Dorie's Perfect Party Cake - DB March 2008

Well, this is my first Daring Bakers challenge. And yes, I did leave it to the last minute, but I've been busy with other things.



I didn't make the finals on Art You Eat either, but thanks to all other participants, I have plenty of new ideas that'll keep me going for a while. That was great and I'd like to try more of that.

But back to the cake and the Daring Bakers challenge. It certainly was a challenge for me - the cake batter is different to what I've done before and I'd never made butter cream before either. Also I haven't seen such a thing as cake flour in the UK, so I used plain flour and used Ulrike's metric conversion as a basis.

Ingredients

Cake

300 g plain flour
1 tbsp baking powder
0.5 tsp salt
300 ml full fat milk
4 large egg whites at room temperature
300 g granulated sugar
2 tsp grated lemon zest
115 g unsalted butter at room temperature
0.5 tsp lemon extract

Butter cream

200 g granulated sugar
4 large egg whites at room temperature
60 ml lemon juice
1.25 tsp liquid vanilla extract

Finishing

120 g raspberry preserve
1 dl dessicated coconut
1 dl coconut flakes
200 g fresh raspberries
1 tsp lemon zest

Method

1. Sift flour, baking powder and salt together in a bowl.
2. In a second bowl, whisk together the milk and egg whites enough to mix them together.
3. In a third large bowl, rub the sugar and lemon zest together. The sugar becomes moist and wonderfully fragrant.
4. Add the butter to the sugar, a bit at a time and whisk it in with an electric whisk. There may be need to get your fingers dirty here too, my whisk wasn't very good at the start.
5. Add the extract, then a third of the dry ingredients, whisking all the time.
   
6. Then add half of the milk-egg white mixture, then another third of the dry ingredients.
7. Finish with the last half of the milk-egg white mixture and the last of the dry ingredients and continue to whisk until the batter is smooth.
8. Divide between two cake tins - 22.5 cm/9" diameter and bake in a pre-heated oven at 180 degrees C (gas mark 4). The sponges should take about 30 - 35 minutes. Leave to cool when ready.
9. For the butter cream, make Swiss meringue with the sugar and egg whites, by whisking them together over a bain-marie until it's nice, firm and glossy.
10. Remove from the heat and continue whisking until the meringue cools down. Then add the butter to it, a bit at a time, still whisking, until it's completely incorporated. Then continue whisking for about 10 minutes until the butter cream is smooth and thick.
11. Add the lemon juice gradually and finally the vanilla extract.
12. Slice the cake sponges so you have 4 cake layers. Spread a thin layer of raspberry jam and a thin-ish layer of butter cream between each sponge layer, leaving about a quarter of the butter cream for decoration.
    
13. Cover the assembled cake with the butter cream and decorate with the coconut, lemon zest and fresh raspberries.

On the whole, this was a very tasty cake, but with the butter cream it felt a bit rich. Also making it took most of yesterday, there are many turns to do for the butter cream and I'm not sure the 10 minutes of whisking made any difference.

And it didn't help that I didn't have 9" cake tins. I have one 7.5" and one 13" and I wasn't sure if I should use either of them. And because I didn't want to buy new cake tins, I bought cake liners at the right size. Unfortunately they didn't stay in shape too well and I ended up with two oval cake sponges and so my original design had to be drastically altered.





This was interesting, but I'm not sure it was worth all the effort it took. I'd never made sponge cake with egg whites only and also butter cream was a new thing too. Also I really liked rubbing the sugar and lemon zest together, the smell was so wonderful, and I have three new things I've learned from this challenge.

The Sujuk is ready!

If you thought the sujuk had failed and I was going to let it slip away quietly, you were wrong. It has taken almost twice as long as recommended in my parents' recipe. Lundulph has already developed a theory about that.

I powdered it with the flour and paprika mixture a second time over a week ago and since then the sausages didn't really look like they were making any progress in the drying direction. Also I took three out and placed in the freezer in an attempt to test the concept of freeze drying. But yesterday I gave them a probing squeeze - one of them was practically rock solid! Time to eat!

And so, today being effectively Friday in an end of the working week sort of way, we took one out and stripped it of it's dusty clothing...


...and cut it up...



...before devouring it quickly together with a glass of the finest rakia we have. This is a nice, mature rakia, very smooth and oh so easy to drink.

The sujuk didn't taste exactly like the one my parents make, but then, they don't mix their mince - pure extra lean beef. I had 3 parts regular beef and 1 part lamb, so our sujuk had a slightly higher fat content. Also as you perhaps can see here



the middle is still soft and pink-ish.

Needless to say we gobbled up the whole thing. Very quickly too. There are seven sujuks left now. How are we going to manage?

Now to Lundulph's theory. The higher fat content may have increased the drying time - fat not really containing much water, it would be difficult for it to dry. Also possibly the horse shoe shape may have provided some delay - whatever fat could would have gathered at the bottom at the bend, which is still indeed the part of the other sujuks that's still a bit soft. If we make the sujuks straight and then alternately hang them from either end every week or so, this would perhaps help dry them quicker.

Of course a straight sujuk is called a lukanka (луканка) and I'll have to perform a mental struggle to overcome this change in concept. There, done.

I'm sure many Bulgarians will disagree with me - sujuk and lukanka are completely different things. Well, yes in a way - it's about the spice combination as well - you wouldn't put cumin in sujuk and you'd definitely put it in lukanka. But then every village in Bulgaria have their own spice mixture. So I can't say there are any definitive rules to follow.

The chilli flakes I used are our own thing - we put chillies in everything these days. They weren't noticeable at first, but after having eaten half a sujuk, there was a wonderful background heat so to speak, nicely enhanced by the rakia.

On the whole, I'll try to get hold of a small battery operated fan to put in the fridge when I make sujuk next year, to increase the air circulation and speed up the drying. Unless I work out something better. My parents used to hang their sujuk in the loft, but it helps to have proper winters which suck out every ounce of moisture of everything. I was thinking of a herb dryer, but I haven't found anything that would be remotely useful on the internet.

To sum up - get extra lean beef next time, or better yet, make my own mince, I have the attachment for the Kitchen Assistent. "We have the technology...". And as a reminder, here's what the sausages looked like the day I made them.

Easter Once Again

Cooking and baking are now becoming serious hobbies of mine and a lot of time I spend reading foodie blogs for ideas and tips. Clicking around, I found the Art You Eat blog, which I thought was a wonderful idea. This month the theme is of course eggs, with Easter coming up and all and so it's time for the annual kozunak baking. This time, I wisely only made one lot and so will get to bed on time, being school night and all.

Unlike last year, I've decided to make the kozunak egg baskets. These are something that my Dad talks about around Easter, with his eyes glittering in nostalgic memories. Apparently his Grandmother used to make these for all her grandchildren.

