Bread

A remedy for a dry throat: Papo Secos and Port

6th November 2019 by Regula 1 Comment

Not long ago I travelled to the incredible Douro Valley in Portugal where I was a guest of the Symington family, a family business who owns several port and wine vineyards or ‘quinta’ in the region. Our focus this time was on Graham’s port, for whom I also hosted an event in my house this month.

We arrived in Porto at the location where all the barrels and bottels are resting. An impressive cellar with barrels and tall ‘foedre’ as far as the eye can see, on the side wall there are barred cells with vintage ports that date back to the early decades of the last century. In the air there is the smell of ageing wood, must and a deep dark scent of port wine.

After lunch and on our way to the Douro valley, we make a stop to experience the delights of the traditional ‘pastel de nata’ or custard tart paired with a 10 year old port. My travel companion, prolific pastry chef and chocolatier Joost Arijs and I are glued to the glass window that separates us from the pastel bakery. There is no way to keep someone with his profile and a Bake Off judge and author of several books on baking away from where the action is. We walk the steep streets of Porto slightly tipsy, the delayed flight and boozy lunch with port pairing certainly got to our heads, but since all of us have had busy lives at home, it is a welcome opportunity to unwind.

There is just a sigh of light left in the Douro Valley when we arrive at the calm riverside village. Dinner is traditional dried salted cod and the Symington family’s wines to go with it. On the table I spot the bread basket, something that makes me weak in the knees when done well. There are a couple of huge breads in there, looking like a baby’s bum. I stare at them but am so full with the late lunch, custard tarts and salted cod that I can’t even fit dessert in, let alone a baby’s bum sized bun.

The next morning I wake up from the light peeping through the shutters of my room in one of the Symington’s family homes. Opening the shutters on an early morning in a quiet house where everyone is still asleep, letting in the crisp air is like breathing in life itself and with the view over the vineyard that greeted me I had to stop and take it all in. Downstairs breakfast waited for us, with juice made from the oranges growing in the garden and a basket of buns to make me weak at the knees again. On my plate, a large baby’s bum bun, I tear the two halves apart and smear the crusty bread with butter… few things are better than the simple delight of good bread and good butter….

Hot Cross Buns – The Tale Of English Buns # 2

29th March 2018 by Regula 6 Comments

Bake them on Good Friday: The history and tales behind these spiced buns are plenty and intriguing, steeped in folklore dating back as far as Anglo-Saxon Britain. This is perhaps one of the most iconic of buns. Recipe from my new book Oats in the North, Wheat from the South, out with Murdoch Books (2020)

Every year well before Easter Marks & Spencer starts piling up Hot Cross Buns from chocolate & salted caramel to blueberry and marmalade. Marmalade I can understand as you do add candied orange peel to the dough, but chocolate & salted caramel and blueberry just creates a whole different bun, the cross being the only reminder of a traditional Hot Cross Bun. But what is traditional or original with a recipe as old as this one? If you scroll down to the recipe you might discover I too dare to add something which isn’t traditional from time to time.

The tradition of baking bread marked with a cross is linked to paganism as well as Christianity. The pagan Saxons would bake cross buns at the beginning of spring in honour of the goddess Eostre – most likely being the origin of the name Easter. The cross represented the rebirth of the world after winter and the four quarters of the moon, as well as the four seasons and the wheel of life.

The Christians saw the Crucifixion in the cross bun and, as with many other pre-Christian traditions, replaced their pagan meaning with a Christian one – the resurrection of Christ at Easter. …

The white loaf that will make you proud

21st September 2014 by Regula 6 Comments

The power of an image.
I posted a picture on Instagram and Facebook of two loaves of bread I baked on wednesday. I was proud of them, they were beautiful, they were utterly perfect to me.
I had scored the bread this time with little hesitation and fear it would ruin my loaf, and while it was baking in the oven, I watched trough the oven window in true British Bake Off style how my score cracked open and baked into my most proud bake in my life.
Slightly embarrassed by my pride and joy I mentioned that to you the bread might seem plain, but to me they were special. The answer came in the form of that image becoming the most ever likes picture on my facebook and my instagram feed. You loved it too.
So much that you emailed me for the recipe, to go home and bake these loaves yourself, to see it rise, and bake and fill the house with the smell only bread is capable to induce…
Utter joy.

