair of trousers ironed while it was in the oven and to watch a good film watched afterwards. Magic.

Here’s the recipe I used.

Red wine chicken risotto

Serves 4

300 g Arborio rice

750 ml hot chicken stock

150 ml dry red wine

1 large onion finely chopped

2 sticks celery finely chopped

2 cloves garlic minced

500 g chicken breast meat cubed

150 g frozen peas

25 g butter

50 g parmesan cheese

Olive oil (not extra virgin) for cooking

Heat the oven to 180ºC and heat a large earthenware baking in it ready for the risotto. Cook the chicken pieces through in a little olive oil in a frying pan then set aside in a bowl. Add some more oil to the pan and gently cook the onion, garlic and celery in the pan, stirring occasionally, until the onion has softened and is translucent (c. 5–10 mins); do not allow the ingredients to brown. Add the rice and stir it around until the grains are coated in the oil. Add the wine and stir until most of it has reduced away. Replace the chicken in the pan, add all the stock and bring it to the boil. Remove the hot dish from the oven, tip in all the ingredients straightaway, cover tightly (with tin foil is fine) and replace back in the oven.

After around 15 mins, remove the dish from the oven and stir the risotto. Re-cover and put back in the oven for around 10 mins. Remove the dish again and test the rice. If the rice cooked (soft on the outside but still a little al dente in the middle), add the peas, butter and parmesan, stir, re-cover and place back in the oven for 5 mins. If the rice isn’t quite ready, re-cover and place back in the oven for 5–10 mins more before adding the final ingredients. The drop in temperature resulting from adding the peas does not matter once the rice is cooked, and the dish is replaced in the oven merely to warm through the peas and melt the parmesan and butter.

After 5 mins remove the dish from the oven, stir and serve immediately.