Massive disappointment

A few days ago, my Mum mentioned that there had been baking demo's in the breakfast TV show in Sweden and that it had seemed very intriguing.

Luckily, it was possible to watch these from the UK and indeed she was right, there were useful tips and interesting ideas. So I clicked on the link to get the recipes. I had to wait a couple of days for these to be published, but I got them.

And bang on St Lucia's Day, I baked. And things did not work out at all.

I don't know if something was missing in the recipe or it was plain wrong, but what was on the TV clips was not what I had in the bowl of the kitchen machine. Very far from it. There were early indications of course, but I'd decided to stick to the recipe as closely as possible, so I did.

What was interesting here is that it incorporated methods used for panettone and brioche. Namely an additional pre-ferment and incorporating the butter at the end, rather than melting it. Allegedly this will make the buns more moist and that's true.

It was also recommended that the raisins are soaked in water for several hours and I think this is a really good advice not only for raisins but for dried fruit in general. The idea being that they won't soak up too much of the liquid in the dough and thus make it dry out.

The final tip was to brush with egg immediately after baking rather than before. The buns would be hot enough to cook the thin layer of egg wash, and the end result would be a more even gloss all over - if brushing before baking, the parts that expand in the oven spring will not be covered and the resulting buns have patches which are not glossy.

However, the pre-ferment was equal parts in weight milk and flour, so it was fairly gloopy and didn't appear to rise or bubble up or anything. Yet the amount of yeast was pretty high in comparison to bread dough. The sugar was added at this point as well as the saffron. The sugar may have prevented the yeast developing perhaps, I don't know. The saffron certainly didn't release any flavour or colour.

Then I added a further part of flour and ended up with a dough so stiff that the machine couldn't work it and I had to continue manually. That turned out to be very difficult too. I even divided the dough in two parts, but it was still near impossible to knead. So I added the butter, knowing full well that once the fat is in, gluten development will become extremely difficult.

I ended up kneading for about 30 more minutes, without any significant change to the dough. So I divided it up into 50 g pieces and shaped into the traditional S-shape of a lussekatt. I got 37 pieces and a small lump left over. I let them rise for 2 h 15 min, they didn't puff up as much as I expected. In the mean time I toyed with the left over lump of dough to see if I could get some gluten into it. And yes, after kneading it for almost an hour it was where I would have liked the overall dough to have been. Bah!

The instructions said to bake on high oven for a short time - like 5 to 8 minutes - and in fact on the TV clip they came out without any browning on top. They used a hot air oven, so baked at 210 degrees. I adjusted for a regular oven to 230 and of course my lussekatt buns came out browned, but didn't really give the impression of being baked through.

The first two trays I brushed with egg wash after baking and although it seemed to work OK-ish, I went back to tradition on the last tray and brushed before baking. In comparison, the ones brushed before seemed glossier, but had of course patches where they'd expanded in the oven. So perhaps it would be better to adopt a technique similar to the one for painted bread - brush with egg wash after bake, then bake for a few minutes in the oven again on a low heat to get the egg wash cooked through.

And so I ended up with 37 white buns, note quite baked through. Believe me, I was sorely tempted to throw away the dough, as I was struggling to knead it. Thus I'm massively disappointed with this recipe and will not be posting it here.

I looked at my original recipe and I see that it uses a little more milk and a lot more sugar. Discussing the failed bake with my Mum, she agreed that most recipes for lussekatt aren't sweet enough and she regularly doubles the sugar content.

But I will try to tweak the original recipe and incorporate the butter at the end like for a brioche. And the soaking of the raisins is definitely a good idea.

Crispbread

While making a new sourdough starter, I ended up with surplus after each daily feed. The instructions said "discard", but there is no way I could do that, so I saved it in the fridge and yesterday mixed up a variation of my recipe for crispbread in order to use up this surplus semi-sourdough.



Ingredients

3 dl water
2 tbsp grapeseed oil
1 tsp salt
3 sachets quick yeast (7 g each)
8 dl rye flour
2.5 dl strong white flour
285 g sourdough left-overs


Method

1. In the bowl of the kitchen machine, mix together the water, grapeseed oil and salt.
2. In a separate bowl blend together the quick yeast, 7 dl of the rye flour and the white four, then add to the liquid and start mixing to a dough.
3. Finally add the sourdough left-overs and let the machine work up a nice dark dough. It will most likely still be sticky at this point.
4. Turn out the dough on a worksurface and start incorporating the final dl of rye dough, stop when the dough stops being sticky.
5. Place back in the bowl, cover with cling film and let rise for about 1 h or preferably overnight in the fridge.
6. Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C and prepare two identical baking sheets with baking paper.The baking sheets shouldn't have a lip around the edge.
7. Take some of the dough, about the size of a grapefruit, dust generously with flour and roll out to about 3 - 4 mm thickness, using a knobbly rolling pin if possible, if not, prick the dough with a fork.
8. Cut into shapes and transfer to one of the baking sheets, cover with the second baking paper, then place the second baking sheet on top.
9. Bake in the oven for 10 - 15 minutes, then remove to a wire rack to cool.
10. Repeat with a second piece of dough and so on until all the dough has been used up.
11. Store in air-tight containers, also place a piece of kitchen tissue inside to make sure they stay dry.

This time I wanted to make the crispbreads a bit thicker than previously, so I rolled them thicker. But I made a mistake here in rolling a new batch, while one was baking. This resulted in the rolled out dough proofing and puffing up, so when it went into the oven, it ballooned like pita bread. So very important to roll out at the last minute before baking. The dough is soft enough, so shouldn't take too long, unless your are fiddling with fancy cookie cutters.

I also baked two trays before having the idea of putting a second baking tray on top to keep them down. This was a method used for when baking puff pastry for mille-feuille.It worked pretty well, apart from not being able to see when the crispbreads are done, but it helped brown them on both sides. They still puffed up a little, but not like balloons.

And as I rolled the dough thicker, the oven temperature had to go down, I burnt a few before I worked that out, the original recipe states 250 degrees C.

