skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Tell you what, I'm really enjoying baking bread. I can say quite definitively that I'm no longer afraid of working with yeast - instant or fresh. I've actually got into the rhythm of baking two loaves of bread (sometimes three) pretty much every other Saturday. They're mostly a mix of white and wholewheat bread for everyday use, and sometimes I bake a third loaf which might be a flavoured one, to go with soups and suchlike.
The bread loaves get sliced - and I'm getting pretty good at cutting even, thin slices, even if I do say so myself - divided into half-loaves and fed to the freezer, stored in bags labelled with the date of baking. That way I get to rotate recycle use up the bread, oldest ones first. Yep, I'm THAT organised. It's kind of disconcerting, even to me. Or especially to me, because only I know just how alien this behaviour is to me.
Now that you've all been made aware of my weekend baking activities and the resulting follow-ons - which information I'm sure has been of great interest, by the way - let's get to the sundried tomato and roasted garlic bread that is today's recipe. By rights it should have been posted two months back, because that's about when I made it... but never mind that. The bread is really nice with soup, but I was happy to eat it by itself, with no adornments, because it was that tasty. Can't say better than that, can I?
By the way, if you don't like a strong garlic flavour, use less of the roasted garlic paste... and if your thing is to wilt every living thing within a 10-metre radius with your breath, by all means use MORE garlic paste, as much as you want. At least Dracula won't get you.
Recipe for: Sundried tomato and roasted garlic bread
Ingredients:
3-1/2 cups (15 oz) strong white bread flour
2-3 tbsp olive or other oil of choice
2 tbsp double concentrated tomato paste
1 tbsp roasted garlic, roughly mashed
1/4 cup chopped sundried tomatoes in oil (but leave out the oil)
1 htsp salt
About 300 ml warm water
1/2 tbsp instant yeast
Method:
1. Place the flour in a deep bowl and mix in the instant yeast and salt.
2. Then add the roasted garlic, tomato paste, and chopped sundried tomatoes
along with 250 ml of the warm water and mix together till the flour begins to form a rough dough. Cover and let it rest for 10 minutes to absorb the water.
3. Now knead again, adding as much of the remaining 50ml water as required, to make a dough that is not exactly sloppy but also not hard or dry either.
4. Pour 1 tbsp olive oil on your worktop (make sure your worktop is clean first!) or kneading board and spread it around a bit. Turn the dough out onto the oil and start kneading, pushing the dough away from you with the heel of your hand, turning it a quarter, then repeating the pushing/turning movement. Add more oil to the worktop if the dough starts sticking again, and continue kneading. Occasionally scrape your hand clean of dough.
5. After about 8-10 minutes, the dough should be elastic and only a little tacky. Now grease a large bowl (I use Pam spray, but you can use more oil if you like) and place the dough in it, turning it around to completely coat it in the oil. Cover the bowl and place in a warm place for the dough to rise and more or less double in volume. This can take between 1-2 hours, or even longer - there's no way to accurately predict how long it might take, so I can't give you a precise time.
6. Once the dough is risen, punch it back down. Sprinkle a couple of tbsp extra flour on your workspace and put the dough on it. Shape it into a round ball, place on a baking tray (flour the top of the dough lightly if you like) and cover with a clean tea-towel. Let the dough rise again for 45 min to an hour. Use a sharp knife to slash a 1-cm deep cross into the top.
7. Preheat your oven to 180C/350F and put the dough in to bake. Let it bake for 25-30 minutes - the top should be a nice golden brown and the bottom should sound hollow when tapped.
Remove the loaf to a wire cooling rack and let cool completely. Serve sliced, with soup.
I just wanted to try the pull-apart recipe again, to see if I could manage the miraculous "second rising" of the bread dough. I started this before I checked to see if I had any cheese - and sure enough, when I did get around to checking the fridge, there was no cheese - no, not even a bog-standard Cheddar *sigh*. I couldn't go out to get cheese because of all the snow (it's been snowing all day) and because I didn't want to venture out into the freezing cold.
This should have been a CHEESY bread... ideally I was hoping to use feta, as a Mediterranean cheese to go with the somewhat Mediterraneanish Dukkah (Sainsbury's finest version, I'll have you know).
