getting back into shape.

okay, so that ice cream looks amazing. ice cream is absolutely my food achilles heel; it has been since i was little. and i feel ed failed to get across the magnitude of the pistachio moment at gelupo. i am actually fanatical about pistachio ice cream, ever since my dad introduced me to it on some forced-cheer family holiday where i must have been somewhere older than five and younger than ten. i used to live on the south coast, as keen readers of this blog will know, and a scoop of pistachio, or hazelnut if there was a drought, was never more than stroll down the seafront away. and it was the good shit, from a company called minghella, based on the isle of wight, with several concessions along southsea seafront and old portsmouth. things have changed now i'm in the semi-rural midlands. pistachio here comes out of a tub, and only from the more archly middle-class supermarkets at that. walking into gelupo and semi-drunkenly enquiring as to whether there was any pistachio only to be met with a 'just finished some...look!' was beyond a stroke of luck, it was a 'truly, the gods have smiled upon today' moment. you don't even need to ask if it was good. of course it was good.

anyway, so my last post was uncharacteristically wide-ranging in its outlook, as occasionally my politics and arts education impact my interaction with oh, basically, everything. and i'm not saying that's going to stop any time soon, but after a morning of battling the hormone-demons and painting my nails during my like, millionth rewatch of stop making sense, i'm back in a place where i can talk about what is becoming quite an intensely personal working relationship in the kitchen for me. that's right folks, i'm talking about my adventures in breadmaking.

i didn't write an in-depth post about last week's bread, because not only was i in a totally shitty mood, but all i really did was change up the basic wholemeal by adding mixed seeds (sesame, sunflower, pumpkin, and fennel). i only made a half batch because that's all the flour i had in the kitchen, and in the process i learned it is actually far easier to be working with a kilo of dough than 500g. i ended up with two loaves, both happily perfect:

the loaves have the seeds kneaded in to the dough toward the latter stage of the kneading process, and were also rolled in milk, then in the seed mixture before baking. as i say, there was no real need for an indepth post for so basic a variant, but this week's batch is an altogether different kettle of fish. i chose one of daniel steven's variants on the basic technique, from the river cottage bread handbook, so i'll give you the ratio of ingredients needed, but the technique is the same as the basic recipe throughout:

hazel maizel bread

800g wholemeal flour
200g maize meal (also known basically as cornmeal to those of us not looking for cutesy rhyming names)
300ml apple juice,
300ml warm water
1 tablespoon honey, to be stirred into the liquids,
10g dried yeast
10g salt,
1 tablespoon melted butter
2 handfuls lightly bashed hazelnuts,
few handfuls flour to coat.

okay, so onto the process of working with the bread. this was my first time deviating from just using water as the liquid, and i was basically amazed (although given exactly how much homework i have done to get national qualifications in cask ale and wine i shouldn't have been) at the effects the sugars in the apple juice had on the yeast:

look at that. you got a good half centimetre of foam, minimum, all over. one of the things that has been hotly debated behind the scenes here at pot tossery is food and science, as filtered through heston 'i'm considerably smarter than you' blumenthal, who, the intuitive of you will have already guessed, i have absolutely no time for whatsoever. i don't appreciate the artistic qualities of food being fetishized, and neither do i appreciate the same process being applied to food's scientific properties. i feel, in fact, that heston's smug appropriation of scientific processes home cooks have been using for years, creates a kind of academic level of distance that actually intimidates more people away from cooking than it does interest them. and given how firmly i believe in widely available information and education, you can imagine how grossly irresponsible i find heston's niche specialism being a part of the mainstream cooking canon. i told you guys i was the more cynical one here.

wouldn't it be better just to discuss the processes at play in a more frank way, with a more pragmatic and obvious link between cause and effect, and a whole lot less dry ice? for example; look how insane yeast goes if you give it sugar to feed on, you are gonna get some serious air going on in that bread compared to a water based one, let's see how it worked out, shall we? pre rise dough:

aaand, post-rise dough:

that is the stuff, people. that is what i am talking about. this dough was gloriously airy. the more you work with bread, the more you train yourself in the tactile aspect of cooking; it's possibly the most hands on, responsive cooking i can think of, and this stuff was a dream to work with in terms of yield and feel.

right. now, i have previously lamented my lack of ability to take process pictures for you of vital stages such as knocking back and loaf shaping, but i figured since i was using forgiving wholemeal flour, and had enough yeast action going on that i could afford to gamble on losing a tiny bit of rise here, that i would try anyway. i am completely aware of how useless i am with a camera, and that consequently these pictures may not be much use in themselves, but describing a process entirely verbally tends to result in confusion, and consequently if they're as terrible as i think they are, just think of them as vague ciphers. i mean, if you can put something together using weird ikea diagrams, this should be a walk in the park:

this is what dough should look like post-knocking back. knocking back implies a heavy handed process, but really, you should be using light pressure with your fingertips to squash the air out of the dough, until it is roughly half the size it was in it's risen state. the more eagle eyed amongst you might have notice tiny little half moons all over the cratered landscape of my dough; what can i say? i rock a fierce set of talons. you should actually be able to hear the tiny, relaxed snap of bubbles popping here; it's like bubblewrap for hippies. and now, onto the matter of loaf shaping, something i haven't previously addressed, which is muchos important for your finished rise. you divide the dough into three rounds (shaping a round is something i have yet to get snaps of, but honestly, it's not a vital step in proceedings at this stage), for your three loaves, and shape each accordingly:

flatten out your piece of dough, similar to the knocking back process (see them half moons again? i told you. fierce.)

roll it, really very tightly, using your thumbs and the heels of your hands, towards you. this stretches the glutens in the underside of the dough, as what you're effectively trying to do is make your glutens work for you to aid the rise here.

okay, take one end of your sort-of sausage shape; and fold it about a third of the way onto itself. fold the other end over that. again, you are stretching the glutens on the underside of the piece to put more spring in.

flatten this out again, gently, with your fingertips.

then, roll the longest edge towards you, using your thumbs and the heels of your hands again. you should have stretched the glutens in several directions, which will result in an even rise in all directions. and that's your basic loaf shaping 101. you pop them seam-under to prove freeform, or seam-up to prove in baskets.

so, the finished product should look like this:

unless of course, your top oven is actually out to fuck you up, in which case you'll end up with one that looks like this:
...in which case you utter a string of profanities, tear into it while it's still warm, and devour the still-delicious evidence with your mother.

i am definitely feeling more confident in my breadmaking these days, i think after a dalliance with low-gluten flour such as spelt and rye, i may well progress onto variations in technique. i reckon about a month's time, maybe, for that? once i've gotten completely comfortable working with yeast in this context i'll then move on to wild yeasts. the bread itself was amazing; i love hazelnuts in general, and i feel like the cornmeal lightened up the malty quality of the wholemeal flour, while the air in the bread because of the sugars made it almost shockingly light given the heavy nature of the flour involved. it worked well with honey, naturally, apple jelly, also naturally, and bizarrely, as toast with scrambled eggs. anyway, until my next novel, i mean, blog post, i bid you adieu, dear readers.