All We Need Is....Bread!

I haven’t been doing much in the way of cooking these days…I’ve been baking bread. A little bit obsessive I know – but with good reason I might add – I have been perfecting my wild yeast culture as well as my sourdough culture…

And it is pretty well – perfect! I just love the taste of the bread but more then that I really like the ‘feel’ of it when I am working with it – kneading it, the pulling and stretching as well as the mixing.

It just doesn’t compare to how bread feels when I have used commercial yeast. This feeling is the first thing I noticed about the dough when I first mixed it – it just felt so different in my hands.

Wild yeast gives the bread a softness and a lightness not found anywhere else and I just know it must also impart far more flavour (it tastes so good!) and along with that the vitamins and minerals that come from fermented grains.

This week I have been playing around with the culture – using different types of flours as well as varying the length of time I have let the dough rise (and rise again). Mostly I have treated it a bit like a sourdough giving it lots of time to develop.

As of right now I have 3 different breads on the go – one in the oven while the other two are at different stages of fermentation. Each one is completely unique in it’s flavour and texture when done but so delicious.

Who’d of thought that bread could be this easy to make, yeast this easy to grow and the taste so superior? And I couldn’t be happier! LOL

 April

Sage & Coconut Biscuits

Well, once again I find myself with things sitting around my cupboards and I want to be using it up....but also I like to expand my recipe base at the same time. Often we find ourselves stuck in with the way we cook, bake or go about preparing food.

When we venture out of that box and go back to the drawing board some interesting points tend to be raised. First of all you can do nearly anything - with what you've got. I am not one for special ingredients or strange stuff I will never use again or in anything else.

Secondly, we can tend to have some types of food we enjoy but only prepare it one or two ways. I was like that with cabbage, which I posted on yesterday with a lovely slow cooker recipe. But, I am also like that with coconut.

I love coconut - and use it shredded in several dishes such as muesli, cookies and cakes. I also like the coconut milk in rice dishes and a couple of soups I make. But that seemed to be it really - so yesterday I set about playing around in the kitchen with blocks of creamed coconut.

And the results were quite interesting! I ended up with a lovely biscuit that the kids loved and I can't wait to taste. It looked very much like a scone but I was told it was sweet and creamy tasting with a different texture from a floury scone.

To make these biscuits I did the following!

2 1/4 cups spelt or barley flour 

200 g creamed coconut

1 tablespoon rubbed sage

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 cup water (hot)

1/2 cup goat's yogurt or sour milk

sea salt

In a saucepan I poured the 1/2 cup hot water and added the coconut block - this was gently heated on the wood stove while being stirred until it was uniformly melted. In the meantime I preheated the oven to 180C and placed a piece of parchment over a baking sheet.

Next I measured out 2 of the cups of flour into a deep mixing bowl and added the other dry ingredients (soda, salt and sage). This was sifted around to mix thoroughly. In another small dish I placed the goat's yogurt - I ended up using half yogurt and half sour milk. (add 1 teaspoon cider vinegar to make the milk sour).

After mixing the milk mixture in with the coconut I added this to the flour in the deep mixing bowl. It will blend nicely into a soft ball which you can then turn out onto a floured surface. Use the extra flour to handle the dough sprinkling a little over top to keep it from sticking to your hands.

Flatten it down a little and start punching out round circles (sort of like cookies or scones) and placing them onto the cookie sheet. Once the dough is used up, sprinkle some more sage over top and put them in the oven for about 15 to 17 minutes. 

They turned out wonderfully (I made them twice with different flours) and smelled like they had butter inside - but they don't, it's just lovely coconut!

April

Sage & Coconut Biscuits 

Breaking Bread

These past few weeks I have been mentioning bread a lot - but especially one aspect of it. The flour. Continuing on with the theme of getting out of our food ruts, changing or combining types of flours for bread and baking is more then a treat.

I have found myself using barley, oat, gram, lentil and several other types of flours more often these days. Perhaps since the colder weather set in and I think it has to do with wanting some additional variety in our diets, but also to play around with them.

Most of the time for nearly all my baking I use whole grain organic spelt flour and it works out great. Occasionally I throw in some organic white spelt flour if I am making something a little more refined such as cookies or scones. 

But over these past few weeks I have been drawn to using more oat and barley flours in my breads - often mixed in with the spelt, which gives it far more flavour and quite a different texture. These breads are a little denser and heavier then plain spelt flour, however there is something quite nice about all of this experimenting.

Changing out flours can be better for us and most of them are easier to digest then wheat. The other important point here is that they are all nutritionally superior to wheat with loads more vitamins and minerals then even white spelt flour.

Apparently oat flour is one of the best flours you can use in your cooking and baking. I like it because it gives such a nice taste to the bread. It is also low in gluten and offers the goodness of oats. You can grind some yourself easily in a spice mill or coffee grinder in a few minutes. 

Getting a variety of nutrients in your diet is not difficult when you use a variety of foods from many sources. And your food will never be boring - something different each day can be created with just a little effort.

April

Spelt and Oat bread 

Sweet Potato Samosa's

There are a few recipes I have been wanting to make but have been putting them off mostly because I have never made them before and need to have some space to 'create'. Getting the kitchen to myself doesn't happen very often, so these experiments do tend to be put off indefinitely.

Today however, I decided to throw caution to the wind and to get the kids to join in with me as I figured out a recipe for sweet potato samosa's. Once again this is not a food I would have been very familiar with, as I don't eat out or order take away, but, I was fairly certain they appeared to be easy enough to make.

I am still working on overcoming this level of resistance to some new recipe tastes and flavours - you know how we kind of get set in our ways with all our old standby's. Well, time to branch out!