So now I have two big boxes full of crispbreads for Lundulph to nibble on. Of course, as I'm still feeding my sourdough starter daily, I have surplus sourdough that goes into a box in the fridge and I think it can be added to regular bread dough for enhancing the flavour. Once my new starter goes in the fridge, I'll freeze the box with surplus for future use.

My Mum also sent me a different recipe for crispbread, without yeast, but with lots of seeds. I did intend to try it out as well, but I might wait a couple of days or so.

More New Sourdough

Previous post.

Today is Day 5 of my new sourdough adventure and I have now entered the repeat cycle which started yesterday. But to do it chronologically:

Day 3

2 tbsp sour rye flour
2 tbsp unsweetened pineapple juice

Stirred in, lid on and left on the window sill. However, in the recent cold snap in the UK, the temperature in our kitchen is well below what one might consider "room temperature" and so I have moved the jar to the living room, which has a radiator...

I don't have any photos because the thing looks the same. There were still only 3 - 4 big bubbles and it still smelt vaguely of pineapple that has started to ferment, but that's it.

Day 4

Keep 0.6 dl of the sourdough
Add
0.6 dl strong white flour
0.6 dl filtered water

Stirred in, lid on and back on the shelf in the living room. The left-over sourdough went into a box in the fridge. I refuse to throw it away.

A couple of hours after being fed, it has a lot of little bubbles on the surface and some hooch, which is a bit surprising - it's supposed to produce this when it's hungry and I don't think this is the case, perhaps it was more of a sediment action.

Today I repeated what I did yesterday and the left-over sourdough went into the little box in the fridge - it was a little lighter than yesterday's left-over.

Observing the new sourdough, today I was not able to detect the pineapple smell, instead it smelt of sourdough. Yay, good start it seems.

It's a lot runnier than what I had before, but perhaps that's OK. The instructions are now to repeat the activities of Day 4 until the sourdough starts to expand after feeding and starts smelling very yeasty. It could be ready as early as Day 7, but they recommend keeping it up for 2 - 3 weeks to develop the flavour. Then the new sourdough can go into the fridge for a less frequent feeding.

I should probably thicken it up a bit, if it's too runny, it won't be as obvious when its ready to use, as the bubbles will just come up to the surface instead of the whole sourdough expanding. The next post.

Sujuk 2012

After a lot of procrastinating, I finally got round to making sujuk again. The previous time is fairly well documented, I followed the instructions there, but changed the spice mixtures a bit.

This time, I went all the way and purchased four pieces of pork loin joint (called kotlett in Swedish). This is on my Mum's recommendation as I can then remove all fat and all sinews, ensuring the mince is as pure as possible. The loin joints were vacuum packet, but it was possible to see what they looked like and I picked four that had large areas of pure muscle meat.

I then set out to clean the joints and this turned out to be trickier than expected and I did the first two pieces on Friday (took about 4 h and caused substantial pains in my neck) and the remaining two yesterday (a bit quicker, the pieces were nicer and I guess I had worked out the technique, still my neck hurt).

I then quickly minced the meat, I was almost disappointed, given how long it took to trim the darn things. But the mince came out lovely, but well under 4 kg and I'd hoped to do a full batch of 5 kg. Never mind.

I divided the mince in two parts and spiced each as follows:

Spice mix 1
2 kg pork mince
40 g salt
8 g black pepper
8 g dried ground savory
3 tsp sweet paprika
3 tsp ground cumin

Spice mix 2
1.7 kg pork mince
34 g salt
7 g black pepper
7 g dried ground savory
3 tsp hot smoked paprika
2 tsp sweet paprika

I mixed each part well and left overnight in the fridge and today, I made the sujuks all by myself. Lundulph was a bit disappointed that I didn't ask him to help. But one person can do it, it's just easier to get a flow in the process if there's a second person at hand.

I didn't bother pushing an onion through to clean out the meat mincer, nor did I do the same when filling the sausages, so this left me with enough sujuk mixture for a further sausage. But instead, I made it into meat balls, since lunchtime had already passed and both Lundulph and I were quite hungry. But since this was pure mince, not mixed with onions and bread, it wouldn't really work very well as regular Bulgarian meatballs, so instead I used this opportunity to try out the technique used when making Swedish meatballs. They are made quite small, just under the size of an unshelled walnut and then fried in a pan, which is shaken around until the meatballs brown lightly all over. Then they need to be stirred until they are completely cooked. This is how they remain round.

I also had some duck eggs in the larder, so I decided to fry them sunny side up to go with the meatballs. Hot tip - if you're after lots of runny yolk, then go for duck eggs, the yolks are a lot bigger than chicken eggs.

Of course the meatballs were way too salty, but that was to be expected and as it should - for sujuk, the amount of salt must be 2% of the weight of the mince, to ensure that nothing nasty develops while they're drying. So, this year's sujuks are now happily hanging in the fridge and stinking it up (wet dog sort of) and hopefully in 6 weeks they will be ready.

New Sourdough

Now that I'm at home again and have had rather marvellous results with my bread baking lately, I thought I'd try to make a new sourdough starter. I'd found these instructions some time ago and yesterday I started the process.



Yesterday was Day 1:

2 tbsp unsweetened pineapple juice
2 tbsp sour rye flour

Mixed up in a jar, lid on and left on the window sill in the kitchen.

Today was Day 2 and I left it more than 24 h:

added
2 tbsp unsweetened pineapple juice
2 tbsp sour rye flour

Mixed it in with the stuff from yesterday, closed the lid and put on the window sill again.

I went to my local farm shop to get the fancy flour - the theory is that if it is from a small flour mill, it is more likely to have wild yeasts in it, rather than the mass produced stuff. That is a while ago too, and I hope it will work, the instructions were to get freshly milled flour, but I'm not sure where I can get hold of that.

I'm also not sure what "sour" rye means and the packet isn't too helpful either other than to say it's good for both hand baking and bread machines and also for artisan bread. Fingers crossed, it should take about 2 - 3 weeks to get it ready and I'm already dreading the point in time when I'll have to throw away parts of it. I might just make some soft tunnbröd or knäckebröd and use it up.

Next post.