For each basket a hard boiled painted egg and a twig of willow or hazel is needed. The twig should be thin - about 1 cm diameter at the bottom end, straight with no branches at all and be about 80 - 90 cm long. I used regular food colours for the eggs - 1 tsp of colouring in about 1 dl lukewarm water. I left the eggs in for about 6 hours.



The twigs should be washed thoroughly, then twisted around to a hoop.





Prepare the kozunak dough as per my recipe. Then after the dough has risen take about a quarter of it for one basket. Divide the quarter into 3 equal parts. Roll each part into a long sausage, it should be about 2 cm diameter.

Press in the willow hoop into the rolled dough and make sure it's well covered and evenly thick throughout. This will be the basket handle.



Roll out the second part to the same length and thickness, then spiral around the knot of the willow hoop and upwards. Make sure the dough layers overlap a little.



Roll out the third part like before, then place the egg over where the second part ends and continue to spiral the third part around the basket incorporating the egg as well.



Leave to proof for 30-40 minutes, brush with whipped up egg and bake on gas mark 3 (175 degrees C) until golden brown.



Also what I've spotted on my blog readings is a bread called Challah and by the look of it I have a suspicion that kozunak is related to it. And so with the remainder of the dough, I made two traditional plaits.

Note: Yes, I started out with two eggs and two willow hoops and I made two baskets (one for each niece), but I keep forgetting that I have a double oven and the basket with the green egg sort of rose too much and was almost twice the size of the one in the photo above, so I didn't include it in the final photo. In fact it cracked the egg shell completely! That didn't stop my nieces from eating the baskets a few days later.

Müsli bar challenge 3

Yesterday it was time to finally put my original idea into practice - a whole batch of my regular müsli apart from the porridge oats, which were made into porridge with milk. I used 1.5 pi of porridge oats to 2 pi of semi-skimmed milk and boiled stirring on low heat. I also added 2 heaped tablespoons honey.

Once the porridge was ready, I added the müsli mixture and stirred it in as well as I could, which was difficult. This filled up my big pressure cooker pot quite nicely.

As the dry ingredients tried to suck up whatever available moisture there was, the whole thing went quite stiff.

I put most of it in one of the deep baking pans and again put the second one on top and weighed it down. What was left, I distributed over two muffin tins, again trying to compress the mixture. After about an hour, I removed the weights from the baking pan and left it together with the muffin pans to cool down overnight, covered with kitchen paper.



This morning I was almost late for work, as I had to cut up the big slab. It was still fairly moist and spongy to the touch. I cut it up and put it in my big cake tin, on layers of baking paper. The muffin shapes needed to be poked out, but came out in one piece. Lundulph took two pieces with him to work and said they were good. But since I made a whole batch of müsli, these should last him a couple of weeks and a worry is how this will work, if at all. Especially the milk is bound to go off. So after an e-mail discussion, we decided to bake this lot on low, just like meringues. Sadly I forgot to get this started when I got home, so there are some left to do tomorrow.

When I checked them half an hour ago, the pieces had definitely a dried feel to them. At that point they'd been in the oven for just over an hour.

Hopefully this will be the one good recipe.

Update 12 March: I had a bite of this version and frankly it didn't taste too nice, almost like eating bran flakes out of the box. But it's definitely the healthiest version.

Update 14 March: I've frozen most of this version of the müsli bars and a good thing too, Lundulph says that the ones he had this morning left a bit of an odd aftertaste. We're guessing that the milk in the porridge is going off.

Hovmästarsås

The famous Swedish mustard dill sauce that goes so well with all kinds of salmon is called hovmästarsås, which translates as Maître d's sauce. Sainsbury's used to have one very similar, but they seem to have discontinued it, at least I haven't seen it in the superstores I've been to. So tonight I picked what came on top of the google search, from the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Here's the translation.


Ingredients

2 tbsp granulated sugar
0.25 tsp salt
6 tbsp fresh finely chopped dill
3 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 dl grapeseed oil
finely ground white pepper

Method

1. Mix together sugar, salt and dill in a pestle and mortar, as this brings out the dill flavour.
2. Stir in the mustard and vinegar.
3. Slowly add the oil, so the sauce doesn't split.
4. Add pepper to taste and leave to stand for a few minutes before serving.

Writing the recipe, I realise that I made several mistakes, which is why I ended up with a pesto lookalike. I didn't have fresh dill and used dried instead, so halved the quantity, but I should have used maybe a quarter at most. Next I only added 2 tbsp mustard. Third, I didn't have red wine vinegar so used white wine vinegar, though I don't think this made too big a difference. Finally I didn'thave white pepper and was going to use black pepper, but forgot completely about it.

As this is very much a mayonnaise type preparation, it might speed things up if it's made in a blender. I stirred manually and I didn't achieve the magical point when it all goes creamy, so my sauce kept separating fairly quickly.

But as Lundulph put it, it has sugar, salt and mustard, so all the right flavourings are there and you can't go wrong. Well obviously I did.

We had cold smoked salmon slices accompanied by ratatouille and steamed Jerusalem artichokes. It actually tasted very nice.

In order to correct things, I'll keep adding non-dill ingredients until it reaches the look of creamy mustard with bits of dill in it.

Update 5th March: I added another tablespoon of Dijon mustard and not only did the sauce get closer to it's correct colour, once stirred in, it didn't start separating immediately. It's still very green though.

Müsli bar challenge 2

Due to an extremely busy week-end, I didn't manage to do a second attempt at a healthy müsli bar for Lundulph.

Ginger's suggestion about a bran muffin made me think. What if I make a muffin batter and mix in a lot of the müsli? So I did.

However, most batters contain eggs and I'm not sure it's a healthy thing to have lots of them, so I started with my cake recipe without eggs but with some modifications.

Ingredients

butter and flour
1.5 dl grapeseed oil
1.5 dl brown sugar
2 dl yoghurt
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 dl plain flour
1.4 litre müsli mix

Method

1. Butter a deep baking pan and dust with flour. Have all ingredients to hand.
   
2. Mix together the oil and sugar.
3. Stir in the soda into the yoghurt, bubbles will start to appear.
   
4. Quickly whisk in the oil and sugar mixture, then the plain flour.
5. Add the müsli mix and stir until well coated with batter. This needs to be done manually, when I ran the electric whisk, bits of oats flew in all directions.
6. Pour the müsli blend into the baking pan, level and bake for about 30 minutes at 175 degrees C or gas mark 3. My pan is about 25 x 40 cm. The cooking time needs to be adjusted to the thickness.

It smelt fairly nice, but as you can see in the photo, it's far too crumbly for eating in the car.

Oh well, back to the drawing board again. I suspect my idea with porridge will give a similar result.

National Day of Bulgaria

Today is the National Day of Bulgaria. I'm not sure how it's to be celebrated, but I made some Bulgarian flags in meringue.