So, the first thing on the agenda was to decide what I wanted to use as a filling for these samosa's - I wanted sweet potato and soft cooked vegetables. But I also wanted veg to be baked and not boiled, so as not to be too watery. Sweet potatoes, carrots, pumpkin and shallots were chopped up, wrapped in foil and placed in the oven for an hour.

Roasted vegetables and stir fry mixed with spices

Next, to make this dish a little spicy I used an onion, a leek and garlic - chopped finely which was sautéd in a saucepan with a little oil. To this I added turmeric, cumin, salt and pepper. I didn't want to go overboard with spices because the children would not eat them.

Once the vegetables were done, I added the stir fry onion mixture in with that to make a lovely fragrant vegetable filling.

In the meantime I made a dough from 2 cups of spelt flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon bread soda. I added 6 tablespoons of milk and about the same of cold water until it looked like a slightly sticky dough and formed a ball.

Dough forms a ball 

This was then easy enough to roll out flat enough to make round cut outs. To make my samosa's I used 2 pieces of the dough for each one, placing the filling in the centre and pressing it together with a fork. 

Samosa dough ready for filling 

This was actually a very easy to make recipe, tasty and quite filling. The nicest part of this is the way the filling can be nearly anything - rice with vegetables, spicy mince lamb, feta cheese or any different combinations of these.

They were in the oven for about 23 minutes or so and then we got to have samosa's with our dinner. I used my homemade honey mustard sauce for dipping and it was delicious! 

Well, I hope to make another new dish again tomorrow... keep it new and exciting LOL

April

Samosa! 

Bulk Buying, Flour and Cinnamon Cake

Today, in my wish to get a little organized for next week and indeed the coming winter season, I did a large bulk shopping trip to build up our own stores here at home. What I found were some different flours I would not usually use too often.

I now have oat flour, more gram flour, barley flour, white spelt and lentil flours. A few years ago, when I was gluten free, I did use more of these. At the time our digestive tracts were still in recovery phase, so we did not eat bread and certainly not cakes.

Now, we are well past that (a few years in fact) and I have been making lots baked goods for us to enjoy. Mostly I use organic whole grain spelt flour for nearly everything. But it is nice to branch out now and again into some different tastes.

When I came home I wanted to try out my white spelt flour in a cake recipe I have been working on and hope to make a few of these cakes in the coming weeks. Tonight I made a cinnamon cake that was supposed to have an almond crumble.

However, at the last minute I thought the almond crumble might not keep frozen, so I ended up mixing the almonds into the batter. Of course, I always start with my standard - 2 cups of flour,  baking soda and a little salt.

Next I wanted the cake to be sweet but am no longer using commercial apple concentrate, so I made some apple sauce from 2 apples with cinnamon and nutmeg mixed in. To this I added 1 cup of butter and two eggs. 

Steamy apple sauce with lots of cinnamon and nutmeg

Using my blender I ground up 1 cup of almonds fairly fine which went into the flour mixture. Then I folded in the apple sauce-butter-egg into the flour mixture. As I was stirring it, I added 1/4 cup of maple syrup and a little more flour.

Cinnamon cake batter in pan

At this point it smelled very almondy so I added more cinnamon! 

Of course, the entire house now smells like cinnamon cake, it looks divine and we are fasting until Thursday... LOL

Into the freezer it goes until next weekend. I hope to have a couple more made by then, perhaps something very different from what I normally make - with all these nice flours to try. 

Hope you have a lovely day!

April

Cinnamon cake, just out of the oven

You Can Make Anything With...The Basics

These past few days I have been thinking of making a cake, however I held off, mostly because we had so many other goodies to eat first. But, then again I caught myself thinking I needed to dig out my recipes in order to find something to make.

Today I could smell very ripe bananas in the kitchen (that sticky sweet banana smell) and knew something needed to be done with this bunch or I would lose them to compost. Of course, the most obvious choice is to make a banana bread.

So, I started to go and look up my recipes - but then stopped myself. This is simple, making ANY bread, any cake, any dessert can be a basic, simple start with just 3 or 4 ingredients, then we just add on from there to provide different tastes or textures. Right?

I mean, think about it - the basics for any cake or bread are; flour, water or milk, baking soda, salt, and then butter or oil, perhaps something sweet if needed. If we only put 2 cups of spelt flour, bread soda and salt into a mixing bowl - this could be the start of nearly anything!

Bananas in flour

Well, that is just what I did. I took 2 cups of spelt flour, 1 teaspoon of bread soda, some sea salt, 1 cup of goat's yoghurt/milk and a duck egg. This was my basic cake mixture to start off with. I wanted to make a banana bread, so to this I added 3 mashed bananas, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and nutmeg, a little more yogurt and kept stirring.

Then I looked around the kitchen to find something nice to put into the bread. I really like the taste of apricots and walnuts, a handful of these went in as well. By now, it was looking very much like a cake batter, smelled great and had enough flavour packed into it, so I just added a little date syrup to sweeten it.

I then poured this mixture into a loaf pan lined with unbleached parchment paper and put it into the oven at 180 degrees for nearly an hour. And voila! Here we have it....

Banana loaf cooling on rack

It was the nicest banana bread I have ever made and there is hardly a crumb left right now. It was fragrant, light, tasty and very moist. Perfect in every way, I have never had one turn out so well. I think it was because I completely followed my internal 'recipe', the same way I make my spelt bread. 

No measuring, no thinking, just intuitively listen and follow your heart - all the way home. 

Have a lovely day,

April 

Banana bread slices