Lunduph's Choice

In the past few weeks, I've had a complete lack of ideas on what to cook and we've pretty much been cycling through a chicken dish and a fish dish. At least that's what it felt like.

So yesterday Lundulph asked me to do something special and started going through my cookery books. He finally stopped at a dish called Kefta Mkaouara, from Rick Stein's Mediterranean escapes. This is a tagine with meatballs, a fairly simple recipe calling for beef or lamb mince. But Lundulph asked me to use chicken instead. In the same breath he also stated that the problem with chicken is that it doesn't pick up flavours and ends up tasting quite bland. Hmmm...

Now I'm not a fan of chicken mince, so no way I'd make meatballs from chicken.instead I decided to cut the meat in chunks. But not the usual 2.5 cm chunks, but quite a lot smaller. And in hindsight, this made a huge difference, because the tagine sauce is quite spicy, so the balance was very good.

Lundulph originally thought this would go in the gyuvetch dish, but it is a tagine and according to the recipe it doesn't bake for very long, so I opted to use my large shallow pie dish instead.

Ingredients
serves 4

800 g chicken breasts
4 tbsp olive oil
3 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp hot chilli powder
2 tsp paprika
2 tsp ground pepper
1 tsp salt
1 medium onion
2.5 x 400 g cans of tomatoes
3 tbsp finely chopped parsley
3 garlic cloves
4 eggs

Method

1. Trim the chicken breasts as much as possible and cut into small pieces, about 1 cm in size.
2. Heat up 2 tbsp of the olive oil in a large pan on medium heat and fry the chicken together with 2 tsp of the cumin, the hot chilli powder, 1 tsp of the paprika, 1 tsp of the ground pepper and the salt. Keep stirring so that the spices coat the chicken and all the pieces are browned.
   
   
3. Remove the chicken to a large oven proof dish, add the remaining olive oil, heat it up and add the onion. Turn down the heat a little and fry the onion for about 10 minutes until it is soft, stirring occasionally.
4. In the mean time, blend the tomatoes and garlic and add to the onions, once soft. Add the remaining spices, stir to blend well and let cook for about 20 minutes.
5. While the sauce is cooking, pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C.
6. When the sauce has thickened a little, pour it over the chicken, then make four small indentations and crack carefully an egg in each.
7. Bake in the oven for 15 - 20 minutes to set the eggs.

Yesterday turned into a general cooking and baking day, we were low on bread, so I made a double dose of Richard Bertinet's olive oil bread from his book Dough. This time I mixed all ingredients except the olive oil in the machine, until the gluten had almost developed. It was a very stiff dough, so it took a while. I then turned it out onto my baking board and added the olive oil, a little at a time and kneading as much as I could, it was quite slippery. This is the best way to do it, as any fat tends to make it harder for gluten to develop, so should be added at the end. Previously I've always attempted to let the machine do this and it never works, finally I've learnt my lesson. This of course meant kneading by hand for another 10 - 15 minutes, but it's well worth it. I also decided to make the loaves a little fancier, like I've seen on several bread blogs - the dough for each loaf is divided into 3 equal parts and each is rolled up into a mini loaf and placed in the bread tin.

The bread turned out rather lovely, even though I only had 20 g of fresh yeast for it, instead of the 30 g in the recipe. It just needed to rise a little longer.

So we had the chicken tagine with our freshly baked bread and it was very yummy. Lundulph had a large seconds and declared that this is a keeper and I must admit, I felt very pleased too.

Next time, I'll reduce the chicken to 500 g or even 400 g and add some vegetables and also some pearl barley, the sauce was a bit too runny, Lundulph thought. I like to dip bread in such sauce, so for me it was just right.

Cinnamon Wreath for 1st Advent

In my recent baking browses, I came across this website, which shows how to shape the bread from Caucasus in pictures. No wonder I got it a bit wrong when I tried it the first time.

So I thought I'd give this shaping method a second try, but I wanted to make something sweet, so I decided on the recipe for cinnamon buns my Mum and I tried a couple of years ago. Though this time I used regular milk and completely ignored the fact that the recipe is quite massive.

The dough mixed rather nicely, in fact I've been quite successful with doughs lately. I used up 11.25 dl of strong white flour and this was just right - the dough felt a bit stiff before I added the butter, but once it was incorporated and worked on for a few more minutes, it became very soft and barely sticky. It also proofed well and after a brief hesitation on whether I should divide it in two or not, I made the wrong choice of attempting at making just one big wreath. I started rolling on a board I have specifically for working dough, but after having rolled the dough out to cover the whole board and it was still not sufficiently thin, I ended up flipping it over onto the worksurface and proceeding with rolling it out to cover most of it as well. I actually ended up stretching the dough, as I couldn't get the rolling pin into the corners.

Then on with the cinnamon butter filling and it was my intention to also add chopped walnuts, but I forgot them and rolled up the dough with only the cinnamon. I got a fairly thick roll, probably over a metre long too and I carefully cut it lengthwise in half.

Following the picture instructions, I carefully twined the two parts while keeping the cut surfaces upwards facing. It did look like a thick rope.

Then starting from one end, winding the "rope" into a spiral.

And finally transferring to a baking tray lined with suitable paper. The picture instructions had the wreath placed in a springform or similar, so I placed my cake circle around it to stop it from completely taking over the oven.

After proofing for about 40 minutes, I brushed it with whisked egg and sprinkled some of the chopped walnuts on top, as it also turned out I'd run out of pearl sugar. And in the oven it went. The bun recipe states 15 - 18 minutes at 200 degrees C. My oven decided that 190 was the temperature it wanted to work at, so I had to comply.

15 minutes of baking and the cinnamon wreath had expanded into something enormous and was starting to colour nicely. I wanted to be careful and not to burn it, so I covered it with some aluminium foil and I checked it after a further 15 minutes. It was very wobbly and I let it go for another 20 minutes. One more check confirmed that the thing was a little less wobbly, but still didn't inspire confidence of being ready so I gave it a further 15 minutes and took it out. At this point the whole house smelt strongly of cinnamon buns and Lundulph came in to inspect the situation as well. As I removed the aluminium foil, I discovered that not only was it still dough-y in the centre, but it had also collapsed, probably due to the many openings of the oven door. So back in for another 30 minutes the thing went, though I was fairly certain the damage had now been done.