Bread has been a staple since the beginning of time, it evolved from a flat, dense gritty loaf to the small bun sized wheat loaves of the Saxon monks. Wheat and bread was so valuable that often food rents consisted partly of loaves or grain. Wheat and barley would be planted together so if one harvest failed, the barley which was a hardier grain would survive and save the people from the starvation that was luring behind every tree and every sheaf of corn. But harvest failed plenty of times and so bread was made from dried peas and beans. This must have been an very heavy and unpleasant bread but it would provide plenty of nutrition during shortages. Windmills and communal bread ovens can be found in the Domesday book but as they were owned by the manor or monastery, they were not free to use. A portion of the grain or bread dough had to be payed for the use of the mill and oven, therefore the peasants continued to mill the grain themselves using a hand quern that must have taken many long hours of hard labour to end up with a small portion of flour.
People must have suffered from acute toothache with the amount of grit in the bread. Even the upper classes preferred to soak their bread in their all important sauce and have their meat so succulent that it fell of the bone. Chewing would have been difficult if you would have lost most your teeth in your early adulthood.

Bread remains a staple food in the centuries following the Norman conquest and the Middle Ages, but recipes for breadmaking remain unknown from that period except for a mention of the process of bread making in a poem.

Although today bread still remains the most popular base of our diet, it has also become a source of worry with gluten and wheat intolerances becoming nearly as frequent as famine was in ancient times. Although bread has been a staple food for centuries, in the early years it was labour intensive to mill the grain by hand so bread would not have been the thing to fill up the bellies of the poor. They would have had a modest piece of bread, with their pottage, or a piece of cheese but not as plenty as we often have it today.
Wheat has also been modified to an extent that it is easier to harvest, but the quality is less. The need to have everything fast and plenty changed the way we create bread, with added chemicals to make is rise in a fraction of the time if would actually need to break down the enzymes in the grain which make it harder to digest. There is talk of a modern day ‘bread belly’ with people suffering from the effects from fast factory made bread which has little resemblance to the real bread of our ancestors. In my opinion the modern everlasting, spongy bread, sometimes dyed with malts or molasses to make it appear as a wholewheat loaf while it is not, is a new kind of poverty, the poverty of quality of the most basic of foods. Our daily bread.

So
here is my recipe, which I just in true honesty came up with by winging
it. It’s quite the recipe for a plain white loaf, but strangely enough
it came out differently than before. I added a spoon of my precious 1
year old organic wholemeal spelt sourdough starter, and a drizzle of
good English rapeseed oil. Other than that of course, (I always use)
Cornish sea salt, organic strong white bread flour and water which I
first boiled and let cool to tepid before adding organic dried yeast.

To make two 700-800 g loaves

What do you need

1 kg of organic strong bread flour, stone ground if you can obtain it, is the best
700 ml of tepid water
2 heaped tsp of dried yeast
20 g of seasalt flakes, not the over processed, white powder kind please
1 generous tablespoon of sourdough starter if you have some
1 teaspoon of rapeseed oil, or olive oil

Method
Turn on your oven on the lowest setting to just make it nice and warm, then turn off.
Boil water and let it cool until blood heat (tepid is fine) before adding the yeast
In a large bowl or soup pot add the flour and make a well.
Drizzle in your oil, salt and sourdough on the edges without letting them touch eachother.
When you have mixed your yeast with your water start adding it to the well and make a turning movement with a couple of fingers or the back of a wooden spoon to gradually mix the flour with the water and yeast.