Creme Parfait for Mother's Day

This is my Mum's version of a dessert that was served in the 70s in the fancy "Кристал" (Kristal) cafe in Sofia in Bulgaria.

She's been making it regularly and at some points my Dad didn't bother with a plate, but just worked his way through the baking pan.

Ingredients

Base

2 dl plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
4 large eggs
1.5 dl granulated sugar
2 - 3 dl orange juice

Cream

1 litre fresh custard
12 sheets of gelatine
5 dl double cream
5 tbsp icing sugar

Decoration

1 dl double cream
1 tbsp icing sugar
chocolate thins

Method

1. Mix the flour and the baking powder well.
2. Whisk the eggs and sugar white and fluffy.
3. Slowly add the flour to the egg and sugar mixture, while whisking.
4. Line a shallow baking pan of about 30 x 40 cm with baking paper making sure that it folds up the edges.
5. Pour the mixture into the pan and level out with a spatula. Tap the whole pan a couple of times to make the mixture settle.
6. Bake in the middle of the oven at 200 degrees C or gas mark 6 until the base goes golden brown.
7. Take out and turn over, either on a second sheet of baking paper that has a little granulated sugar sprinkled on it, or better, straight back into the baking pan and peel off the baking paper while the base is still hot. The base needs to be back in the baking pan and left to cool down.
   
8. Heat up the custard while stirring so it doesn't burn.
9. In the mean time, soak the sheets of gelatine in cold water for a few minutes.
10. When the custard is hot take it off the heat, squeeze out the exess water from the gelatine and add it to the custard and stir in well. The custard will go quite runny once the gelatine has dissoved, that's OK.
    
11. Let the custard cool down completely.
    
12. Add the icing sugar to the double cream and whip it to stiff peaks.
13. Carefully stir in the whipped cream into the custard, this will double the cream in volume.
14. Distribute the orange juice over the sponge base and let it soak in for a couple of minutes.
15. Pour the cream over the base, level out with a spatula and also give the pan a tap like before.
16. Place in the fridge overnight to set.
17. For serving, cut the creme parfait into squares, whip the cream and icing sugar and place a teaspoonful on each square and push in a chocolate thin in the middle.

Normally my Mum makes custard from powder and it's a lot sweeter than the fresh one. Unfortunately I didn't think it through and didn't add extra sugar, so my creme parfait was fairly bland. I also cut too large squares and it was too big and felt a bit heavy. I'll try to post an alternative recipe for the custard, I think a variety without eggs would be lighter.

This is the very basic one. But it'll work very well with bits of fruit - strawberries or blueberries - or even with chopped nuts or chocolate. All can be added to the cream before pouring it over the base.

The quantity of gelatine is what was recommended on the packet for one litre. This is the second time I use gelatine, so I'm not entirely confident on this, but the final result had the correct texture, so I guess it was OK.

Decoration is also quite easy to vary with chocolate sprinkles or whatever you fancy. My Mum made this dessert when we visited for New Year and she had red and green coctail cherries that she pushed into the blobs of whipped cream on top of each square.

From the brief search on google, this is quite different from what is called parfait in other countries.

Update Tuesday 4th March:
My Mum had forgotten the sugar in her recipe. Also the cream is not custard, but a cream based on potato starch. Corn starch works as well. These are the proportions:

1.5 dl milk
1 tbsp starch
1 tbsp granulated sugar

This would of course need the addition of some flavouring.

She also suggested I use some of the wonderful white cherry jam to sort out the lack of sweetness.

Clotted cream project

Well, I promised I'd make clotted cream and I did. On the whole it's perhaps a bit too much effort to put in, but it was interesting to try it out.

So I bought 2 litres Jersey gold top. This is milk from the famous Jersey cows. I've seen them, they are pale brown and very friendly. They also produce a wonderfully creamy milk - 5.2%.

So step one was to pour the milk into a shallow pan. The pan had to be stainless steel, pyrex or heat proof porcelain. The pan should be shallow, but still deep enough to go into a bain-marie. What's of importance is the surface - the larger, the more clotted cream allegedly.

So on Friday morning, before going to work, I used my large pyrex dish. It could only take 1 litre. Oh, well, that leaves one as backup. The milk had to be left to stand "overnight" which in my exprience is about 12 hours.

12 hours later, I placed the metal plate from the pressure cooker in a shallow casserole, then placed the pyrex dish on that. I poured water in the casserole and set it to boil on the lowest setting.


The recipe was not very specific on how long to do this - it depends on the depth of the dish the milk is in. I guessed that my dish was on the deep-ish side and opted for 2 hours of "just under simmering". Fairly quickly after placing it on the hob, it developed the familiar yellowy crust.


After two hours, the dish is to be stored in a cool place "overnight". I covered the pyrex dish with plastic foil and then it's lid and then put it outside, it's still as cold as a fridge outside. To be on the safe side, I placed a large log on top of the lid, in case some of our wildlife should get interested.

The next morning, the cream was to be skimmed off. Well, I skimmed it off and there wasn't much at all - about half a decilitre, barely enough for our two hot cross buns this morning.

It tasted OK and looked OK-ish too. But for the resulting amount it was a lot of effort, I think. I also think the temperature wasn't high enouth, I shouldn't have used the metal plate in between. And maybe follow the alternative recommendation of adding some double cream to the milk, it might yield more.

Hot tip on eating - use scones, not hot cross buns. The hot cross buns are too spicy and it makes it impossible to taste the flavour of the clotted cream.

Happy Baba Marta

Today is 1st March and in Bulgaria it is celebrated as the beginning of Spring. People give each other мартеници (martenitsi) - small items made of red and white yarn. I didn't have time to make any this year, I normally do though. So instead I made meringue martenitsi.



Won't last as long of course.

Powdered sujuk

After discussing my observations on our sujuk sausages with the expert (my Mum), it turns out she'd noticed the same thing on her sujuks and has taken two steps to ensure final success - she's dusted them with a mixture of flour and paprika and she's put them in the freezer which is frost free.

So tonight, I measured up about a tablespoon of paprika and a tablespoon of plain flour and mixed them well in a deep bowl. Then I set about dusting. The powder did stick to the sausages very well and far too thick too, so I had to brush off all the excess with my egg brush.



I still don't feel too comfortable about placing in the freezer - they have to be put in there "naked" so to speak, not in a plastic bag or similar. I might give it a try on a couple of them over the next few days, I need to work out a way of not getting the freezer dirty with grease and flour and paprika.


Here they are almost done and dusted. The drier parts at the edges didn't pick up too much of the dusting, as you can see. But they are now closer to the ones in the shop, on the surface at least. Industrially made sujuk of course contains a lot more fat.

Click here for the next step in this adventure.

Müsli bar challenge 1

A couple of days ago Lundulph challenged me to make him a müsli bar based on my own recipe. This in order to skip breakfast at home and beat the traffic on his way to work.