I even measured the temperature of the wreath in the centre with my new cooking thermometer. It was over 90 degrees C, which I believe indicates that the dough should be baked. I let it cool down a bit before cutting a couple of wedges for myself and Lundulph and lo and behold, there were still dough-y patches. Dang!

The parts near the edges were very tasty though. But on the whole I think it was just too big. Lundulph suggests I make it again, but half a batch for practice. I should just have divided the dough in two at the beginning.

Another disappointment was that when the wreath was baked, the stripy pattern was not very obvious. Maybe it should be baked covered so that it doesn't brown as much. I'm glad I took photos before it went into the oven, it looked so pretty.

Anyway, the first candle is now lit, everything outside is white with frost, the sky is bright blue and the sun is shining. What a lovely start to December.

Biff à la Lindström

It's Friday and the last day of November and Lundulph has had a nasty cold all week, so I thought I'd make a nice dinner. I have a feeling that Friday dinner tends to be fancier in Sweden, but I may well be wrong, it may be something we've had in my family as a celebratory start of the week-end of sorts.

So I finally made biff á la Lindström, a Swedish classic. There are several variations on the story behind, but they all seem to have in common that this recipe originates from Russia and was brought back to Sweden almost 200 years ago by a man called Henrik Lindström and put on the menu of his restaurant.

I didn't spend too much time on researching, as I came across a recipe (in Swedish) that seemed reasonable and I did it. However, it does require some tweaking as it was a bit on the salty side and I would like some of the flavours to come through stronger. I've tried to adjust the amounts below, but I've not confirmed them yet. The amounts are enough for 4 portions. I served with roast potato wedges with paprika and I added fried funnel chanterelles to the "jus".

Ingredients
4 tbsp fine breadcrumbs
1.5 dl water
1 onion
butter for frying
5 tbsp finely chopped gherkins
2 tbsp finely chopped capers
5 tbsp finely chopped pickled beetroot
400 g beef mince meat
1 egg
0.5 tsp salt
0.25 tsp black pepper
butter for frying
2 dl beef stock

Method

1. Place the breadcrumbs and the water in a large bowl, stir around and let stand and swell up for 10 minutes.
2. Peel and dice the onion finely, then fry for a couple of minutes in a little butter, then let them cool down a little.
3. Finely chop the gherkins, capers and beetroot.
4. Add the chopped vegetables, the mince meat, the onion, the egg, salt and pepper into the breadcrumb mixture and mix well.
   
5. Keep a bowl with water next to you and wet your hands and shape 8 patties/hamburgers from the mixture and place on a wet chopping board or on a piece of cling film.
   
6. Pre-heat the oven and place an oven safe dish in it. Heat up a little butter in a large frying pan on medium heat and fry the patties for 3 - 4 minutes on each side, taking care not to crowd them. When done, transfer to the oven safe dish and keep warm.
7. Once done, de-glaze the frying pan with the beef stock.

As I said, I added fried funnel chanterelles to the de-glazing jus, which was nice.

For the potatoes, it is a variation of my Mum's trusted recipe - it works either with paprika or garlic. Lundulph made the choice of paprika this time, I quite fancied garlic possibly with rosemary, but in hindsight, it wouldn't have worked, so I'm glad I went for Lundulph's choice. I've made them before, but I made some changes this time, so I'm writing down the recipe here as well.

Ingredients
4 large baking potatoes
1.5 tsp sweet paprika
1.5 tsp salt
0.5 dl grapeseed oil

Method

1. Peel the potatoes and cut into wedges.
2. Steam the potato wedges for 5 - minutes.
3. In the mean time, pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C and grease up a deep roasting tin.
4. Transfer the potatoes to the roasting tin and sprinkle paprika and salt over. Drizzle more grapeseed oil and stir around to get the spices and oil spread around.
5. Bake for about an hour, stirring a couple of times.

Actually I started with the potatoes and baked them in the main oven, while I made the beef patties, which I kept warm in the grill oven of my cooker.

So on the whole, it was quite nice, but I expected stronger flavour of beetroot and gherkin and not as much salt. Lundulph liked it too, even though he's not a big fan of capers. And the potatoes are so lovely, it's hard to stop eating them. I probably should have used 5 baking potatoes, though the amounts above should do fine for 4 persons.

Sadly I didn't measure how many funnel chanterelles I used, it was an emergency de-frost in a bowl of hot water, because I forgot to take them out of the freezer this morning. I'm guessing it was around 500 - 600 g.

Mexican Coffee Buns à la Rotiboy

I'm not sure how I came across this recipe last week, but luckily I did and today I tried it out.

In fact the whole website is quite fascinating, I'll be returning to it for inspiration for sure.

I'll repeat the recipe here for my own reference and ready tweaked for the next bake. This time I got 18 buns out of this batch at 54 g each.

Ingredients

Bun dough
500 g strong white flour
20 g milk powder
75 g caster sugar
6 g salt
8 g instant yeast
1 lightly whisked egg
270 g water
60 g unsalted butter at room temperature

Fillings
180 g butter cut into 10 g pieces and frozen
or
18 tsp dulce de leche or toffee from condensed milk

Coffee topping
200 g unsalted butter at room temperature
160 g icing sugar
3 lightly whisked eggs
3 tbsp instant coffee
1 tbsp water
1 tsp ground cinnamon
200 g plain flour

Method

1. Mix together flour, milk powder, sugar and salt in the bowl of a dough mixer.
2. Add the yeast, whisked egg and water and let the machine knead the dough until nearing complete gluten development.
3. Turn out the dough onto a work surface and add the butter. The dough should be fairly sticky at this point, but work it to incorporate the butter.
4. Weigh the dough and work out how much each bun should weigh, then cut up into pieces and roll into small balls.
5. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes and line sheets with baking paper.
6. Take a ball and flatten it a little with the palm of the hand. Place a piece of the filling in the middle and pinch together the dough around it, making sure it is well sealed.
7. Re-shape back into a ball shape and place on the baking sheet. Repeat with all the buns and let proof for 45 minutes.
8. While the dough buns are proofing, make the topping by first creaming the butter and icing sugar together.
9. Add the eggs a little at a time and incorporating well.
10. Dissolve the instant coffee in the water and add also the cinnamon, then add to the topping mixture.
11. Sift in the flour a bit at a time and incorporate well. Finally, transfer the mixture to a piping bag with a small (about 5 mm) round nozzle.
12. Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C and when the buns have finished proofing, carefully pipe the topping mixture over them in a spiral shape starting from the middle.
13. Bake until the topping looks dry and starts getting a hint of brown, about 15 - 20 minutes.
14. Take out, let rest for a couple of minutes, then transfer to a wire rack and let cool further.
15. Best served warm, so either serve straight away or heat up in the microwave for a few seconds.