Keep on doing this until you get a well mixed dough, now either turn out the dough on a floured surface to knead or do as I do, leave in the bowl and use one hand to pull and twist and push your dough for about 15-20 minutes, constantly turning the dough so you have kneaded it well and the dough is nice and springy. It really is very important to work the dough well.
Now put a shower cap over the bowl to keep the dough from drying out.

Place in your warm oven – please make sure it is not too hot, just like a nice warm summers day – and leave your dough there for an hour or until doubled in size.
I feel my dough rises much better when I do this, I live in a very cool house which is never warm enough to give your dough that cosy feel it needs to feel happy and rise.

After your dough has risen for 30 min to 1 hour, take it out of the oven gently and turn it on to full heat. Mine is 250° C. Also place a baking tray in the oven to heat.

When your oven has preheated knock the dough back by simply removing it from the bowl onto the floured work surface where you can divide and shape it in two for two loaves, or in four long stretches to get a ciabatta style bread, by that I mean one that is perfect for dunking in soup, to serve with cured meats and cheese and so on.

Dust the tops of your loaves with flour and just before you place them on the heated baking tray, score the bread with a very, very sharp knife about 1 cm deep. A stanley style knife works best, other knives are often not sharp enough, and not thin enough to make that all important score.

Place in the middle of your oven, on the heated tray, and chuck a bit of cold water on the bottom of the oven to create steam
Bake for 10 min on full blast
After 10 min turn down to 220°C and leave for 20-25 minutes.

These loaves freeze perfectly, when you need them, defrost in a kitchen towel the evening before and preheat your oven to full blast, place a ramekin with water into the oven with the bread and bake for 5-10 minutes.
Fresh home made bread in 5-10 minutes, epic. Just think ahead and always make two loaves instead of one. 1 kg of flour is also easier to work with that 500 g of flour.

Enjoy and if you bake this bread, show me a pic! I love it when you send me your pictures of your creations!

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Soda bread, a loaf in 45 minutes

What’s your favourite bread recipe?
Don’t forget to leave a comment!

Cornish Splits, some very exciting news and a thank-you

16th April 2013 by Regula 35 Comments

In Cornwall, a cream tea was traditionally served with ‘Cornish Splits’ rather than scones. Cornish splits are little yeast-leavened bread rolls, they are split when still warm and first buttered, then spread with jam before topping it with a generous dollop of clotted cream. Sometimes Treacle would be used instead of jam, this combination goes by the name of a ‘Thunder and lightning’ and although I’m not a big fan of treacle straight from the tin, it tasted -and the name sounded- rather good!
The splits are only baked for a short while and when removed from the hot oven, the little warm splits are then piled up in a tea towel, rubbed with a little butter before being covered by another tea towel so they don’t develop a crust.
I haven’t found any earlier reference to a Cornish split than the receipt in on of my favourite books ‘Good things in England‘ published in 1932 by Florence White, a delightful collection of 853 regional English recipes dating back as far as the 14th century.

With findings of evidence at Tavistock Abbey in Devon it is believed that the tradition of eating bread with cream and jam existed in the 11th century. In Devon a similar bun is served with cream and jam, going traditionally by the name of a Devon Chudleigh as noted by Florence White and Elisabeth David Chudleighs are made the same manner as the Cornish split, only smaller. Devonians however tell me that the ‘Devon split’ -as it is called now- is in fact a lighter and more luxurious white bun rather than heavy scone-like bread as the Cornish version.
The Cornish split is a rare treat these days but as they are best eaten while still a little warm from the oven, you get the best split by baking them at home.

I have another thing to share with you today, my beloved blog has been nominated for the Saveur Magazine 2013 Best Food Blog Award in the ‘Best Regional Cuisine Blog‘ category.
I am still pinching myself, to be a finalist and especially to be selected by the judges in this respected international competition is a great honor. The other four blogs that are nominated have all been blogging quite a while longer than I have and are all gorgeous.