A quick google resulted in the following, extremely tasty creation, that's also probably quite unhealthy.

Ingredients

125 g unsalted butter
3 tbsp brown sugar
5 tbsp honey
1 litre müsli

Method

1. Melt the butter on low heat in a fairly large sauce pan.
2. Add the sugar and honey and stir until they are dissolved.
3. Leave to simmer for 7 minutes. Do not stir or shake.
4. In the mean time, line a deep pan with baking paper.
5. Pour in the müsli mix and stir in well to get everything coated in the sugar/butter mixture.
6. Cover with another piece of baking paper, then place as much weights on top as possible and leave to cool.
   

I have two identical deep pans, so I poured the sticky mixture in one and placed the second one on top. I put my big pressure cooker pot inside and filled it with water, along with the second pan. I left it to cool overnight.

This morning I cut the müsli slap with a knife. It was not as sticky as it looked and still fairly soft, so no risk of breaking any teeth. Lundulph said he liked it too, but was worried about the health factor.

So the challenge is not complete yet.

Steamed tuna

Inspired by Fred and Ginger, I'd planned to steam fish this week and since they were so sweet and gave me a packet of lovely green peppercorns the other day, I got some tuna steaks, broccoli, mange tout and a selection of fresh herbs - dill, mint, basil and lemongrass. I was particularly excited about the lemongrass as I've never used that before, it always looks so dry in the shop and I've never felt tempted to buy it. I've missed a lot there, I realise that now.

So, without further ado

Ingredients

4 tuna steaks
3 tbsp ginger paste
2 large cloves of garlic
1 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp Japanese soy sauce
4-5 sprigs dill
4 sprigs mint
2 sprigs basil
2 stalks lemongrass
1 head broccoli
200 g mange tout

Method

1. The ginger paste is just plain ginger that has been run in a food processor into a pulp. A couple of times a year, I buy about a kilo of fresh ginger, spend a couple of hours in front of the TV peeling it all, then process until fairly smooth, distribute into ice trays and freeze.
2. Press the garlic and mix with the ginger, oyster and soy sauces. Place the tuna steaks on a large plate and distribute the mixture over them and rub it in on all sides. Leave for a few minutes.
3. Wash all herbs, cut the lemongrass lengthways in two, wash the mangetout and the broccoli and cut into florets.
4. As I don't have a bamboo steamer, I had to make do with my metal one and as it's smallish, I used the one for my pressure cooker as well. And because they are both metal, I placed two layers of cheese cloth at the bottom, so the fish wouldn't stick.
5. Place the fish at the bottom of the steamer, then all the herbs on top, then mangetout and broccoli on top.
6. Steam for 5-6 minutes. I left to steam a bit too long and the fish was slightly overdone. I also forgot to take off the lid of my pressure cooker after turning off the heat and sadly tomorrow's dinner will be even more overdone and the veg will be the dreaded yellowy hue.
7. I served with Canadian wild rice, which I'd prepared before, as it takes 45 minutes.

Needless to say, this was one yummy and quick dinner. Definitely a repeat.



Also since we'd been so very very healthy with this, we had scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam for dessert. Happy thoughts!

Dinkelbröd

As I'd not cooked for a week, I thought I'd start off with something I've wanted to do for a while - a Swedish dinkelbröd (link is in Swedish). It's made of spelt wheat, which apparently is what was used for flour in Medieval Europe. From reading up on this, spelt wheat farming stopped in the early 20th century, but is now making a good comeback and is really trendy these days.

Also, I did some browsing of foodie blogs and spotted this on Wild Yeast - a Couronne Bordelaise - and I was speechless! I've never imagined that such beautiful breads existed.

So two birds with one stone, today I mixed up the bread and made a couronne of a sorts. And I used regular yeast this time, none of the fast acting stuff.

Ingredients

0.5 l lukewarm water
25 g fresh yeast or corresponding dry yeast
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp salt
12 - 13 dl spelt flour

Method

1. Activate the yeast in the water.
2. Mix all ingredients to a sticky dough.
3. Leave to rise overnight in the fridge or for an hour in room temperature.
4. Knead into the desired shape and leave to proof for another 30 minutes or so.
5. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 175 degrees C / gas mark 4. My couronne took 50 minutes.

I made the mistake of putting in 2 tablespoons of olive oil, so the dough was possibly extra sticky. Also my dough was almost twice the size as what was recommended in the couronne instructions. And one of the instructional photos seemed so pretty with the bread shaped like a star, I wanted to keep that on top, rather than bake it like a true couronne.

And here are the several mistakes or so I made. I didn't grease up the ovenproof dish before putting the dough in. I forgot to take out the little bowl in the middle and it wasn't really ovenproof.

The bread baked very nicely and after 50 minutes, I took it out and covered it with a tea towel. I always remember my Mum saying that you can't eat bread straight out of the oven, it has to rest for a few minutes "to run around it's field" she used to say. I e the field where the wheat grew, the wheat that was used for the flour. I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere, so I'm not sure if that's really a thing to do or not, but it certainly makes the crust a bit softer.

But when I tried to get the bread out of the dish, well it wouldn't come out. I tried to prise it out and sadly this is what happened:



And the bottom of the bread didn't look much better:



I brushed the bread with an egg in the hopes to make the star shape become more obvious, but sadly egg on dark breads never really works, does it?



Still, the bread was quite tasty - a bit on the heavy side and rather crumbly as Lundulph discovered when he was buttering his slice. It was rather nice, but I'd need to have a regular wholemeal bread side by side for a taste comparison, I can't tell the difference on it's own.

Rather interesting and I'm glad I tried it out. And I'll definitely need to repeat the couronne, I must get it right, it looked so pretty.

Back from holiday

Lundulph and I got back from a week in windy Cornwall yesterday. It was nice, but extremely windy. And I picked up a book on how to make clotted cream and I'll be trying it out next week-end. Very exciting.

In the mean time, our sausages have been happily hanging in the fridge. But of course, since it hadn't been opened for about a week and so there had been no reason for it to extract any moisture, so the sausages are still quite soft and also had some small nodules all over them.



I was a bit worried, but they seemed to be little blobs of fat. I wiped all sausages and rolled them. They are getting nice and flat, I hope that they'll be ready by the end of next week, both Lundulph and I are drooling in anticipation.

Click here for the next step in this adventure.

Sujuk 4

Actually I need to explain further on the rolling of the sujuks and the pricking of the skins. Both are compulsory in fact. The skins are to be pricked, so they don't burst when the sausage is rolled. And the rolling is done in order to help the sausage dry as evenly as possible. Obviously the meat nearest the skin will be the first to dry and by rolling, the meat is slightly displaced, and so things dry more evenly.

Either way, we're now counting the days until the sujuks are ready.

Click here for the next step in this adventure.