The original recipe instructed to make the topping first and chill in the fridge. This is OK, but it goes rather stiff and is hard to pipe. I actually transferred it into the piping bag before chilling and perhaps if I'd done this afterwards, I would have softened it up in the process. However, I don't think the chilling was needed. Unfortunately I cut too large a hole in the piping bag, so the buns looked like they had dog poo on them.

But once the buns are in the oven, the topping melts and becomes a thin coat layer over the buns, very nice.

Further, despite my efforts at pinching the dough together around the butter, almost all buns opened up and the butter oozed out. However, I didn't use frozen butter pieces, but room temperature ones. The idea of freezing occurred to me as I took the baking trays out of the oven, precariously balancing them so as not to drip the melted butter over the floor.

And I also didn't pipe symmetrically, so there were bare patches on the buns, I think using a narrow nozzle will help there too and also reduce waste - I used about two-thirds of the topping and as can be seen on the photo, a lot of that just slid down the sides. I have to work out what to do with the left-over topping too.

Now, flavour was less impressive, however I did follow the original recipe (2 tbsp instant coffee and a quarter of a teaspoon of ground cinnamon. So the coffee and cinnamon was barely noticeable and the whole buns were fairly neutral in flavour and a bit under-baked (though that's entirely my fault, I should have kept them in for a couple of minutes longer). I also felt they should be a little sweeter overall.

At this point I got the idea that I could have used my toffee-fied condensed milk I have in the larder as a filling and it would perhaps not have oozed out like the butter and the overall recipe would not need to be adjusted for sweetness. Letting my mind spin further, I wonder if ganache would work or if it would burn... Perhaps next time, I'll prepare different fillings for comparison.

Oh well, 16 buns to go, breakfast for the next few days is secured. As I put them away in the cake box, I noticed that the topping was no longer crunchy, but had gone soft. Maybe it needs more icing sugar too.

Finally, "à la Rotiboy" comes from the fact that this are the signature buns served at the bakery chain Rotiboy. I have a friend based in Kuala Lumpur and I'll drop him an e-mail to ask if he's tried them. It may be a while before I make my way to that part of the world.

Mum's Standard Bread

In my recent recipe trawling, I found a bread recipe in my own writing and entitled Mum's Standard Bread.

I have a vague recollection of taking down a number of my Mum's recipes when I moved out for uni, but I'm fairly sure that I've never actually made this. Yesterday I noticed that we were down to a few slices of bread from the previous batch, so I decided to try this recipe.

Note that although there is not much work involved, the whole thing requires about 2 days from start to finish. Given the amount of flour, I recommend using a machine to knead the dough, in fact I've noted this specifically in the recipe and which may explain why I've not made it before,

Ingredients

7 dl water
4 dl rolled oats or spelt wheat
3 dl water
20 g fresh yeast
1300 g strong white flour
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp cider vinegar
4 tbsp olive oil

Method

1. Place the 7 dl of water in a large bowl, add the rolled oats and let them soak for a few hours.
2. In the bowl of the mixer, dissolve the yeast in the water, then add flour, salt, sugar, vinegar, olive oil and the soaked oats along with their liquid and mix together to a dough until gluten has developed.
3. Transfer the dough to a lidded container and put in the fridge overnight.
4. Take out from the fridge the next morning and carefully turn out on a floured surface
5. Divide into three equal parts and shape each into a loaf.
6. Grease three loaf tins and place the dough loaves inside, then cover with cling film and let proof for an hour.
7. Pre-heat the oven to 240 degrees C and bake the loaves for 30 minutes, then cover them with aluminium foil, turn down the oven to 200 degrees C and let bake for a further 30 minutes.
8. Remove from the oven and the tins and let cool onto a wire rack completely before slicing.

I've not come across a bread recipe calling for vinegar, I'm guessing it helps bring down the pH-value in the dough and thus create a better environment for the yeast. Even using cider vinegar which I find is fairly mild, the dough smelt of it as I put it in the fridge last night. I checked it just before going to bed (rather late) and the dough had already doubled and filled up the box. I should have knocked it back, because this morning when I took it out of the fridge, the dough had managed to push the lid so much that it had managed to seep out on all sides. So much for my airtight container.

Now the recipe also states to put the dough in the microwave at a third power for 3 - 4 minutes. But I skipped that because I didn't want to risk cooking part of the dough. At third power doesn't mean that the microwaves will be a third strength, but rather that they will only be on for a third of the time set.

I used rolled spelt wheat this time. Looking at the ready bread it pretty much looks like it is a wholemeal bread, but I suspect the texture will be nicer. Which reminds me, if using oats, it is crucial to use rolled oats and not porridge oats. The reason is that porridge oats are flakes of the de-husked oat grains and so they soak up liquid quite happily. Rolled oats are the whole grains rolled flat into flakes and don't soak up liquid as much.

Milk Banitza

While rummaging through the freezer, I noticed I have two packets of filo pastry that I'd forgotten about.

I also somehow managed to end up with a surplus of milk, so what better thing to do than a Milk Banitza (млечна баница in Bulgarian). This is quite a common breakfast dish in Bulgaria and I realised I haven't made it since before we moved into our house and thus not on the blog.

So yesterday I thawed a packet of filo pastry in the fridge and prepared the banitza in parallel to dinner.