This blog means the world to me, each post comes from a place deep in my heart. I know it sounds terribly cheesy but it is the truth. The moment I hit the publish button is still as exciting as if it was the first time – even more. In the beginning of writing my blog I was wondering ‘helloooow is anybody out there?’ now I know you are there.
A blog post doesn’t feel quite complete without the first comment from one of you and usually that first comment is from a lovely girl named Rosa.
Each comment brightens my day a little more, even if the comment is just to say ‘hi there’, it matters to me.
To know that you are out there, reading, listening and sharing my stories and yours with me is one of the greatest gifts on this earth. Your support, your time and your kindness mean more to me than I can say.
Thank you …

Oh yes… one more thing if you like to vote for me or one of the other fabulous blogs nominated, you can do so by following this link here -> Voting ends this friday the 19th.
You have to register to vote, this makes it just a fair competition but takes a minute longer. I thank you if you take that minute for me.

Lots of love
x Regula
Although
Elisabeth David doesn’t use lard in her recipe from her book English Bread and Yeast Cookery, Florence White does and I think it ads to the
taste. This recipe is somewhere in between the recipe of David and White using all milk instead of a mixture between milk and water. I also added an extra spoon of sugar to feed the yeast.

What do you need

14 g dried yeast (2 packs)
2 teaspoons of fine caster sugar
355 ml tepid full fat milk
115 g unsalted, good quality butter
30 g lard
750 g strong white flour
1 heaped teaspoon seasalt

Method

Cream the yeast and the sugar in a little of the tepid milk.
Melt the butter and the lard, when most of the butter and lard have melted take of the fire and stir until all the lumps are gone. Be careful not to let the butter and lard get too hot so it burns.
In a large bowl combine the butter and lard with the flour, the salt and half the milk.
Add the yeast and combine.
Add the rest of the milk to create a dough, take it out of the bowl and onto a clean surface and knead for 10 minutes – it is important you do it for exact 10 minutes.
Place the dough back in the bowl, cover with a clean tea towel and leave it to rise for 45 minutes – 1 hour or until the dough has doubled in size.
Line a baking tray with baking paper or if you don’t have baking paper just grease with butter
When the dough has doubled in size, knead it again to turn it into a long sausage.
Divide into 40-50 g pieces so all buns have the same size
Roll into balls and place evenly spaced on the baking tray that you have prepared
Leave the buns to prove until they have nearly doubled in size
Preheat your oven to 220° C and bake the buns for 20 minutes

When you remove them from the oven Florence White recommends you rub them over with some butter and then wrap them in a tea towel to cool so they don’t develop a crust.
You can keep these little buns for 4 days in an airtight container. Before use, place in a hot oven with a small container of water for 6 minutes. Then wrap in a tea towel as before.

Enjoy with clotted cream and jam, treacle, or why not go for savoury with the old school favourite egg and cress.

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Hot Cross Buns through Paganism, Christianity and Superstition.

25th March 2013 by Regula 22 Comments

The Christians saw the Crucifixion in the cross bun and, as with many other pre-Christian traditions, replaced their pagan meaning with a Christian one – the resurrection of Christ at Easter.

According to Elizabeth David, it wasn’t until Tudor times that it was permanently linked to Christian celebrations. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the London Clerk of Markets issued a decree forbidding the sale of spiced buns except at burials, at Christmas or on Good Friday.

The first recorded reference to ‘hot’ cross buns was in ‘Poor Robin’s Almanac’ in the early 1700s:
‘Good Friday come this month, the old woman runs. With one or two a penny hot cross buns.’

This satirical rhyme was also probably the inspiration of the commonly known street vendors cry:

‘Hot cross buns, hot cross buns!
One ha’penny, two ha’penny, hot cross buns!
If you have no daughters, give them to your sons,
One ha’penny, two ha’penny, hot cross buns!’