Sujuk 3

Last night it was time for the first rolling and Lundulph kindly complied. He did a really good job of it too.

The sausages have definitely begun to dry and have gone darker, closer to their final colour. Also I seem to have filled them fairly well too, as no air bubbles had appeared. If they do, they need to be pricked with a needle.

All we need to do now is to wait the 25 days and roll every now and then.

Click here for the next part of this adventure.

Sujuk 2

Last night I made the sujuks. Very exciting and it got a bit late, so I didn't get to blog about it.
The whole went faster than I thought it would and it was rather fun too.
Here is my sausage stuffing machine, it's my beloved Electrolux Assistent with a new attachment.
I'm not sure I needed to soak the intestines. I think that's only needed when they have been stored in brine or salt and that in order to make them more flexible. The sujuk tends to be on the salty side once it's done, after all water and other liquid has evaporated, so getting some of the salt out of the skins is a good thing.

Anyway, the intestine is threaded onto the plastic pipe.
I actually had more intestine that would fit onto the pipe, so I had to cut it off. Before I tied the end, I filled the machine up with mince mixture as far as possible to avoid air bubbles. Once the mince started showing at the end of the plastic pipe, I pulled out a little bit of the intestine and tied a string around the end. Then I switched the machine on and started stuffing it with more mince.
At approximately 30 cm lenth, I stopped the machine and squeezed the mince away from around the pipe and tied the string around for the second end of the sausage. With a new piece of string I tied the beginning of the next one. After just under an hour, I had eight and a half sausages. The last one was a bit tricky as I ran out of mince and there is just so much I could push down the machine with the plastic stick. So for the last half, I took off the plastic pipe, took out as much of the mince that I could and stuffed it manually. This was quite tedious and I'm not doing that again.

Lundulph hung our produce on the wine rack in the fridge:
Almost immediately the sujuks started dripping, so we've lined with kitchen tissues and we swapped them tonight. There will be more of this over the next couple of days. Hopefully the fridge will be sufficient to get them dried.

They do have a strong smell though. It's not unpleasant, but too much of anything is not good, so I'll have to get hold of something to neutralise it with next time.

My mixture of mince was 75% extra lean beef and 25% lamb. Basically what I happened to have in the freezer. Generally pork is mostly recommended, but it's not that important.

Also if you can't get hold of any kind of sausage skins, or just feel it's too disgusting, cheese cloth can be used as well instead. Just form the mince into a long sausage and roll it up into a piece of cheese cloth, so that it covers it with a couple of layers.

Once we'd put the sujuks in the fridge, some of them kept sliding out of the string knots. I'm not sure how to tie them to prevent this. Must remember to leave more bits of the intestine at each end next time. Yesterday I had to re-tie them a couple of times. They are staying put now though.

Finally when I cleaned out the sausage machine, I ended up with a handful more mince. This I flattened into a hamburger shape tonight and fried for Lundulph's dinner. He thought it was excellent and suggested we make this mixture for our next barbecue.

The next big thing to do is on Sunday evening, when I'll take the sujuks out and roll them for the first time. They will shrink as they dry and rolling will push the air out and make the sujuk denser.

Click here for the next part of this adventure.

Суджук

After yesterday's pancake indulgence, we were good and had salad tonigt. I reduced the recipe to two eggs which resulted in 3 pancakes each. One with sugar and lemon, one with Nutella (yum!) and one with strawberry jam. We also had blackberry jam, fig jam and white cherry jam, but there weren't enough pancakes for that. Not to mention all the jellies screaming for attention in the fridge.

But I also started on the following. This is the big one for this year, I think. I'm making cуджук (sujuk). This is a dried sausage, shaped like a horseshoe. Possibly of Turkish origin, but very popular in Bulgaria, along with луканка (lukanka). The main difference to me seems to be in the shape and thickness of these two. And of course every region has their own combination of spices. The one I'm making is based on my parents recipe that they've developed and tuned over the past 25 years.

This is the first time I make this, so to be on the safe side, I'm making less than half of the amounts. Of course as for most sausages, you need sausage skins, and because the sujuk needs to be dried, the sausage skins must be porous. Traditionally sheep or pig intestines are used, but there are artificial alternatives as well. Our butcher did have pig intestines and amidst a bit of sniggering, I got some last Saturday. When the sujuk is ready, I'll bring them some. They thought it was rather amusing that I'd try to make sausages at home.

Notice that this will take the better part of a month and so will be spread over several posts.

Ingredients

5 kg minced meat
90 g salt
3 tbsp granulated sugar
3 tbsp sweet paprika
2 tbsp chilli flakes (optional)
15 g savory
15 g ground black pepper
7 dl water

Method

1. Mix all ingredients well and leave overnight so all flavours are released.
2. Next day, place the (natural) sausage skins in water for a few hours.
3. Thread the sausage skin onto the sausage filling machine and tie a piece of string at the end. Then fill a length of about 30 cm and tie with the other end of the string, so a loop is formed between string and sausage.
4. Cut off the end and repeat the previous step with the next sujuk.
5. Hang the sujuks in a cool place to dry.
6. After 2 - 3 days, carefully roll each sujuk with a rolling pin and leave to hang and dry again.
7. Repeat the rolling 2 - 3 more times while the sujuks are drying. They should be ready after about 20 - 25 days.
8. If you grow tired of waiting this long, or just fancy trying it, the sujuk can be fried during the drying period. Works pretty much like a regular sausage.

When the sujuk is ready, remember to peel off the sausage skin. It's normally eaten as a snack, sliced thinly along with a fine rakia. Maybe salad as well.

Commercial sujuk tends to have a higher fat content, so in making your own, you can ensure that it's mostly meat, not to mention the spice combination.

Today I made step 1 above - mixed everything and put in the fridge overnight. My fabulous kitchen assistant machine not only mixed all the ingredients in a whizz, but will also help me stuff the mixture into the sausage skins tomorrow. Here's an action shot.


Click here for the next part of this adventure.

Kitchen experimentation

On Saturday I decided to finally try out the idea of leaving a dough to rise slowly in the fridge overnight.

True, I made the dough in the morning, so overnight in this case would have been some 24 hours plus.

I made the dough for the cinnamon buns and again I made a double amount. I divided in in two, leaving one half to rise normally and the other I put in the fridge.

Here's where things started going wrong - the dough in the fridge rose at the same speed as the dough outside! I had to punch it down or it would have invaded the whole fridge. After that, it remained smallish.

From the half left outside, I made cinnamon buns, a bit on the small side, but still. Baked half of them, the other half I put in plastic bags and in the freezer. The idea being to be able to have them freshly baked on demand, rather than freezing after they're baked as they tend to dry out quickly when reheated in the microwave, not to mention that the nib sugar goes soggy then too. So will post later on how this part of the experiment works.