(Ok, yeah, I know Dukkah is Egyptian, but it's kinda sorta close to Mediterranean cuisine, no? Work with me here, people... I suppose you could say that Dukkah and feta are about as compatible as Dukkah and cheddar - but that's for YOU to say. I say different.)
Anyway... I halved the quantity of ingredients in the original recipe because I'm back home and there are fewer than half the people that were there when I made my first attempt in Seattle earlier this month. I'm glad to say that, on the plus side, the second rising in my second attempt was successful. Unfortunately, while I turned the former negative into a present positive, a couple of other negatives arose in the present version - one being, as mentioned earlier, a lack of cheese; the second being that the tomato flavour was at best only mild. I guess 1 tbsp of concentrated tomato paste was not enough even though the ingredients were halved. Next time I'd probably double the amount of paste and use finely chopped sun-dried tomatoes in oil too.
Oh well, live and learn.
The bread, by the way, was good, but it would have been better with cheese (a friend of mine at work insists that most things are better with cheese).
Recipe for: Tomato-garlic pull-apart bread with dukkah
Ingredients:
For the Dough
1/4 cup warm milk
1/2 tsp sugar
1 tsp active dry yeast
1.5 cups bread flour (+ a couple of tbsp more for dusting if necessary)
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp butter, soft at room temperature
1 tbsp concentrated tomato paste
2 fat cloves garlic, grated (use only 1 clove or 1/2 tsp garlic paste if you want a milder flavour)1/3 cup milk
1 tbsp milk for brushing
For the Filling
1 tbsp melted butter
2 tsp Dukkah (I pounded it with a mortar and pestle to make it more uniformly sized)
Method:
1. In a small bowl, dissolve the sugar and the yeast in the 1/4 cup of warm milk. Keep aside for about 5 minutes till the yeast mixture bubbles up.
2. Put 1.5 cup of flour, salt, softened butter, and grated garlic in a large bowl and mix. Then add the yeast mixture and most of the 1/3 cup of milk and mix together. If there is more than a tbsp of flour that keeps dropping off from the dough (i.e, it isn't coming together) and the dough itself seems dry, add the remainder of the milk and knead it in.
Transfer the dough to a non-stick mat (lightly flour your kneading area if it is not non-stick) and knead away till you have a soft, smooth and elastic/ pliable dough which is not sticky (about 10 minutes of energetic kneading). Add a little extra flour if your dough is sticking, but only just as much as is necessary.
3. Shape the dough into a ball and place it in a well-oiled bowl, turning the dough to coat it completely with oil. Cover and let it rise for about 1 to 1 1/2 hours or until almost doubled in volume.
4. Dust your work surface lightly with flour. Deflate the dough, shape it into a square and roll the dough out into a square that is about 8" by 8". Brush the surface of the square with the melted butter.
5. Evenly sprinkle the Dukkah mix. Use a rolling pin to very lightly press the topping into the dough to ensure the topping doesn’t fall off when you are stacking the strips.
6. Using a pizza cutter, slice the dough from top to bottom into 4 long and even strips – they do not have to be perfect. Lay each strip on top of the next, with the topping facing upwards, until you have a stack of the strips. You can put the 2 strips cut from the sides in the middle of the stack so it looks neater. Using a pastry scraper or a sharp knife, cut straight down through the stack dividing it into 3 or 4 equal pieces.
7. Grease and lightly flour a small loaf tin that will fit the pieces comfortably (or any other baking container you like). Layer the slices, cut sides down into the loaf tin. Cover the loaf tin dough with a towel and allow the dough to rise for an hour. Lightly brush some milk over the top of the loaf.
8. Bake the dough at 180C (350F) for about 25-30 minutes (but check from 25 minutes, as every oven differs in its performance) until it is done and the top is golden brown, and the bread sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.
9. Serve hot with soup.
This is what I call an "all-purpose" recipe because you can use whatever vegetables you have to hand. It's especially good for using up the odds-and-ends. The only reason I use the generic term "curry" is because it's not a kootu or anything specifically South Indian, and it is not quite proper North Indian because I used "curry powder" as a flavouring.
I know - gasp! What was I thinking, using store-bought "curry powder"? Me, who used to be authentically Indian and looked down my nose (only a short distance, given that my nose is regrettably lacking in ski-slope proportions) at any recipe that involved the use of "curry powder" especially with the words "mild Madras" preceding the term. Me, who used to be mildly scornful and pitying of the uninformed Brits who relied on curry powders to make their "Indian" curries. That me, now admitting without any apparent embarrassment to having "gone over" to the British side of Indian curries? WTF?