The Widows Son. Copyright Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive – posted with permission

A century later the belief behind the hot cross bun starts to get a superstitious rather than a religious meaning.
In London’s East End you can find a pub called The Widows Son, named after a widow who lived in a cottage at the site in the 1820s. The widow baked hot cross buns for her sailor son who was supposed to come home from the sea on Good Friday. He must have died at sea as he never returned home, but the widow refused to give up hope for his return and continued to bake a hot cross bun for him every year, hanging it in her kitchen with the buns from previous years.

When the widow died, the buns were found hanging from a beam in the cottage and the story has been kept alive by the pub landlords ever since a pub was built on the site in 1848.

To this day, every Good Friday, the ceremony of the Widow’s Bun is celebrated and members of the Royal Navy come to The Widows Son pub to place a new hot cross bun into a net hung above the bar. Legend has it that the buns baked on Good Friday will not spoil.

For whatever reason or belief you choose to bake a batch of hot cross buns on this Good Friday, it will most likely be to enjoy them with your loved ones. May it be for Eostre, Easter, the beginning of a much awaited spring or as a superstitious amulet for when you set sail, bake them with love!

If you want to bake ahead, you can easily bake these buns in advance and freeze them. Slowly defrost in a teatowel and then place in a hot oven for 5-10 minutes with a small ramekin of water to give some moisture to the warm air in the oven.
And finally … you can also find my story about Hot Cross Buns in the latest edition of Pretty Nostalgic Magazine!
If you don’t know the magazine, it’s fairly new and all about British Nostalgia, love for all things Vintage and quirky.

Wheaten Soda Bread with Stout Beer, Oats and Molasses for St-Patrick’s day

15th March 2013 by Regula 10 Comments

A lucky shamrock scarf for your bread, to keep your hands flour-free. It’s been years since I crocheted!

I was asked by Honest Cooking online food magazine to share a St-Patrick’s day recipe with them. I’ve never been in Ireland so therefore St-Patrick’s day is something I only know from visiting the Irish pubs that used to be plenty in Antwerp. The day would be advertised on the pubs blackboards weeks in advance offering live music and a Paddy’s special menu. When the day finally came, the Irish folk living in Antwerp and the Irish sailors who were docked at Antwerp port with their ships would gather at the pubs to enjoy a pint and a meal, you would hear the traditional Irish folk music from behind the corner along with loud and often drunken sing-alongs. In Antwerp you most certainly knew when it was St-Patrick’s day … But as the Irish pubs started to disappear, the St-Patrick’s day celebrations and the taste of Irish food went with them.

Wheaten Stout Beer, Oats and Molasses

What do you need
•   500g/17oz. good quality – organic wholemeal wheat or spelt flour
•   1/2 cup / 4oz.rolled oats
•   2 teaspoons of baking soda
•   1 teaspoon of sea salt
•   3 teaspoons of molasses
•   200ml/6.7 oz stout beer and 200 ml/6.7 oz live yoghurt
•   some extra flour to dust

Method

Preheat your oven to 190C/375F
Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper
Combine the flour, baking soda and salt well in a bowl.
Add yoghurt and stout and mix with the dry ingredients.
Quickly form a wet dough – it is important to get the bread in the oven as quickly as possible and not to overwork it – if the dough is too wet dust with flour until you can shape it.
Dust it with flour and cut a cross in the dough half way down the dough.
Put on the baking tray in the middle of the oven for 40 minutes.
The bread is ready when it makes a hollow sound when you knock on the bottom.
Cool on a wire rack

I like to place a small container of water with the bread in the oven, the moisture will help the bread get a tender crumb.
Best eaten when still slightly warm, spread with butter and with a piece of bitter dark chocolate …

The Irish Times pub in Antwerp, is no longer. There had been an Irish pub on this site since the 40’s

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Soda bread, time to bake.

24th February 2013 by Regula 16 Comments

On saturday mornings I look forward to a wholesome slice of bread, spread with -when I have the time to make it- home made butter and a sprinkle of seasalt or jam that reminds me of the warmer days of the year passed.