Yesterday, I took out the dough from the fridge - it hadn't moved since I punched it down. I took off the cling film and noticed the dough was wet with condensation. Very sticky when I took it out of the bowl, but also it smelt "funny". I took it to Lundulph and he said it smelt fermented. And of course that's what it was - yeast and sugar and nothing to kill the yeast after the initial rising (being a sweet dough, no salt was added, salt kills the yeast). And I'd no intention of baking that stuff, so ended up binning the lot, very sad.

Now my new fancy pastry book specifically says that fresh yeast should be used, but if course I've not been able to find it in the UK. As an alternative there's dry yeast, but under no circumstances should quick yeast be used, the book said, as it contains more than just yeast that makes things rise quicker and removes the control over things. So this is what I'm blaming for my fermented dough at present - I only use quick yeast nowadays, since it's needed for the bread machine.

My Mum often makes dough and leaves it to rise overnight and that always works out (I can only remember her having one mishap in the kitchen throughout my entire life). But she uses fresh yeast, something readily available in Sweden. Also she really does mix the dough in the evening and makes it first thing the next morning. So I'll be buying myself some regular dry yeast and make a second attempt. The idea behind this part of the experiment is that I could make the dough on Friday night and then make the buns on Saturday morning, and not have to lose half the Saturday with rising etc.

At present though, the freezer is cram-packed with food, so won't be cooking anything major for a while now. But I have a few things up my sleeve (or in the fridge actually) that I'll write about over the next few days.

Marbled Butter Biscuits

The other day my new cookery book arrived, The Professional Pastry Chef by Bo Friberg. Needless to say, despite it being big and heavy enough to club a seal with, I skimmed through quite a few parts of it and decided to begin with some biscuits, since I haven't made any in ages.

I hadn't realised that this is actually written to be used in teaching future pastry chefs, but there's so much that's so very interesting, I think it's good for advanced or eager amateurs too.

Because of this, the recipes are a bit oversized for home needs, so I scaled this one down as well as I could, rounding off to make it possible to measure:

Ingredients

200 g unstalted butter at room temperature
0.25 tsp vanilla extract
75 g icing sugar
200 g strong flour
100 g plain flour
8 g unsweetened cocoa powder

Method

1. Blend all ingredients except the cocoa powder, in a food processor with the cutting knife or a dough mixer, which is what I used. Very important that it's done on low speed to avoid warming the ingredients, as this will apparently affect the final texture.
2. Divide the dough in two equal parts and mix the cocoa powder into one half. Knead until the cocoa colour is completely even.
3. Place in the fridge for about an hour to chill the dough. It needs to be firm enough for the next step.
4. Take out the two parts and roll/squeeze into 25-30 cm long "ropes". It's more squeezing than rolling, the dough tends to crumble when rolling. Divide each "rope" into three parts.
5. Now starting with one of the white dough pieces, press it onto the baking surface, place a brown dough piece on top and press in, then a white and so on alternating with all 6 pieces.
6. Then roll up the layered dough into a log and again roll/squeeze it to reach a diameter of about 5 cm.
7. At this point it needs to go into the fridge again to get it firm, but it was getting late and despite the strict instructions in the book on not skipping the chilling stages, I did.
8. Preheat the oven at gas mark 5 (190 degrees C). Cut up this log into 5-6 mm thick slices and place onto a baking sheet lined with baking parchment.
9. Bake in the middle of the oven for 15 minutes. The recipe called for 190 degrees, but I think maybe gas mark 5 was a bit too high, possibly do gas mark 4 and bake for 20 minutes, to avoid browhing the biscuits too much.

From the quarter of the original amount I produced 47 pieces. They are now cooling in the kitchen. Lundulph and I couldn't wait and tried them out, I even burnt my tongue on mine and the verdict so far is that the texture is rather nice, but they felt a bit more flour-y than sweet, so it may be necessary to increase the amount of sugar next time. But will see when they have cooled completely first.

I'm not too happy with the marbling effect and I think I flattened the dough too much during the layering and then had to roll it up. Next time, I'll first stack the pieces and just start rolling the log straight away, maybe twisting slightly to get a bit of interest into it. And as you can see from the photo, they are quite greasy, but the book is explicit on this, not try to make them healthier by substituting the butter and I agree with that.

What I found particularly attractive about these biscuits is the fact that once the dough has been rolled into the log, it can be wrapped up in cling film and frozen until needed. How brilliant is that? Fresh biscuits on demand.

Update 2nd February: Well, I was right, the biscuits definitely need a bit more sugar, otherwise the texture was wonderfully crumbly. Also should perhaps make them slightly smaller and not skip the second chilling stage, as skipping it made the cuts flat and I had to re-shape each one before baking. Also I think caster or granulated sugar may give a bit more crunch to the texture as well. The test panel, consisting of various relatives concur - more sugar!

Beans Plakia

Most of today I spent wondering what to do for dinner. I made a Thai red curry last Friday and there was one small portion left. I hadn't taken out anything from the freezer this morning either. On top of that we've run out of bread, so beans on toast were not an option either.

For a short while I toyed with the idea of butter bean salad, but it would still need a night for all flavours to release. So walking into the larder, I spotted some cans of fancy beans I'd bought some time ago and I clicked - beans plakia.

The "plakia" (BG: плакия) I rather suspect originates from the Greek plaki, which means baked in an oven, according to Wikipedia and Rick Stein. In Bulgaria, this means baked in an oven with tomatoes and lemon.

Needless to say, I didn't have lemon in the house, but had some of the lovely pepper-chili paste still from the imam bayildi I made a couple of weeks ago. Also since I had canned beans, I didn't need the cooking phase where celeriac, parsley root and a bay leaf provide interesting flavours. So all in all it was something fairly different from the beans plakia that I ended up with, but it was very tasty indeed. Would work fine as a main meal for a vegetarian or as a side dish with something grilled I think. Lundulph says that chicken might get lost in it. I think it might just about work though.

Ingredients

3 x 410 g cans of beans (Borlotti, Pinto and Black-eye)
2 medium sized carrots
0.5 dl grapeseed oil
2 cans of plum tomatoes
1 dl Turkish red pepper paste
3 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tbsp lemon juice
salt, black pepper

Condiment

garlic
vinegar

Method

1. Drain and rinse the beans. Lay out in a deep baking tin. Preheat the oven at gas mark 6 (220 degrees C).
2. Peel and slice the carrots and lay on top of the beans.
3. Drain the tomatoes into a jug, add the red pepper paste, parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper to the juice and stir in well.
4. Slice the tomatoes and lay on top of the beans and carrots.
5. Drizzle the oil over the dish, then cover with the tomato sauce. Give it a shake, so everything is covered with the tomato sauce.
   
6. Bake for 45 minutes in the middle of the oven.
7. Peel and press the garlic in a small bowl. Pour vinegar on top and leave to stand while the beans are cooking.
   