Ingredients

50 g butter + some for the baking dish
250 g filo pastry
8 dl milk
5 - 6 medium eggs
2 dl caster sugar
2 tsp vanilla essence
icing sugar for sprinkling

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C and butter an oven proof dish, preferably clear pyrex so you can see when it's done.
2. Melt the butter on low heat, taking care that it doesn't start bubbling.
3. Place a sheet of filo in the baking dish, making sure the bottom of it is completely covered,but doesn't go up the sides. Then brush with melted butter.
4. Place a second sheet in the same way and brush with butter. Continue until all sheets have been used up.
   
   
5. Make sure to brush also the top sheet with butter, then carefully cut into squares or diamonds.
   
   
6. Bake for around 25 minutes until the filo goes golden brown.
   
   
7. Take out and let cool down and make the liquid mixture in the mean time.
8. Whisk together milk, eggs, caster sugar and vanilla essence lightly until the sugar has dissolved.
9. Once the filo pastry has cooled down, carefully pour over the liquid mixture. The top layers of the filo will probably float on top, just push them down to get them wet.
   
   
10. Let the banitza stand for a while until the filo pastry has soaked up some of the liquid and swollen and doesn't float on top.
11. Place back in the oven and bake for about 45 minutes, until all the liquid has been taken up. If the filo on top starts burning, cover with a sheet of baking paper or aluminium foil.
    
    
12. Remove from the oven and allow to cool. Serve warm or cold, by carefully cutting along the pre-cut lines and take out the pieces. Sprinkle generously with icing sugar.

As usual I made a number of mistakes here - for starters I only had 220 g filo pastry and I used 1 litre of milk, so it was not possible for all the liquid to be soaked up. I also used only 5 medium eggs and I think I should have used 6. The amounts vary between recipes (I did a quick google), so I guess it also depends on the thickness of the filo pastry and how much it can absorb.

Still, Lundulph and I had milk banitza for breakfast this morning and it was rather nice despite its runny-ness. I guess this dish is more for home use than to impress guests, but it is tasty.

Update 2021-02-27:
As this takes a bit of time to do and as it is a suitable dish for breakfast, I recommend doing everything up to point 9 in the evening before, then leaving the banitza in the fridge overnight to soak. Then just bake in the morning.

Duck Pie

There were several 3 for 2 offers when I went on my weekly grocery shop the other day and every now and then I can't resist these. This time my impulse purchase was three packets of duck breast fillets. They did look nice!

But of course, once home, I started racking my brains on what to actually do with them. I didn't want to do a chicken dish, duck is fancier and deserves special effort I think.

I'd also purchased a proper pie dish, which needed inauguration, so to speak, so I wanted to do a pie (again). I flicked through several of my cook books, but nothing on duck pie. The most intriguing I managed to find was a recipe for duck with cabbage from my Bulgarian cook book, but the amounts given seemed disproportionate and I wasn't really sure about combining duck with cabbage either. So I widened the search to the BBC's food pages. Lundulph was a bit ahead of me there and had found a recipe that he didn't like at all. But when I searched, I came across this recipe, which would do nicely, albeit with some alterations.

After repressing the little voice telling me that tender duck fillets should not be cooked for long because they'd go as tough as leather, I made another trip to the shops to get the remaining ingredients. I decided to make my own shortcrust pastry, now that I have the hang of it.

Ingredients

Pie filling
1 large onion
1 large carrot
150 g shiitake mushrooms
3 tbsp grapeseed oil
3 tbsp tomato purée
525 g duck breast fillets
100 g new potatoes
75 g pearl barley
150 ml Madeira wine
400 ml beef stock
6 cloves roast garlic
1 dried bay leaf
black pepper

Pie crust
200 g plain flour
125 g cold butter
1 medium egg
1 tbsp cold water

Method

1. Peel and slice the onion and carrot thinly.
2. Brush off any dirt from the mushrooms and cut in chunks.
3. Heat up the grapeseed oil in a large pan and fry the onion, carrot and mushrooms until they go soft. Stir occasionally so they don't burn.
4. Stir in the tomato purée and fry for a few minutes further.
5. In the mean time, cut the duck breast fillets in bite sized chunks, wash and dice the potatoes and rinse and drain the pearl barley. Then stir all of them into the pan, followed by the Madeira and beef stock.
6. Peel and mash the garlic and stir into the stew along with the bay leaf and black pepper.
7. Turn down to low and let simmer for about 30 minutes until most of the liquid has been reduced.
8. Now pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C and make the shortcrust pastry. Measure up the flour in a bowl. Measure up the butter and cut into dice and add to the flour.
9. Working with the finger tips of one hand only, stir and pinch together to form fine crumbs.
10. In a separate small bowl, whisk lightly together the egg and the water and add to the crumb mixture.
11. Continue a little to combine to a soft and sticky dough.
12. Flour the work surface and turn out the dough onto it and knead a couple of times to make sure it's well blended.
13. Roll out to about 3 mm thickness and enough to cover the pie dish.
14. Spoon the pie filling into the pie dish, then cover with the pastry lid and crimp to the sides and make a few holes to let steam out.
15. Bake until the crust goes golden brown, about 25 minutes.

Again, the pastry started to melt, as I put it over the hot filling, for a fancier version, it would be better to make the filling a bit in advance and let it cool before making into a pie.

I also forgot to brush with egg wash, though I think this can be done at the end as well.

On the whole, this pie turned out quite nice, the duck breast fillets did not go though as leather, on the contrary, it was very tender and I think the Madeira and beef stock helped to enhance the gaminess of it.

I'm not entirely happy with the crust, I used unsalted butter and it tasted a bit funny I thought, perhaps salted butter would be better or maybe even half and half of butter and lard would give a better flavour.

Lundulph said it was good, but then he came home late and had skipped lunch, so I suspect he would even have eaten cheese, he was very hungry. One thing he said was that basically a top crust pie is a stew with lid. I couldn't agree more, in fact, what would be good if one could create a bigger amount of stew and freeze in portions, then just thaw, cover with a pastry lid and bake.