Actually, after years and years of using readymade garam masala powder in various dishes and not thinking twice about it being a store-bought item, I finally came around to admitting that "curry powder" was pretty much the same sort of thing.
However, I do still look down my sadly length-challenged nose at people who use curry powder as the sole flavouring for their versions of curries. My superiority imaginary superiority in the matter of "authentic" recipes is maintained quite satisfactorily (from my point of view, naturally) because I used "mild Madras curry powder" mainly to provide the "authentic British" flavour to this curry. I do not, I hasten to add, use it all the time.
There, that should pretty much re-establish my credentials. And if it doesn't, here's a gentle reminder - I am now, as my husband chooses to describe, a "Brindian", not an Indian...
Recipe for: Basic vegetable curry
Ingredients:
2-3 small new potatoes, sliced into 1/2-cm thick rounds
1 carrot, peeled and sliced into 1/2-cm thick rounds
1/3 cup fresh or frozen green peas
2 small onions, sliced
1/2 cup green beans, sliced 1" long
2 cups baby spinach leaves
1/2 cup roasted tomatoes OR 1 cup tomato puree + 1 tbsp concentrated tomato paste
1-2 small cloves garlic, chopped fine
1/2" piece ginger root, peeled and grated
1 tsp cumin seeds
salt to taste
2 tsp oil
1/2 tbsp mild Madras curry powder
Coriander leaves for garnish
Method:
1. Heat the oil in a wide pan, add the cumin seeds and garlic, and fry on medium-low heat until the garlic softens (about 30 seconds).
2. Then stir in the sliced onions, grated ginger and turmeric powder and fry till the onions become limp and turn translucent.
3. Add the sliced potatoes, carrots, green beans and green peas along with 2 cups water and the curry powder.
Bring it to a boil on high heat, then turn the heat down to medium and let the vegetables cook for 7-8 minutes.
4. Then add the roasted tomatoes.
If you're using uncooked pureed tomatoes, turn the heat back up to high after adding the puree + concentrated paste, and let the liquid reduce by half.
5. Let the mixture simmer till the vegetables are fully cooked. Now add the spinach leaves.
Turn the heat down to low and cover the pan for 3-4 minutes or till the spinach is wilted. Add salt to taste, stir it in well. Leave the curry on the hob for a few minutes more, if the gravy is not thick enough for you.
Garnish with coriander leaves and serve hot with plain rice, any Indian pickle and papad.
RECIPE: VEGETABLE CURRY
Ingredients
2-3 small new potatoes, sliced into 1/2-cm thick rounds
1 carrot, peeled and sliced into 1/2-cm thick rounds
1/3 cup fresh or frozen green peas
2 small onions, sliced
1/2 cup green beans, sliced 1" long
2 cups baby spinach leaves
1/2 cup roasted tomatoes OR 1 cup tomato puree + 1 tbsp concentrated tomato paste
1 tsp cumin seeds
1-2 small cloves garlic, chopped fine
1/2" piece ginger root, peeled and grated
salt to taste
2 tsp oil
1/2 tbsp mild curry powder
Coriander leaves for garnish
Method
1. Heat the oil in a wide pan, add the cumin seeds and garlic, and fry on medium-low heat until the garlic softens (about 30 seconds).
2. Then stir in the sliced onions, grated ginger and turmeric powder and fry till the onions become limp and turn translucent.
3. Add the sliced potatoes, carrots green beans and green peas along with 2 cups water and the curry powder. Bring it to a boil on high heat, then turn the heat down to medium and let the vegetables cook for 7-8 minutes.
4. Then add the roasted tomatoes. If you're using uncooked pureed tomatoes, turn the heat back up to high after adding the puree + concentrated paste, and let the liquid reduce by half.
5. Let the mixture simmer till the vegetables are fully cooked. Now add the spinach leaves. Turn the heat down to low and cover the pan for 3-4 minutes or till the spinach is wilted. Add salt to taste, stir it in well. Leave the curry on the hob for a few minutes more, if the gravy is not thick enough for you. Garnish with coriander leaves and serve hot with plain rice, any Indian pickle and papad.