In fact any type of beans would work, I had some doubts about the Borlotti and Pinto ones because they looked the same, both on the label of the cans and when I opened them. All had a floury flavour.

The garlic condiment is optional, but is recommended with lots of Bulgarian dishes, mostly soups. I used to like to dip bread in it when I was little, but then I do really love garlic. It's quite stong flavoured and smells even stronger, store wrapped in at least two plastic bags!

Swiss Meringue

The other day I made meringue again, this time using the Swiss method, which according to my Larousse Gastronomique, is the preferred method by professional chefs as it is stable enough to last a few hours in the fridge.

The method is to mix the sugar and egg whites together over a water bath, i. e. a bain-marie or a double boiler. This sounded a bit complicated to me, but it's not, in fact the mixing of the meringue works so well, it's quite fun and I immediately decided to never make any French meringue ever again.

This time I also made a few changes to my recipe and now I realise despite my impulsive decision, that I have to give French meringue one more chance. This time I used a stainless steel pot for the mixing. From researching on the Internet, a copper bowl is the ultimate to use as there is some fine chemical reaction between the egg whites and the copper that makes the meringue more stable and that stainless steel is the best substitute for this. You may be able to get away with glass bowls, but definitely not plastic ones, as despite thorough washing, there tend to be some small residues of fat which ruin the meringue.

The other thing I changed was that I used caster sugar (as most recipes recommend) rather than icing sugar. I was surprised that it did dissolve, I'd expected it to remain in small crystals.

The third change was to separate the egg whites and leave them on the kitchen top for about an hour and a half to bring them up to room temperature, apparently that also optimises the meringue stability.

I used 2.5 dl caster sugar to 3 large egg whites and whisked them together on the lowest setting of my electrical whisk, while heating up the water in my bigger pot. It went foamy white fairly quickly, so I put the small pot into the larger one (and thus forming my bain-marie), while still whisking.

I had the hob on quite low and the water never actually came to simmering point, just to be on the safe side, I did rotate the small pot to avoid heat pockets where the egg whites may cook into a solid lump.

I kept whisking on the lowest level throughout and the mixture went very stiff. The idea is to get the whites cooked, but also in a foam and this provides the stability.

Once the foam was very stiff, I took out the small pot from the larger one and filled up the piping bag and got to work, it was a joy, the meringue kept it's shape!

Unfortunately, 3 egg whites resulted in three baking sheets full of rosette squirts of meringue and it was getting late in the evening on a school night, so I put two in the main oven and one in the grill/oven. At half-time I swapped the two in the main oven around, as I don't have the fan functionality to spread the heat evenly. At this point the top ones had gone a bit rosy. At the end of the hour, I switched off and left everything to cool in the oven.

The next morning, when I took them out and was about to put them in a box, I found it was impossible, they were extremely sticky. Though tasty and Lundulph thought too. So I put them back in the cooker and did a second session of a few hours when I got back home, I forgot all about them. When I switched the cooker off, they all seemed to have dried nicely. This wasn't quite true, there was still some stickiness in most of them this morning, but it was possible to move them to a box. Not for giving away, but we'll make sure they don't go off.

Hot tips for next time is to use the slow cooking setting, which should be even lower than gas mark 1. Possibly leave the meringues on overnight and on the lower level in the oven. Possibly also with a baking sheet on one of the higher levels, to prevent the meringues from going brown.

Anyway, the rescue mission sort of worked. Taste-wise, these meringues didn't taste as sweet as the French ones I've made before, which does make sense since I used caster sugar this time, so per volume it's less than icing sugar.

Inbakad Fläskfile

Yesterday for our luxury Sunday special dinner, I made "inbakad fläskfile", which would be "pork tenderloin en croute" in English. This used to be in Sweden what Chicken Kiev was in the UK and around the same time period too.

In fact it's fairly simple to make and tastes very nice. The restaurant I worked in many years ago used to do this for most of the functions they did and sadly I never wrote down the recipe, so I had to make it up yesterday. On the whole, it worked well. Generally you'd use beef tenderloin which is more expensive, but the ones our butcher had were pork and looked nice, so I did them instead. You could tell that I hadn't made this in over 15 years. I had two good pieces of tenderloin, so made two rolls, the second one turned out a bit better, but still far from worth serving guests. In addition, Lundulph and I will now be eating this for some time to come, it was way too much for two people, but I've cut it up into portions and frozen, though I suspect this particular dish won't take kindly to this treatment. I had some for lunch today, reheated in the microwave, which made the crust ever so greasy, otherwise it was OK.

Ingredients

10 g butter
400 g piece of tenderloin, pork or beef
salt and pepper

10 g butter
1 large onion
1 clove of garlic
150 g fresh chanterelles
150 g fresh button mushrooms
2 dl creme fraiche
salt and pepper

2 pieces of puff pastry, approx. 20 x 35 cm each
1 egg with yolk and white separated

Method

1. Heat up the butter in a pan. In the mean time pat the tenderloin dry with a kitchen towel.
2. Brown the tenderloin all over, only enough for it to get a bit of colour.
3. Remove from the pan and cover with salt and pepper, slice into 2 cm thick slices and leave to one side to cool.
4. Peel and dice the onion, clean and dice the mushrooms. Preheat the oven on gas mark 6 (225 degrees C)
   
5. Heat up the butter in the same pan as used previously, don't wash in between. Fry the onions for a few minutes until it goes soft and a bit translucent, then add the mushrooms and stir occasionally until the released liquid evaporates.
6. Add the creme fraiche, it'll melt and go thin, that's OK. Leave to simmer for a few minutes, then season and remove from the heat.
7. Grease a baking tin. Place one sheet of puff pastry onto it, place the tenderloin in the middle, spread the mushroom-onion mixture evenly on top.
8. Brush with egg white around the edges, then place the second sheet of puff pastry to cover the lot. If the sides are too wide, trim down.
   
9. Whisk up the yolk with 1 tsp water and brush over the top. Trimmings of the puff pastry can be used for decoration.
10. Bake in the oven for 20-30 minutes, depending on how thick the meat is.

With this I made Delia's perfect mashed potato and steamed some broccoli. I also had a little play with the mashed potato and piped some roses and placed under the grill for a few minutes until the tips went golden brown. I have very vague recollection of my Mum doing this once very many years ago. They barely held together those roses, so I suspect I didn't quite do them right.

In the restaurant they used to make a sauce with red roe, which sounds very odd, but complemented the tenderloin very nicely. I don't remember how it was done, so didn't attempt it this time.

The big mistake I made this time was that I used two sheets of puff pastry in total for double the amount of everything else. So in order to get the meat and filling covered, I rolled the pastry. The first one I rolled straight onto the special silicone sheet I use when working doughs and this was a grave mistake as it stuck very well to it, I had severe difficulties prising it off and it tore badly pretty much everywhere. For the second piece, I left the plastic sheet on and also placed a piece of clingfilm under before rolling. This made wrapping much easier, but the pastry was so thin, that it tore anyway here and there. Not too bad though.