But it has become so hard to get a decent loaf these days, I admit I’m not the easiest of customers but I think my wishes aren’t odd at all.
I want ‘real’ bread made from good quality – organic – stone ground flour, not low protein Chorleywood style loafs or other breads that have been made in a jiffy filled with additives and bread enhancers that feed food intolerance and allergies.

Many people don’t realise that when they buy this unnaturally square shaped spongy bread they get more than they bargained for. Chorleywood bread is one of these wonderful inventions of the 60’s when everything had to go fast and had to be industrialised. The ingredients don’t only list low quality wheat flour, water, salt and the double amount of yeast used for ‘real’ bread, it also contains a cocktail of hard fats, ascorbic acid, enzymes, emulsifiers and other chemicals that speed up the process.

Some scientists claim that the Chorleywood method is responsible for the growing amount of people who have trouble digesting bread, the use of potassium bromate (E924) -which is now banned in the EU but not the US- being the primary cause. Potassium bromate is carcinogenic and nephrotoxic to experimental animals, causing cell tumors to the thyroid and Renal cell carcinoma.
I apologise for the usage of these scary words but when I found out about this an researched it some more I felt I had to share it with you.

Soda bread, oysters and a pint of stout. A fisherman’s tea.

I don’t want to be the one screaming ‘horse meat’ but I wouldn’t be surprised if this harmful E924 would still be circulating in our food chain. After all it isn’t banned all over the world and still used widely in the US.
The Chorleywood method is used all over the world and not exclusively for the iconic square shaped loaf but also to speed up the process of regular bread.
I’ve stopped eating store-bought bread unless I know it was made traditionally.

Now I know some people might argument that baking your bread takes longer and one hasn’t the time to do this very often and I agree.
Baking this Soda bread is in my opinion a great alternative to baking your bread traditionally when in urgent need of it and no time to spare. Made with good quality organic wholemeal flour this makes a fine loaf in just 45 minutes – baking included. This is faster than hopping on my bike and driving to a store.
Soda bread is an acquired taste but I promise you it is very much a treat on busy saturday mornings when all you need is to get on with things.
In soda bread Bicarbonate of soda is used as a raising agent instead of yeast or a sourdough starter, the process is activated by the acidity in buttermilk, live yoghurt or in some traditional recipes even stout beer. Buttermilk and live yoghurt contain lactic acid, which was also used in Milk stout beer before the usage went out of fashion. The lactic acid reacts with the baking soda and forms air bubbles of carbon dioxide. The trick is to underwork your dough and get it in the oven as fast as you can to get a good rise.
Unlike the chemicals used in Chorleywood method, baking soda and lactic acid from buttermilk, yoghurt or beer, isn’t harmful to your health.

In Ireland Soda bread is often eaten with oysters, before the decline of oyster beds they used to be a cheap source of protein. The tale goes that down at the harbour pubs, fishermen used to get served soda bread and oysters along with their pint of stout. I must say it is a treat indeed, the bitter taste of the stout pairs perfectly with the salty oyster especially when fresh and still drowning in seawater. The soda bread brings a slightly sweet and sour taste to the table, along with a crumbly texture.
So now perhaps a treat only enjoyed on special occasions.

What do you need

500g good quality – organic wholemeal wheat or spelt flour
2 teaspoons of baking soda
1 teaspoon of seasalt
400 ml buttermilk
or 200ml live yoghurt and 200 ml milk
or 200ml stout beer and 200 ml buttermilk

Method

Preheat your oven to 180C°
Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper
Combine the flour, baking soda and salt well in a bowl.
Add the buttermilk, milk, yoghurt or stout – whatever you chose – and mix with the dry ingredients.
Quickly form a wet dough – it is important to get the bread in the oven as quickly as possible and not to overwork it – dust it with flour and cut a cross half way down the dough.
Put on the baking tray in the oven for 40 minutes.

Eat warm and spread with a generous amount of butter …

For a smaller loaf, split the recipe in half.

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Bread

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