I also note that this is a triple carb recipe - pie crust, pearl barley and potatoes, though all in small amounts. I've never cooked with pearl barley before, it was good. To my untrained eye it looks very much like whole wheat corns and I thought it worked rather nice as a space filler and soaked up the liquid very nicely.

Lemon and Meringue Ice Cream

I'm in the process of tidying up the digital part of my recipe collection and I came across another Mary Berry recipe, this time for a lemon and meringue ice cream.

I do intend to one day buy an ice cream maker, but not yet, so I haven't ventured into ice cream making too much. But this recipe seemed quite easy to do, so while I was at it with the tarte au citron, I thought I'd try this out as well.

The original recipe can be found here, I was not able to get hold of all ingredients, so my version became this:

Ingredients
300 ml double cream
1 lemon, zest and juice
200 g lemon curd
50 g meringues

Method

1. Whip the cream to soft peaks in a large bowl.
2. Grate the lemon zest into the cream
3. Cut the lemon in half, then place a sieve over a tea cup and squeeze as much of the juice as possible over the sieve. Or use a proper citrus reamer. Just make sure none of the pips end up in the liquid!
4. Pour the lemon juice into the cream, add the lemon curd and stir in well.
5. Carefully break up or cut up the meringues into small chunks and incorporate into the mixture.
6. Spoon into a plastic box with 1 litre capacity. Alternatively use a small loaf tin, but line with cling film first.
7. Place in the freezer overnight. It will go fairly solid, so remove from the freeze for 10 - 15 minutes before serving.

I made this on Sunday and Lundulph and I tried it for afters last night. It was very rich and quite tasty. I started thinking along the lines of maybe doing a citrus trio with a scoop of lemon, scoop of orange and scoop of lime. With home made curd of course. But for the next time, I will not use double cream, but possibly single, if I can get it whipped. According to my kitchen science book, the cream needs to be at least 30% fat in order to whip properly.

I was also worried that the only sugar in the ice cream would be from the meringues and the lemon curd, i. e. not enough especially when frozen and indeed I was right, but it works very well with the lemons. Just the fat that needs reducing.

To conclude, we are well lemon-ed out at the moment.

Rhubarb Muffins

While searching through my recipes for a lemon related dessert, I came across a very old recipe in one of my notepads and based on its title, it is a recipe I got from Doctor Cutie a very, very long time ago. This was her basic muffin recipe and had some suggestions to flavourings. I remember making these with dessicated coconut, but I haven't made them in well over a decade.

Tomorrow is Lundulph's parents' sapphire wedding anniversary and we're going out for a meal to celebrate. As they are having a new kitchen installed, I thought I'd bake something nice for afters. I'd planned to bake something, but I wasn't sure what the overall plan was, so I couldn't plan anything elaborate and the good thing about Doctor Cutie's recipe is that I have all ingredients in the larder and fridge, they are part of the things I always have.

But what to use for flavouring? Well, I have lots of finely sliced rhubarb in the freezer, ready for baking. That'll do just nicely. To quickly thaw the rhubarb, I placed it in a sieve and let it stand for about an hour, then I rinsed it briefly under the cold water tap and let it drain well. I don't see a problem in using fresh rhubarb directly, as long as it's finely sliced - about 2 mm, so it can cook through during the baking.

My notes claimed that this will do 30 muffins, but this didn't seem right, the amounts seemed better for 15 pieces and I was right, I got precisely 15 from this recipe.

Ingredients

Basic recipe
75 g unsalted butter
1 dl semi-skimmed milk
3 dl plain flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
2 dl caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence

"Filling"
200 g rhubarb
2 tbsp potato or corn flour

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 215 degrees C (195 degrees on a fan assisted oven) and line a couple of muffin tins with cases (5 cm diameter).
2. Place the butter and milk in a small saucepan and warm up on low heat until the butter has melted completely.
3. In a bowl, mix together the flour and baking powder well.
4. In a separate, larger bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar and vanilla essence until they go pale and fluffy.
5. Slowly pour in the butter and milk mixture, the whole thing will go very runny.
6. Now add the flour mixture, a few spoons at a time, whisking in well. This will avoid stirring up a cloud of flour dust.
7. Stir together the rhubarbs with the potato or corn flour, then add to the muffin batter and stir in well.
8. Carefully spoon the batter into the muffin cases, filling them to about two-thirds.
9. Bake for 15 - 20 minutes, check with a toothpick for readiness.

According to my notes, alternative fillings are chocolate (cocoa powder) and nuts or coconut. For these, the amount of flour needs to be reduced. Further fillings can be raisins, apple and cinnamon or pieces of banana (however,these must also be coated with potato or corn flour). I have a vague memory trying sliced banana pieces, but I think I might have cut them too thick, because they sank down to the bottom of the muffin cases and resulted in an ugly hole in the middle and they were awkward to eat. Though thinking about it now, I could have filled the muffins with some butter cream or similar and decorated into fancy cup cakes. I suspect using different fillings will result in a different number of muffins too - the rhubarbs add quite a bit of volume to the batter, so if making coconut flavoured muffins, maybe it will result in just 12 pieces.

My final note to the recipe is that these are OK to freeze.

I was so happy when these were ready, I called Lundulph to the kitchen to have a look and his initial comment was that they looked like muffins with pieces of bacon in them... I guess they do, hi, hi.

Tarte Au Citron

Lundulph and I were barely through a quarter of the chocolate tart, when I managed to drop it on the floor. As with buttered toast, the tart managed to flip around, even in the short drop of about 60 cm. So straight in the bin it went, with Lundulph asking me to make another one.

But I didn't want to do another chocolate one, so suggested something like lemon meringue pie. Yes, that would do, said Lundulph, but don't make it too lemony and sour tasting.

I know for a fact that I have a very good lemon meringue pie recipe from a very long time ago, when I worked at a restaurant where it was served regularly. Sadly I couldn't find the notepad where I'd written it down. Dang!

OK, surely I must have one in my recipe collection, sounds like the thing I would save and it was probably on The Great British Bake-Off at some point.

Nope, but I came across Mary Berry's recipe for tarte au citron. This link has the recipe and also a video of Mary Berry baking it.