And since my new cookery book arrived today - Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cooking Techniques - I've reached page 125, where this dish is described and called Beef Wellington. The stuffing is however completely dry and the piece of fillet is a lot thicker, so needs some pre-roasting.

One very neat trick that I'll try next time is that the meat and stuffing should first be wrapped in a couple of thin crepes, which will prevent any juices penetrating the puff pastry and making it soggy. Also the crepes are made with herbs for additional flavour.

Update 23 January: Yes, after some more googling, I found out that mashed potatoes piped and baked in the oven are called pommes duchesse and need an egg yolk or two in addition, I suspect to give them a more goldeny colour and to make the rosettes keep their shape better. There's plenty of mashed potato left now, so I'll give this one a go again.

Imam Bayildi

This turned out rather nice, despite all the mishaps I had with it. Once again I followed Rick Stein's recipe.

First of all, making the aubergines stripey - I have a tool for making stripes in fruit and vegetables, but it turned out hard work. I tried Rick Stein's recommendation to use a potato peeler, but that was almost as tricky. I also tried using a vegetable knife, but it was difficult to control. I ended up using the veggie knife to score the aubergine vertically, then followed along with the stripe tool. Not sure if that was easier, but by this point I ran out of aubergines to stripe.

Next I only cut them lengthwise, pried them open and spread some salt and left to drain, wondering how on earth I was going to get the stuffing in. Turns out I'd mis-read, I was supposed to cut out a wedge.

While the aubergines were draining I made the filling. When it was time to add the tomatoes, I found out that I didn't have any. Gah! But I had a small can of tomato puree, which I put in with some water.

Before attempting to stuff the aubergines, I cut out wedges and just about managed to fit in the filling. As with the lamb mince breads, the proportions weren't right, good thing I used two large onions instead of medium sized ones. I also squashed two fingers on the garlic press, which broke. Luckily I had a spare one.

Finally, out of the 6 aubergines, I could only fit 4 in my pan, so decided to bake the last two, which is what my Mum does with Imam Bayildi (or имам баялда in Bulgarian). The 4 in the pan were done in just under an hour, while the 2 in the oven I left for about an hour and a half.

I also drizzled the recommended amount of olive oil, by some strange coincidence, the aubergines didn't seem to soak it all up.

Mu Mum also slices the aubergines and fries them lightly with very little oil, before lining an oven proof dish. So a lot less oil, a lot healthier.

The whole thing was a bit of a hassle, but was quite tasty and I suspect it'd be even nicer with real tomatoes.

Lundulph and I had one each yesterday. I hadn't prepared anything to go with this dish, and I kept thinking that some potatoes or some butter beans might be nice with it.

Tonight, I baked salmon in aluminium foil and I covered it with some of the pepper paste I made on Saturday. That worked ever so nicely, the salmon took some of the heat off the pepper paste. With that we had steamed baby potatoes and half a stuffed aubergine - a very nice dinner for a working day.

But I'll try my Mum's version next time, this stuffing of aubergines takes too much effort, so I'll only do it for dinner parties.

Lundulph's verdict is that it works as a side with meat, or as a main dish for a vegetarian. I think I concur.

Lahmacun

Last year, I briefly got a glimpse of a couple of episodes of Rick Stein's new show Mediterranean Escapes. They were a very nice surprise to me, he's normally so into fish and I'm so not. But here he's picked out some specialities that seemed quite tasty. Well, it did help that I caught the episode in Turkey.

And I was playing with the thought of buying the book. Luckily I didn't because I got it for Christmas.

Tonight I made the Lahmacun and I've no idea how to pronounce it. It's a Turkish light meal consisting of spicy minced lamb on flatbread.


Once again I had to make some changes to his recipe - I didn't have the special Aleppo pepper and didn't have the recommended substitute Cayenne, so I used my treasured hot Hungarian paprika instead. It's not as hot, but adds a nice flavour. Also I trebled it, to be on the safe side.

I was also surprised that plain flour should be used for the dough, its gluten content is normally not very good and it tends not to rise, but this was precisely the point. And it did swell enormously during the rising period.

I think I used too small pieces of the dough for the flat breads and too much mince on each, so I only got 8 when the recipe was for 12. But I rolled the left over dough with my knobbly pin and got 6 pita-like soft flat breads in addition. Will see how they hold, this may be a solution to my long search for a recipe for Swedish soft flat bread, just need to add some spices.

I used up quite a lot of flour in the kneading and rolling, should be less generous with that in the future. Certainly there's no need for flour on the baking sheets, they are non-stick.

The mince mixture was difficult to spread on the breads, very messy. Might be an idea next time to do all the flat breads, before starting to bake them, rather than just do two at a time, while the previous lot is baking. I just about made it, but it was stressful.

Finally we forgot the lemon juice in the end, only had parsley, but it was very tasty indeed. Lundulph had 2 and I had one, the remaining 5 I'll freeze, I don't see why this wouldn't work.

On the whole, these are very close to what is called Princess toast in Bulgaria (принцеса), where a minced meat mixture is spread on a slice of bread and it's baked under a hot grill for a few minutes. I tried to do that after we'd been to Bulgaria, since Lundulph really liked it, but didn't succeed with beef mince, which we normally use. But this mixture with lamb mince might work here too, and it'll speed things up significantly too. I think it's because the lamb meat is a finer mince than the beef, not sure the reason for this. I'd rather use beef and will have to check with the butcher if they can do a finer mince with beef for me.

In between things, I also made Turkish red pepper paste in preparation of another Rick Stein recipe from the Mediterranean book - Imam Bayildi, which is a dish popular also in Bulgaria - имам баялда. So I bought 6 Romano peppers - those fancy long bright red ones - specifically and also some fat red chillies from Waitrose. I blended them along with some sugar, salt, olive oil and water, then simmered in a pan for an hour until reduced to a thick paste. When I tasted it, it was way too hot to eat as is, but the flavour was precisely what Bulgarians call lyutenitza (лютеница). Which is really great, I'd asked my Mum for a recipe, but she didn't have one and reckoned it's too much trouble to make at home, easier to buy (if you're in Bulgaria or have access to a good Turkish shop). Traditionally in Bulgaria, lyutenitza is used as a spread, instead of butter. And despite the name meaning something spicy hot, it's not always that. In any case, I won't be putting in 3 big chillies with seeds and all when I make it for a spread. I'll also try using regular bell peppers, the Romano peppers are a bit pricey for larger amounts. Out of the amount I made (the chopped peppers and chillies filled the blender to the brim), I ended up with about 1.5 dl of paste. Rick Stein says it's called aci biber salcasi and it uses sun dried ingredients, I'll look out for it on my next run to the Turkish shop.