I prepared the dough on the evening before and was quite proud of myself for managing to get the ingredients together with very little interaction and kneading. I formed it into a thick circle and put it in the fridge.

Now this turned out to be a mistake, because the dough went very hard and was almost impossible to roll out. In fact, yesterday I ended up beating it fairly brutally with the rolling pin to get it going .

And indeed it didn't roll out as nicely as I would have liked. I tried to patch up the cracks as much as possible.

Lessons learned from the chocolate tart, I prepared a piece of aluminium foil for the blind baking and I also prepared to protect the edges from burning.

I also left the surplus over the edge, though this ground against my very nature as being highly wasteful.

But I'm glad I managed to control myself and follow the instructions, the blind bake worked out a treat. Lundulph happily gobbled up the trimmed edges, they were very delicate and tasty in their own right. Sadly as I took out the pastry case, I noticed that it had several holes, obviously my patching attempts had not been successful and the filling would run through and on the outside. Oh well...

Indeed it did run out. Also I had to bake it for 40 minutes before the filling had set. At this point a couple of bubbles had formed, which added to the misfortunes. I pierced them with a skewer. Perhaps the oven was a bit too hot? I let the pie cool down completely in the tart tin, then covered with cling film and put in the fridge.

This morning when I took the pie out to bring it to room temperature, I noticed the filling had contracted a bit and cracks had appeared along the edge. Maybe I over-baked it or it is because some of the filling went on the outside of the pie, I don't know.

But it sure was tasty, though I think I'll increase the amount of sugar used in the filling. The recipe states 225 g, but I'll up it to 250 g. And the big lesson learned here is to roll the dough out and fit it into the tart tin immediately, rather than leave it in a ball overnight, I think this it will roll out better and bake properly without cracks and holes.

Pieday part 3

The main thing for the pie day was to be a surprise for Lundulph - a chocolate tart. This one is directly out of the Hairy Bikers pie book, no changes made to it at all. It wasn't clear what sort of dark chocolate should be used, I opted for a 45% cocoa version.

Well I didn't have a rectangular loose-based 10.5 x 34 cm tart tin, so I used my ceramic 17 cm round quiche dish instead.

This resulted in a substantial amount of left-over sweet shortcrust pastry. So I dug out my mince pie tin (yes, I have one, despite never having made these, it was on a 3 for 2 offer...), rolled out the remaining dough and cut out 6 circles of 7.78 cm diameter. That's what it said on the cookie cutter and the circles fitter very nicely into the shallow indentations of the baking sheet.

Perhaps I could have rolled both the main tart and the small ones a bit thinner in hindsight.

This was also an opportunity to try and blind bake with beans, I've never done that before and always lived with the sides of my pies shrinking down.

Of course I don't have fancy ceramic beans, nor did I have regular beans, but I did have lentils, so I protected the shortcrust tart with a piece of baking paper and poured in the lentils. After all, legumes are legumes.

This was very interesting, the instructions were to bake the tart for 30 minutes, then take out of the oven, remove the beans and place back in the oven to finish baking for another 5 - 10 minutes more. And indeed, after 30 minutes only the sides seemed to have baked through, the bottom was shiny and bubbly. But I removed the lentils carefully and put the tart back in the oven. However, what I didn't take into consideration was that while the bottom was baking, the sides would burn. I did put some aluminium foil over them, but too late and the sides were a bit on the burnt side. Must remember next time. I let it cool in the pie dish before carefully prising it out.

Now for the filling. First goes in a white chocolate ganache: 200 g white chocolate with 100 ml double cream. It was a bit bubbly when I poured it into the tart, so I used a toothpick to pop the biggest ones. Then it went into the fridge for an hour to set.


After just over an hour, a skin had formed on the surface, but it seemed fairly soft still.
Then a dark chocolate ganache and here was my surprise: 200 g dark chocolate with 150 ml double cream. Odd, but I guess the Hairy Bikers know what they are doing. To be on the safe side, I carefully spooned it over the white ganache so that it wouldn't sink through. Then into the fridge for another hour.


The final decoration was to just melt white chocolate and drizzle over. I did try to temper it, but no luck, so I just went ahead and drizzled anyway.

At this point it was evening and I presented it to Lundulph... and there was much rejoicing... The book did say that this is a very rich dessert and that thin slices should be served, so that's what I did - thin wedges, though it looks very stingy on the plate:

As I cut into the tart, the dark chocolate ganache had set harder than the white chocolate ganache, but still the whole thing was rather wobbly and the layered effect was a bit lost. But it was yummy and Lundulph had a second piece which I'm sure he regretted afterwards.

I was worried that the ganaches were of different consistencies and read up on chocolate in my science of cooking book. It has interesting things to say. In general ganache will be equal parts in weight of chocolate and double cream. The double cream must be scalded first. But it is possible to vary the consistency by varying the amounts of chocolate to cream. So a thicker ganache can be achieved by blending two parts (weight) of chocolate to one part (weight) double cream. However, this doesn't hold as long, but goes grainy.

The book also goes on to explain the chemistry behind and what reacts with what to produce the smooth velvety ganache and although the book doesn't mention it explicitly, the type of chocolate would have quite an effect on the ganache. White chocolate is mostly fat, so would require less cream for a firmer ganache, whereas dark chocolate would require more. I must remember this and experiment. This recipe will need adjustments for sure.

After leaving the tart in the fridge for another 24 h, I noticed something more interesting. Both ganaches had set quite firmly now, the dark chocolate one was a bit too stiff for this sort of dessert, while the white chocolate one was perfect. So next time, the white chocolate ganache is OK as is, but the dark chocolate one needs more cream. And I also need to reduce the amount of dark chocolate overall, the layer of dark chocolate ganache is a bit too thick and the white chocolate is not noticeable at all.

I also think the dark chocolate ganache as it is would be very nice as filling for macaroons.

Oh yes, the little tartlet casings, I almost forgot. I baked them after the main tart. I didn't fill them with beans, seemed like overkill and of course they sank in a bit and I definitely should have rolled them thinner. But once baked, I put them in a small box in the freezer. All I need to do is take them out, put a spoon of jam and bake for a few minutes and a quick dessert is ready. At least that's the theory.